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Classic Stories 1: The Golden Apples of the Sun/R is for Rocket

ray bradbury

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A spaceship captain determined to gather a cupful of the sun ... a nubile young witch who yearns to taste human love ... an expedition that hunts dinosaurs across the fragile and dangerous chasm of time.... These strange and wonderful tales of beauty and terror will transport you from the light to the dark, from inner space to the infinite, from the beginnings of time to the outermost limits of the future. Selected from his bestselling collections The Golden Apples of the Sun and R Is for Rocket, here are thirty-two superb stories from one of the master fantasists of our age--the inimitable Ray Bradbury.

348 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published April 1,1990

This edition

Format
348 pages, Mass Market Paperback
Published
April 1, 1990 by Bantam Books
ISBN
9780553286373
ASIN
0553286374
Language
English

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About the author

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ray bradbury

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Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.
Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).
The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".

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Community Reviews

Rating(4 / 5.0, 100 votes)
5 stars
31(31%)
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35(35%)
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34(34%)
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100 reviews All reviews
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Starisametaphor
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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1944 Retro Hugo Award Finalist for Best Short Story
> “King of the Gray Spaces” (“R is for Rocket”), by Ray Bradbury (Famous Fantastic Mysteries, December 1943) . . . Read 4/8/2019 (3.5-4 stars) a nice coming-of-age for boys story involving rockets (every kid wants to grow up to be an astronaut).
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Lindsey_shinichi
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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The only redeeming quality is that while the majority of short stories are sub-par...atleast they were over quickly!

This was struggle to read and there weren't any stories that were scary. I found two interesting.
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SmileToday191
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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No life is insignificant

Someone else recommended this book to me in an odd way...they mentioned rendering reading a story by Ray Bradbury in school about a time machine and hunting dinosaurs. I had to read it. It was Truly great story, but my favorite ended up being "The Time Machine". I won't spoil it for anyone, but of all the wonderful stories in this book, that one touched me.
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D3va
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Back to my youth and why became a science fiction enthusiast. Some of the stories I remember like "R is for Rocket" (where a boy dreams of space and gets his chance) and the Rocket (a junk dealer buys a rocket). Most I don't remember, but are dazzling stories on life on Mars, Venus and elsewhere. There are stories of time machines. The story "the Fog Horn" is a delightful story of a sea creature and a lighthouse. There are stories that are not science fiction. All in all, this man was brilliant and he shines in this book.
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JennyAysgarth
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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I really did enjoy this book, it shared a lot of similar stories with October Country and even a chapter of Dandelion Wine, but I didn’t mind reading them again. I found myself always going back to the same few just to reread certain sections. A truly perfect summer read indeed.
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cosme7
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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The writing is very moving and BEAUTIFUL. I will be honest here and say that I would pick and choose the short stories I wanted to read. Some of them genuinely reminded me of those English/Lit textbooks we had in middle school that would excerpts or short stories in them…. I actually think one of his “the flying machine” was in my textbook….

Lol. Anyways, very nice read. Probably won’t have to read again for a while!
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shinespark
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Boring minus “A Sound of Thunder”

The short stories did not age well. It felt like most had the same theme, plot, ending. Wish I would of just [re]read “A Sound of Thunder” and moved on.
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Cleesus
★ ★ ★ ★ ★
April 26,2025
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Like most collections of short stories, this one is a igneous mixture of different levels of quality. A Sound of Thunder is so good it has been copied by many Sci-Fi TV shows and movies. Here There Be Tygers is excellent at portraying the greed of capitalists that would happily destroy even paradise to make a buck. The Murderer and The Bottom of the Fruit Bowl were also well-crafted and reminiscent of Poe. The Rocket and Rocketman showed our wonder at the coming Space Age. The rest were just a bunch of filler unless you are obsessed with religion, families, or other staples of the 1940s/1950s acceptable storylines for middle America.
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