Ray Bradbury is without a doubt the finest American science-fiction author of the 20th century. I absolutely loved "R is for Rocket" and "The Golden Apples of the Sun," so when I saw this book with an eye-catching cover I absolutely had to buy it. The book combines the best stories from these two books and is an absolute delight to read. His stories take one through a range of emotions and possibilities and are always believable, sometimes terrifyingly so, sometimes nostalgically so, sometimes hopeful.

Ray Bradbury definitely turned me into a fan of science-fiction stories, but he did not always write science fiction. His stories are sometimes psychological thrillers such as Roald Dahl would write, sometimes science fiction dramas of space exploration, and sometimes whimsical fantasies. Darkly macabre at times, sometimes optimistic and hopeful, he definitely takes one through a range of moods and scenarios. In short, this author is a literary genuis. It was so wonderful to read these favorite stories again after so many years. (I first read these stories as a teenager along with stories by Isaac Asimov and William Gibson)

I loved "The Fog Horn" so much when I first read it and it really hits the nail on the head about the human condition. "The Murderer" about a world where technology reigns supreme and people have no escape from phones, watches, and music could have been written yesterday. "A Sound of Thunder" is another of my favorites. Such a wonderful story about the interconnections of all nature and what could possibly go wrong if one traveled back in time. I am sad to finish this book and hope to revisit some of his wonderful stories soon. A true gem!!

Contains my all time favorite Bradbury story: The Fog Horn. Such profound, century old loneliness and longing has rarely exuded from the pages of a book.

Bradbury's stories are heartbreaking, fascinating, and just plain interesting. They contain standard themes like love and homesickness, but he gives them new life by putting them into different realms and realities. He writes such a variety of stories that I'm sure most people could find at least one to love.

A Sound Of Thunder was great and exactly the kind of sci-fi I like. Ray Bradbury explores the concept of the butterfly effect and it was just so cool to read.
I'm sure if time travel machines happened, there would SO be rich idiots waving their cash around to do stupid things like killing dinosaurs for sport.
It was pretty funny when face to face with the thing though, rich idiot nearly craps himself in fear and wants to just go home. But is home still home... Time travel is just really freaking cool to think about.

I should really read fahrenheit 451 already.

This was so disappointing! I feel like I have been scammed with the use of "A Sound of Thunder" in the title... I thought most stories would be similar and as good as that one... There were some good ones, yes, but most were terrible and some were really very pointless... Why not DNF? The hope of discovering some hidden gems...

2.1 (Overall rating)

The Fog Horn 3.5
The April Witch 3
The Wilderness 1.75
The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl 2.5
The Flying Machine 2.5
The Murderer 3
The Golden Kite, The Silver Wind 1.5
I See You Never 1 (What was the point?)
Embroidery 2.5
The Big Black and White Game 2
The Great Wide World Over There 2.5
Powerhouse 1
En La Noche 1
Sun and Shadow 2
The Meadow 1.5
The Garbage Collector 2.25
The Great Fire 2
The Golden Apples of the Sun 2.25
R Is for Rocket 3
The End of the Beginning 2.5
The Rocket 1.75
The Rocket Man 2.5
A Sound of Thunder 5
The Long Rain 3.5
The Exiles 1.5
Here There Be Tygers 1.5
The Strawberry Window 1
The Dragon 1.5
Frost and Fire 2.5
Uncle Einar 1
The Time Machine 1.25
The Sound of Summer Running 1.5

The Fog Horn - 3/5
The April Witch - 1/5
The Wilderness - 3/5
The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl - 5/5
The Flying Machine - 4/5
The Murderer - 3/5
The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind - 2/5
I See You Never - 2/5
Embroidery - 4/5
The Big Black and White Game - 1/5
The Great Wide World Over There - 1/5
Powerhouse - 1/5
En La Noche - 3/5
Sun and Shadow - 1/5
The Meadow - 2/5
The Garbage Collector - 4/5
The Great Fire - 1/5
The Golden Apples of the Sun - 3/5
R Is for Rocket - 3/5
The End of the Beginning - 3/5
The Rocket - 5/5
The Rocket Man - 5/5
A Sound of Thunder - 2/5
The Long Rain - 5/5
The Exiles - 2/5
Here There Be Tygers - 4/5
The Strawberry Window - 2/5
The Dragon - 2/5
Frost and Fire - 4/5
Uncle Einar - 3/5
The Time Machine - 2/5
The Sound of Summer Running - 2/5

Deep and disturbingly beautiful. Reminds us of how the most insignificant of things can change everything (for the better or worse).

