I thought I had nearly everything that Bradbury had written, so when I saw a new title on Amazon that I'd never seen before, I had to buy it.
It turns out that this is a version of his story Frost and Fire from the R is For Rocket collection. Somehow this slipped through when copyright was supposed to be renewed in the 70s and this particular text of the story is open for anyone to publish if they want to.
(Thanks to the Bradbury fans in the Ray Bradbury Fan Club facebook page for clueing me into that. I would have spent forever trying to work out where I'd read it before)
The people who've put this edition out have done a decent job. That's pretty good artwork that goes well with the story.
The story is one of Bradbury's more fantastic ones. On a world where spaceships crash landed an unknown time in the past, the radiation from the atmosphere means that people age from birth to death in just 8 days. During those 8 days, they can only leave their caves for about 2 hours a day. The rest of the time, they will either freeze in the sub zero temperatures at night, or literally fry on the rocks in the sun in the afternoon. Only the couple of hours just before noon are habitable.
There is an old spaceship at the top of a hill, just too far away to get to in the scant time available. Can Sim and his potential lover Lyte work out a way to get there without dying, and save themselves?
As usual with Bradbury, the prose is poetic and freewheeling, never using one metaphor where he can squeeze in ten. But as usual, it works and it works brilliantly. If you think about the science of the story, it's not going to work. But Bradbury didn't write science fiction (except for F451), he wrote fantasy and this is a brilliant short fantasy tale.
This was a good cheat read but unusually, I'm recommending that you don't buy this particular edition. Bradbury isn't even named on the Copyright page. This smells of someone taking advantage of an out of copyright story and making easy money out of it. Even that rather nice cover art is from a stock photo website.
If you want the Bradbury estate to get the money from your purchase, you might want to buy a new copy of The Stories of Ray Bradbury. You'll get a lot more stories for your money too.
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