I Want To Be a Time Machine

I’m currently listing to the audio book of Ray Bradbury’s Dandelion Wine on my drive to and from work. I must admit it took me longer to get engrossed in it than a Bradbury usually does. I kept waiting for something, well, outside of the normal to happen. Aliens show up to kidnap the Green Machine. A circus with a sinister showman gives Doug and Tom the stink-eye. Charlie turns on his parents and feeds them to the lions on a virtual reality veldt.

But, in spite of the lack of typical Bradbury action, I stuck with it. And danged it if didn’t pull me in despite my preconceptions as to what a Bradbury story should be.

Now, why do I bring this up? Because I’m thinking about the power of story. You read that correctly. Story. Not Stories. The collective singular whole.

All of the stuff that is classic Bradbury is there… the struggle between nostalgia and the future, people’s love/hate relationships with technology, the true fiction of the imagination. But above all in Dandelion Wine is Bradbury’s eye for history and the knowledge that whatever the present is, it too will soon become that lists of facts we know as history.

Read more:

https://seanhtaylor.blogspot.com/2017/01/i-want-to-be-time-machine.html