On the eve of a election, a party of rich men purchase a time travel safari to the past to hunt a T-Rex. While the safari guides have taken every precaution to minimize the impact of the hunting party on the past, one member violates the rules and leaves the designated path. Upon their return to the present the group finds that the world has been drastically altered by the seemingly innocuous death of a pre-historic butterfly.

The imagiary of the mashed golden butterfly embedded in the mud of Eckelsly's shoe still haunts me to this day even though I've read this book a few times.

Actual rating is 3.5 stars.

This is an anthology of short stories. These stories cover many topics like long lost sea creatures, racial issues, and time travel. The time travel stories are probably the most known. They have influenced works like Doctor Who to The Butterfly Effect. Some of these stories are really short and only cover several pages.

I thought this was one of the better anthology collections that I have read. Like any other collection there are some amazing stories but also some duds. The good definitely outweigh the bad. I liked how the author covered many different topics. Even though these stories were written back in the 1950's, they are still prevalent today. One story covers how humans are dependent on machines and how they are everywhere telling us what to do. I wonder how Ray Bradbury would have felt if he could see how we have our heads buried into our phones. There were several stories that stood out but the story that this collection is named after is terrific and a must read. The author has a wonderful way with words and can convey symbolism with the best of them.

The only flaw with this collection is the stories are really short and there were no connection with the characters. Maybe only a handful are worth recalling. That being said, the stories have meaning and the use of symbolism made this collection worth reading.

I was looking for something in classic science fiction, and I settled on Ray Bradbury. He’s not purely science fiction, but it was a great (and lucky) choice.

These are stories taken from two earlier published collections — The Golden Apples of the Sun (first published in 1953) and R is for Rocket (first published in 1962).

Eighteen stories from The Golden Apples of the Sun make up the first 160 or so pages. These are not heavily slanted toward science fiction per se, but more toward what you could call “imaginative fiction.” They pre-date the “space age” itself and reflect a post-war world of technological change, weaponry and power on a new scale, and a kind of Bradbury-like slipperiness to the ordinary and everyday.

They also reflect 50s style social mores. In The Wilderness, a woman decides whether to join her husband as pioneers on Mars. The pioneering effort mirrors the family life of the time, with the husband striking out, building a house and a place for his wife and family to follow. And we can’t help but also notice, in this and other stories, the extension of the “pioneer spirit” from the settling of the American West to the settling of the other planets of the solar system. Of course we will be going, and of course we will be living in some way there as we have lived here on Earth, in America.

This was definitely a different time. The terrors of the bomb are mellowed by a kind of manifest destiny pertaining to the universe and an optimism about human relationships. — in some stories, I confess I was waiting for the ax to fall on trust and compassion, in keeping with a more paranoid, dystopian time. But the ax rarely falls.

There are fourteen stories from R is for Rocket, making up about 180 pages. Like those from The Golden Apples of the Sun, they tend to be short stories, 10 pages or so, sometimes even less. Many are just vignettes. The one longer story, Frost and Fire, may have grabbed me the least, with its depiction of accelerated life on a planet beset by extremes of temperature.

The title story, R is for Rocket, along with several others, vividly recalls a time when rockets were magical but believable technologies. There was a logic. We were conquering space. We would reach the Moon, and it would be a stepping stone to the other planets of the solar system, which in turn would be stepping stones to other systems. It was all imaginable and seemed like it was really going to happen. We didn’t think about the distances, how close the Moon and how far the stars. We weren’t thinking that way — it was just the logic of the space age, making stories of exploring and colonizing planets feel like our future.

And “rocket men” would lead the way. As in the story R is for Rocket, there could be no higher calling. The stars would draw us to them, sometimes maybe even a bit too much, as in The Rocket Man.

This is definitely a book that reflects its time. And I enjoyed it that way, reminding me that there was a time when we were excited about the magic of space and exploration, and about a life in general that held so many possibilities.

My favorites were
The Fog Horn - Two lighthouse workers wait for a phenomenon that occurs once a year - a Dinocephalosaurus (?) rises out of the depths of the ocean, beckoned by the deep bellow of the lighthouse's fog horn. One worker tests what happens when he turns off the horn, causing the dino to charge the lighthouse. The workers manage to get down to the cellar before the lighthouse is destroyed. Eventually the lighthouse is rebuilt but the dinosaur is never seen again.

