When I was a kid I started reading science fiction through short stories. I read them far more often than I do now, and Ray Bradbury was one of the main authors I read - together with Isaac Asimov, Michael Moorcock and Arthur C. Clarke. And in this company Bradbury was not overshadowed.

Ray Bradbury is one of the legendary writers of the science fiction genre. He has been writing sf for decades. And the contents of this book prove his reputation is earned and not merely given to him for his longevity. These are stunning tales and - with the exception of a few instances when the last forty plus years have seen technology develop in different directions to the ones described in the tales (and there's not many of these) - the vast majority still read as fresh and relevant as though they had been written this year.

Well almost anyway, there is another giveaway here. I feel that there is an optimism in these stories that is unlikely to exist in modern stories. The kids in these stories look up wide-eyed at rockets, and dream of joining the space travellers one day.

The stories you will read in this book are special, it's a book packed full of some of the best sf tales of the 1950s. There are some here you will almost certainly have read. I would think every sf fan should have read "The Golden Apples of the Sun" and "A Sound of Thunder" – possibly my favourite of all of Bradbury's tales – a time travel tale that shows even the slightest change to the past can have major effects on the future.

And if you haven't you will recognise the concepts – these are oft used plots and devices – but don't think of them as derivative, Bradbury was one of the originals – when these tales came out, they were often the first time these ideas saw print.

So in reading these you will get a sense of this history and development of the genre of science fiction as well as some tremendous entertainment.

Synopsis
Ray Bradbury is a master storyteller whose tales of science fiction and fantasy have an astonishing range of mood, setting, and subject.

Science fiction, fantasy, small town life, and small town people are the materials from which Ray Bradbury weaves his unique and magical stories of the natural and the supernatural, the past, the present, and the future. There are space ships and dragons, a Time Machine, new planets, and the new science, but real people, reacting in their own personal human ways to the phenomena of a strange world, give these stories the haunting beauty that won wide critical acclaim for Bradbury's books, Dark Carnival, The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, A Medicine for Melancholy, The Golden Apples of the Sun, and Dandelion Wine.

Seventeen of his most popular science fiction stories, including several that have not appeared before in book form, have been selected by the author for this volume from the best of Bradbury in books and magazines. This is a book for the people of the Space Age, "by a boy who grew up in a small Illinois town and lived to see the Space Age arrive as he hoped and dreamed it would."