I Sing the Body Electric

Ray Bradbury

Completed 3/25/2018, reviewed 3/25/2018

4 stars

I haven’t read a short story collection in a long time.  When I saw this Bradbury collection for $1.99 on Amazon, I had to get it.  At first, I was a little disappointed.  The stories are mostly non-genre and I wasn’t expecting that.  As I read more and more stories, I appreciated them more as well.  The following are some of the stories I liked the most:

Tomorrow’s Child – a truly weird story about a baby that’s born into an alternate dimension and so appears as geometric shape in ours.  The parents struggle with how to raise the child until the doctors and scientists come up with some solution for them.

I Sing the Body Electric – the title piece, it’s the story of a father who buys a robot grandmother for his three children after their mother dies. 

Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s Is a Friend of Mine – a border moves into a boy’s house.  The border’s name is Charles Dickens and the boy helps him write his stories.  The town barber isn’t so welcoming, refusing to acknowledge that the border’s real name is Dickens. 

Heavy-Set – a creepy story about a body building thirty-year-old who still lives at home with his mother.  He doesn’t date, doesn’t really have friends.  Finally, he puts together a Halloween party, inviting about twenty people.  It doesn’t turn out too well. 

The Blue Bottle – Two men are on a search for a mythical blue bottle that contains what your heart desires most.  Great twist at the end.

The Burning Man – A boy and his aunt pick up a creepy hitchhiker on a really hot day on the way to a lake.

The Messiah – Some priests, ministers, and a rabbi on Mars talk about their dreams of meeting the Messiah.  In the meantime, a Martian has wandered into the human colony. 

Punishment Without Crime – A man goes to a puppet company which recreates people as puppets so you can murder the puppet instead of the real person. 

There were twenty-eight stories in all, plus a poem.  In the end, reflecting on what I had read, I realized there was a lot of stories I liked, and only a few I didn’t care for.  I give this collection four stars out of five. 

A funny note, in reading other reviews for this collection, I found someone who listed all the stories with a star rating for each one.  My list above were all two and three stars, and my least favorite she gave four and five stars.  I guess it just goes to show that different people have different tastes.