Ray Bradbury "The Machineries of Joy" Signed Limited Edition, No. 196 of 200, Slipcased [Very Fine]

Personally signed by Ray Bradbury and Limited to only 200 

PS Publishing 2010. Ray Bradbury "The Machineries of Joy: Short Stories". Personally signed by Ray Bradbury directly onto the limitation page. This is number 196 of only 200 produced.  FIRST EDITION as stated on the copyright page. Very Fine without any visible flaws in slipcase the same. 

• Introduction: Neil Gaiman
• Cover Artist: Joe Mugnaini

There are authors I remember for their stories, other authors I remember for their people. Ray Bradbury is the only author I remember who sticks in my heart for his times of year and his places. The October Country is a perfect Bradbury title. It gives us a time and it makes it a country. You can go there. It’s waiting.

Places: the green meadows of Green Town Il. in Dandelion Wine; the red sandy expanses broken by crumbling canals that could only be Bradbury’s Mars; the misty Venice Beach of Death is a Lonely Business. All of them, and so many more, locations that linger.

The Machineries of Joy is a book of places as much as it is a book of tales. Priests debate and argue about space travel, and an old woman seals her house from Death, and we ask (as Bradbury made us ask and ask and ask again) Who are the Martians? and we wonder, was the man on the bridge in Dublin really a beggar...?

Ray colonised Hallowe'en, just as the Silver Locusts colonised Mars. He built it, as he built so much, and made it his. So when the wind blows the fallen autumn leaves across the road in a riot of flame and gold, or when I see a green field in summer carpeted by yellow dandelions, or when, in winter, I close myself off from the cold and write in a room with a TV screen as big as a wall, I think of Bradbury...With joy. Always with joy. -- Neil Gaiman, from his Introduction

Review

Whether the author's vision turns toward the future or peers into the past, his worlds of characters and their situations always carry the air of possibility. The title story conveys the struggle between parish priests; Father Vittorini unafraid of man's invasion of space and Father Brian uneasy at this desecration of God's territory and wondering how earthly morals will fit on Mars. Other stories use more standard equipment--the ventriloquist's dummy speaking alone in "And So Died Riabouchinska"; a take over by corrupted youth as in "Boys! Raise Giant Mushrooms in Your Cellar"; the world wished out of existence in "The Vacation";--but all with Bradbury's customizing touch, in which he makes use of the horror latent in the familiar. In "El Dia de Muerte" and "The Lifework of Juan Diaz", the author returns to the Mexican funerary customs that have provided some of his best tales of grotesque terror. And, in "The Illustrated Woman" he reaches a highpoint in bizarre humor. Bradbury, in perfect orbit. -- Kirkus Reviews



About the Author

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 - June 5, 2012) was an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Bradbury is credited with writing 27 novels and over 600 short stories. More than eight million copies of his works, published in over 36 languages, have been sold around the world.

Predominantly known for writing the iconic dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and his science-fiction and horror-story collections, The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric (1969), Bradbury was one of the most celebrated 20th- and 21st-century American writers. While most of his best known work is in fantasy fiction, he also wrote in other genres, such as the coming-of-age novel Dandelion Wine (1957) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992).

Bradbury also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts. He wrote the screen play for John Huston's classic film adaptation of Moby Dick, and was nominated for an Academy Award. He adapted sixty-five of his stories for television's The Ray Bradbury Theater, and won an Emmy for his teleplay of The Halloween Tree. He was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

Upon his death in 2012, The New York Times called Bradbury "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream." The Los Angeles Times credited Bradbury with the ability "to write lyrically and evocatively of lands an imagination away, worlds he anchored in the here and now with a sense of visual clarity and small-town familiarity." Bradbury's grandson, Danny Karapetian, said Bradbury's works had "influenced so many artists, writers, teachers, scientists, and it's always really touching and comforting to hear their stories". The Washington Post noted several modern day technologies that Bradbury had envisioned much earlier in his writing, such as the idea of banking ATMs and earbuds and Bluetooth headsets from Fahrenheit 451, and the concepts of artificial intelligence within I Sing the Body Electric.