It’s Ray Bradbury week on Forgotten Books, hardly a lost author, but onw most certainly worth showcasing. Bradbury was one of my early finds as my reading prowess and hunger grew. I’d started the first grade not knowing how to read and by the end of that first year won a prize for reading the most books, including a girl that was doing second grade work who skipped to the third grade the next year. Each book was noted on a card and handed in to the teacher.
It was a natural for me and after I’d had my fill of The Hardy boys, I moved into more adult fare. Bradbury wasn’t the first. Heinlein gets that distinction. But Bradbury was certainly early. THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES might have been the first. I was heavy into science fiction then and the Word Mars was likely a trigger to GRAB IT.
A PLEASURE TO BURN, subtitle FAHRENHEIT 451 STORIES, collects all the early stories by Bradbury that dealt with themes he was exploring that would eventually end up in the famous novel. Bradbury authorities Donn Albright and Jon Eller edited this volume for the 2010 Subterranean Press edition.
Thirteen tales of book burnings, a gradually more rigid government, and a populace reduced to sheep-like status.
1: THE REINCARNATE
2: PILLAR OF FIRE
3: THE LIBRARY
4: BRIGHT PHOENIX
5: THE MAD WIZARDS OF MARS
6: CARNIVAL OF MADNESS
7: BONFIRE
8: THE CRICKET ON THE HEARTH
9: THE PEDESTRIAN
10: THE GARBAGE COLLECTOR
11: THE SMILE
12: LONG AFTER MIDNIGHT
13: THE FIREMAN
Long After Midnight, appearing previously only in an expensive, limited edition, and The Fireman, the immediate precursor to Bradbury’s most famous work, are essentially the same story, early versions as the author worked toward the full novel.
Three extra stories at the end fill out the book, all time travel tales.
Read this one, all three hundred pages, in a day.
For more looks at the works of Ray Bradbury, check out Patti Abbott over at Pattinase on Friday.
Not The Baseball Pitcher 
This Bradbury ss collections sounds good. The ss titles don’t ring any bells. I’ll look for it.
Thanks for this Randy – I’ve not got this edition though some of the stories have appeared elsehwre I think – but I’ll keep an eye out as it seems like a good collection too. Cheers.
Sergio
I actually haven’t gotten this yet but I will. I’m glad you listed to TOC. My first Bradbury story was read in junior high. he was the one fantasy/sf writer who they would allow in.
I’ve seen this book, but you’re the first one I know to review it. Bradbury could write some powerful time-travel stories.
Not all these stories are Early, though…”Bright Phoenix,” for example, was first published in the Bradbury special issue of F&SF, a decade after F 451…I wonder if “Mad Wizards” is a variation of “The Exiles,” which seems oddly missing here.
I’m not a Bradbury expert. Mad Wizards concerns authors, victims of book burnings on Earth, living on Mars.
Yes, that’s “The Exiles” as it was published in F&SF. WIKIPEDIA has this:
“The Exiles” is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury. It was originally published as “The Mad Wizards of Mars” in Maclean’s on 15 September 1949 and was reprinted, in revised form, the following year by The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction. First collected in The Illustrated Man (1951), it was later included in the collections R is for Rocket (1962), Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003), A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005) and A Pleasure to Burn (2010, under the “Mad Wizards” title and presumably with the Maclean’s text).
Bradbury has been one of the most gifted and imaginative writers of our time and I’m thrilled at the prospect of reading lots of his work next year. I have been through his enormous bibliography several times and each time I come away more confused between his single novels and short stories and collections that have both of the former. At least I know which his top four or five books are.