Zero Hour
Ray BradburyAcross peaceful future suburbs, children take up a new game called Invasion—and their parents cannot decide whether to take it seriously.
14 min · Foreboding
Authors / Ray Bradbury
20th century speculative fiction
Ray Bradbury
16 stories in the catalogScience fiction and fantasy about technology, war, childhood, and fear.
Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was an American writer whose fiction brought together science fiction, fantasy, and horror. He grew up in Waukegan, Illinois, and developed his writing career in Los Angeles. The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man brought his stories to a wide audience, while Fahrenheit 451 explored censorship and the place of books in society.
Bradbury's stories connect imagined worlds with familiar feelings of longing, fear, and affection. Childhood memories, carnivals, family homes, and journeys into space all supply settings for his work. In “The Veldt,” a family's automated home becomes a source of unease; “A Sound of Thunder” considers the consequences of interfering with the past. His vivid descriptions make these places tangible, while his characters face questions about what they value and what they risk losing.
More time with Ray Bradbury.
From a quick encounter to a longer story.
The Creatures That Time Forgot
Ray BradburyOn a world where people are born, grow old, and die within eight days, a boy races against his own lifetime to find a way beyond it.
71 min · Wondrous
A Little Journey
Ray BradburyAfter a Mars-based spiritual grifter strands a group of elderly women, their leader decides they will take the promised journey anyway.
11 min · Bittersweet
Asleep in Armageddon
Ray BradburyStranded on a seemingly hospitable planetoid, a spaceman discovers that the only danger comes when he tries to sleep.
20 min · Chilling
Defense Mech
Ray BradburyA terrified Mars-bound crewman is given a mental refuge so convincing that his childhood memories become the only world he can see.
20 min · Suspenseful
Don’t Get Technatal
Ray BradburyIn a crime-free future, a pulp writer discovers that a perfect society has left him dangerously short of material.
4 min · Humorous
I, Mars
Ray BradburySixty years after being stranded on Mars, an old man receives a phone call from the younger self he recorded to survive the silence.
14 min · Melancholy
Jonah of the Jove-Run
Ray BradburyAn aging, disgraced navigator claims he can guide a vital supply ship through an asteroid belt after its computers fail.
25 min · Hopeful
Lazarus Come Forth
Ray BradburyA grieving morgue-ship attendant recovers a scientist who has floated frozen through space for three centuries—and may hold the key to a war.
19 min · Suspenseful
Morgue Ship
Ray BradburyA burned-out coroner on a space morgue ship gets one last chance to confront the war whose dead he has carried for a decade.
17 min · Solemn
Pillar of Fire
Ray BradburyIn a future that has abolished fear, graveyards, and the literature of horror, the last man from the dead rises to make the world afraid again.
62 min · Eerie
Rocket Summer
Ray BradburyOn the eve of humanity’s first Moon rocket, the man who owns the launch company tries to stop a breakthrough he believes civilization is not ready to use.
20 min · Foreboding
The Fight of the Good Ship Clarissa
Ray BradburyA Venus-bound rocket crew blunders into battle in a delirious send-up of space-adventure pulp.
3 min · Humorous
The Monster Maker
Ray BradburyStranded on an asteroid with minutes of oxygen left, a patrolman and his camera-obsessed partner confront monsters that may exist only in the mind.
25 min · Adventurous
The Pendulum
Ray BradburyAfter a catastrophic time-machine demonstration, an inventor is condemned to become the living pendulum of the device he built.
8 min · Bleak
The Piper
Ray BradburyOn a colonized, dying Mars, an exiled musician plays a tune that may summon a violent reckoning for Earth’s occupiers.
7 min · Foreboding