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1995-01-23
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<pre>
Subject: Review of Ray Bradbury's "The Toynbee Convector" (Turner edition)
Note : If you're intuitive enough to find the spoiler in here, you
wouldn't have been surprised by the story anyway.
Executive summary : A quirky little 1992 mass-market (I guess) reprint
of a good 1983 Bradbury short story. Worth buying for oddity-value
if you're a Bradbury fan and/or you find it for US$4 in the
Bargain Books section of your local Barnes & Noble like I did.
Packaging and Illustration : The first CNN book I can recall buying; I
wonder if there's some cable-program tiein that I've missed, or if
it's part of a series, or just the personal project of someone at
Turner who's allowed to play with things. It's a roughly 6.5"
by 11.5" glossy-finish hardcover (no dust jacket). Inside, wide
margins and a rather large double-spaced font stretch the short
story out to thiry pages. The illustrations help pad it out, too.
I won't say much about the illos, because I've never really liked
pictures in grownup books (the last books that I remember liking
the pictures in were Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows).
I will complain briefly that the illustrator may not have read
the text that she's illustrating (less forgivable in a shory story
than a novel): the cover, for instance, shows a person wearing a
strange machine on his head, whereas the Convector of the story
is very clearly something that you sit inside of.
Story : It's the hundredth anniversary of the first (and only)
time voyage; one hundred years ago Craig Bennett Stiles "stepped
into his _Immense Clock_, as he called it", went a century ahead
into the future, and returned with the joyous news that humanity
had Made Good, got rid of most pollution, stopped wars, colonized
Mars, and so on. Now, after the bright future that he reported
has become reality, he's about to give his first interview in
a century. (The 83% of you who think you know the story's main
twist are quite correct, but it's worth reading anyway.)
Storytelling : Ah, Bradbury! This is the author in his positive mode,
the bursting paranoid-optimist wonder-filled narrative of Dandelion
Wine and the lighter parts of the Martian Chronicles: everything is
charged with meaning, we are an eager fourteen-year-old boy rushing
through golden-dusty streets looking for the marvels around the next
corner. (No, there are no actual 14-year-old boys in the story;
I'm just being metaphorical.) This is the Bradbury that I'm very
fond of, in moderate doses, and this book (this story) is a very
well-measured small dose, a drop glistening at the end of the
spoon, and just the sort of thing to leave sitting around on an
end-shelf for accidental reading on rainy days. I'll have to
figure out which box the rest of the Bradbury is in, and move it
closer to the top of "to be unpacked soon"...
%A Bradbury, Ray
%O Illustrated by Anita Kunz
%T The Toynbee Convector
%I Turner Publishing, Inc.
%C Atlanta
%D 1992
%G ISBN 1-878685-15-5
%P 30 pp.
%O odd thin hardcover, US$10.95 (list)
- -- -
David M. Chess | "Shh... We is seein' who kin
High Integrity Computing Lab | dream 'bout the biggest cat-fish."
IBM Watson Research | -- P. Pine
</pre>