Scan barcode
A review by opheliapo
The Golden Apples of the Sun by Ray Bradbury
3.0
This collection was as I expected it to be, par one.
Not, perhaps, the ‘beautiful and wonderfully improbable’ stories it promised on the cover, but this is likely due to the dated nature of a lot of these perspectives. It’s fatal flaw is that it is not ‘timeless’.
In some cases this was laughable. Nowadays, the idea of the sun only being 40,000-70,000 degrees, of television brainwashing the nation, of large boxes on our wrists that we use to communicate like telephones (oh, he was so close!), and of 2005 being a relatively distant future, are all pretty outdated. Furthermore the twists of a lot of these stories are now cliches, having been repeated over and over in sci-fi, in the near 70 years since this book was first published.
That being said, I still enjoyed the experience of reading The Golden Apples of the Sun, and it gives a great perspective on the philosophy of the 50’s. In fact, ‘The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl’ has become one of my new favourite short stories, and it was interesting to read ‘A Sound of Thunder’ knowing that it was the first ever published reference to the butterfly effect in relation to time travel.
Not, perhaps, the ‘beautiful and wonderfully improbable’ stories it promised on the cover, but this is likely due to the dated nature of a lot of these perspectives. It’s fatal flaw is that it is not ‘timeless’.
In some cases this was laughable. Nowadays, the idea of the sun only being 40,000-70,000 degrees, of television brainwashing the nation, of large boxes on our wrists that we use to communicate like telephones (oh, he was so close!), and of 2005 being a relatively distant future, are all pretty outdated. Furthermore the twists of a lot of these stories are now cliches, having been repeated over and over in sci-fi, in the near 70 years since this book was first published.
That being said, I still enjoyed the experience of reading The Golden Apples of the Sun, and it gives a great perspective on the philosophy of the 50’s. In fact, ‘The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl’ has become one of my new favourite short stories, and it was interesting to read ‘A Sound of Thunder’ knowing that it was the first ever published reference to the butterfly effect in relation to time travel.