The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl - a murderer goes mad trying to clean a house of his fingerprints to the extent he even cleans the "fruit at the bottom of the bowl." the police find him ~12 hours later cleaning objects in the attic

The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind - this was like a fable. Two towns kept building their walls in shapes that outdid the other. One city built their walls in the shape of an orange, the other a pig that eats the orange. So the first city rebuilds their walls into the shape of a club to beat the pig, and it escalates from there. Meanwhile the quality of life in the town erodes as the people spend all their time rebuilding the walls. Finally the town chiefs agree to build their walls in the shapes of a kite and the wind, with the understanding that the wind gives the kite the power to fly and the kite beautifies the wind.

The Great Wide World Over There - really touching story about 2 rural woman. One is jealous of the other because she gets mail every day. So the woman has a boy come and write letters for her, basically just writing to junk mail so that she'll get letters in the mail too. But when the woman learns that mail is delivered by van, and she's never seen a mail van in all her years there, she realizes the woman across the road has been pretending to receive mail by reusing the same letters. At first the woman is haughty but eventually sends away for some junk mail to be delivered to the woman across the road too so that they both receive letters.

Sun and Shadow - Not sure I fully understood this one. A man prevented a photographer from using his property and the town as a backdrop for their own ends by dropping his pants and exposing himself (thereby ruining the pictures). I guess the moral is to not let people take advantage of you?

A Sound of Thunder - Big game hunters go back in time to kill a T-rex. The hunter freaks out, runs away and steps off the prescribed path, smashing a butterfly. They return to the present and the world has completely changed. The big game tour guide takes out his gun and shoots the hunter for his mistake, the sound of thunder.

I'm completely stunned by Bradbury! How can anyone depicts and express any feeling in such a deep, impressive way without using the word describing that very feeling itself? Depiction of the fog horn's voice inside the lighthouse in story "the fog horn" is such an example of this. "One day many years ago a man walked along and stood in the sound of the ocean on a cold sunless shore and said, 'We need a voice to call across the water, to warn ships; I'll make one.I'll make a voice like all of time and all of the fog that ever was; I'll make a voice that is like an empty bed beside you all night long, and like an empty house when you open the door, and like trees in autumn with no leaves. A sound like the birds flying south, crying, and a sound like November wind and the sea on the hard, cold shore. I'll make a sound that's so alone that no one can miss it, that whoever hears it will weep in their souls, and hearts will seem warmer, and being inside will seem better to all who hear it in the distant towns. I'll make me a sound and an apparatus and they'll call it a Fog Horn and whoever hears it will know the sadness of eternity and the briefness of life'."...
I felt like I was almost personally experiencing that deep sorrow and melancholy at that moment right after I've read this paragraph. They were that real, and that vivid for me...
In one of his other short stories named "The Sound of Summer Running", a father asks his son why he needs those new pair of sneakers. And here is the boy's answer, which for me, standing once more as a proof of Bradbury's glorious way of depicting the feeling: "It was because they felt the way it feels every summer when you take off your shoes for the first time and run in the grass. They felt like it feels sticking your feet out of the hot covers in the wintertime to let the cold wind from the open window blow on them suddenly and you let them stay out a long time until you pull them back in under the covers again to feel them, like packed snow. The tennis shoes felt like it always feels the first time every year wading in the slow waters of the creek and seeing your feet below, half an inch further downstream, with reflection, than the real part of you above water."...

I've been rereading Ray Bradbury this year, and what a ride it's been. This collection, originally titled The Golden Apples of the Sun, contains such well-known stories as "The Fog Horn," "The Murderer," "The Great Fire," and "The Rocket Man." These tales carry us from Greentown, Illinois (Bradbury's fictionalized version of his childhood home) to the far reaches of outer space, each one told with his trademark poetic exuberance. Reaching back to the late 1940's, they are not scientifically up-to-date, but none of these stories is about gadgetry and physics. They are all intensely human stories. From the lonely dinosaur that responds to a fog horn to the man who kills his house, from the "rocket man" who thinks only of home while away in space but only of space while at home with his family to the young boy who needs a new pair of shoes every summer, Bradbury takes us into imaginary worlds where we find nobody but ourselves.