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(Copied from an old review originally posted elsewhere.)
Subject: Review of Ray Bradbury's "The Toynbee Convector" (Turner edition)
Note : If you're intuitive enough to find the spoiler in here, you wouldn't have been surprised by the story anyway.
Executive summary : A quirky little 1992 mass-market (I guess) reprint of a good 1983 Bradbury short story. Worth buying for oddity-value if you're a Bradbury fan and/or you find it for US$4 in the Bargain Books section of your local Barnes & Noble like I did.
Packaging and Illustration : The first CNN book I can recall buying; I wonder if there's some cable-program tiein that I've missed, or if it's part of a series, or just the personal project of someone at Turner who's allowed to play with things. It's a roughly 6.5" by 11.5" glossy-finish hardcover (no dust jacket). Inside, wide margins and a rather large double-spaced font stretch the short story out to thiry pages. The illustrations help pad it out, too. I won't say much about the illos, because I've never really liked pictures in grownup books (the last books that I remember liking the pictures in were Winnie the Pooh and The Wind in the Willows). I will complain briefly that the illustrator may not have read the text that she's illustrating (less forgivable in a shory story than a novel): the cover, for instance, shows a person wearing a strange machine on his head, whereas the Convector of the story is very clearly something that you sit inside of.
Story : It's the hundredth anniversary of the first (and only) time voyage; one hundred years ago Craig Bennett Stiles "stepped into his _Immense Clock_, as he called it", went a century ahead into the future, and returned with the joyous news that humanity had Made Good, got rid of most pollution, stopped wars, colonized Mars, and so on. Now, after the bright future that he reported has become reality, he's about to give his first interview in a century. (The 83% of you who think you know the story's main twist are quite correct, but it's worth reading anyway.)
Storytelling : Ah, Bradbury! This is the author in his positive mode, the bursting paranoid-optimist wonder-filled narrative of Dandelion Wine and the lighter parts of the Martian Chronicles: everything is charged with meaning, we are an eager fourteen-year-old boy rushing through golden-dusty streets looking for the marvels around the next corner. (No, there are no actual 14-year-old boys in the story; I'm just being metaphorical.) This is the Bradbury that I'm very fond of, in moderate doses, and this book (this story) is a very well-measured small dose, a drop glistening at the end of the spoon, and just the sort of thing to leave sitting around on an end-shelf for accidental reading on rainy days. I'll have to figure out which box the rest of the Bradbury is in, and move it closer to the top of "to be unpacked soon"...
%A Bradbury, Ray %O Illustrated by Anita Kunz %T The Toynbee Convector %I Turner Publishing, Inc. %C Atlanta %D 1992 %G ISBN 1-878685-15-5 %P 30 pp. %O odd thin hardcover, US$10.95 (list)
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