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).

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

I thought some of the stories in here were fantastic. Others weren't as much and tended to make the reading slower.

I would be closer to giving the book 4 stars if the less interesting stories didn't hold it back. The writing style is VERY descriptive and can have some really interesting metaphors, this really painted the scenes well at times. In other stories, the writing wasn't as on par.

Not a bad book at all but it does take time to get through some parts as they may not be as engaging as other parts.

"A Sound of Thunder" is the best, most memorable of Bradbury's short stories. I remember hearing an audio version in elementary school and it haunted me. I finally figured out which story it was after college when I picked up this volume.

I really don’t know why I went into this book thinking I was going to like it.
I remember the reason as to why I wanted to read this book was because of the Simpson’s episode (Halloween) that Homer travels in time and was told not to touch anything or it may alter the future in some way.
My initial way to review this book was to list out all the stories I did and didn’t like. After half way through, I had yet to come across one that I actually cared for, and after finishing the book, I still hadn’t cared for any of them.
That’s not to say that this was a bad book, it just wasn’t my cup of tea.

I picked this collection up to specifically read A Sound of Thunder - one of Bradbury's most prolific short stories. Needless to say, it didn't disappoint. Along the way I found some interesting gems like The Fog Horn - an interesting piece of cryptozoological fiction, - and The Murderer - a fun little story about obsession that featured truly outstanding writing. Some stories, however, were a bit dated and felt more like a Duck Dodgers's vision of the future. There were a lot of boys dreaming about rockets and girls missing their earthly homes - something I wish was challenged a bit.