I didn't get the link to the current date. But aside from the fact there was no Mars linkage probably my favorite Bradbury short.

Reminds me of when November 2019 came and went (the date that Blade Runner is set in)

> "Today is August 4, 2026," said a second voice from the kitchen ceiling, "in the city of Allendale, California." It repeated the date three times for memory's sake. "Today is Mr. Featherstone's birthday. Today is the anniversary of Tilita's marriage. Insurance is payable, as are the water, gas, and light bills."

The future arrived quietly

It is now public domain ?

I relate strongly with The Pedestrian. I love going for long walks at odd hours.

In the United State police's defence once I was walking all by myself at 3 in the morning in Mountain View, peeking and crouching among the bushes for good shots with my camera. A police car approached me. It ended up being a non-threatening conversation. It was early 2002. All in all quite surprising given my brown skin and then long beard.

https://ibb.co/j9XFgjDS

https://ibb.co/Y7VyGb1w

You know what, you're right - The Pedestrian hit me much harder this time around than the first time I read it.

God, I love Bradbury.

What's the most unsettling to me is that the one thing that makes it less apt to modern life is the implication that at 8 PM, everyone is at home. Nobody still working or commuting.

Bradbury was very popular in USSR. His Wikipedia page has an anecdote of a Soviet filmmaker recognizing him in a crowd and surprising the rest of the celebrities around who had no idea who Bradbury was. (Another such author would be Vonnegut.)

There was a Soviet publisher Kniga (Book) that published only books about other books: book art, technology, bibliophile stories and so on. One of their books was a collection of short stories whose main topic was books, reading, writing or similar. One of stories was Bradbury's "Forever and the Earth", translated, of course, but very well. I was a teenager then an I remember being deeply impressed by it. I knew Bradbury, of course, but mostly from sci-fi and he wasn't really a sci-fi author. (One of Soviet sci-fi writers pointed out that Bradbury was pretty much anti-scientific in his stance.) That story made Bradbury stand out for me.

Better quality: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=quyaaszg6jc

You're not kidding. I read this in the late 70s, and it's a bit of a gut punch to revisit it now, on the very day of the story, in a world where smart homes are somewhat there and nuclear saber-rattling is once again the theme of the day.

Of course, writing about the future means you won't get everything right - especially once specific dates or years enter the picture and technologies are in use that haven't been invented (or invented and discarded) yet. Nobody predicted that World War III would last as long as it has, or be so full of utter stupidity. On the technological front, film projectors are relics in this era, and film-based storage never really caught on. On the other hand, videotape wasn't around in 1950, and even audio tape was a fairly new technology.

The great sleight-of-hand of the 20th century is that it never went away, we all just collectively decided to stop thinking about the fact that at every given moment for the rest of human history we'll never be more than thirty minutes away from total nuclear annihilation.

"shake us off" sounds more like George Carlin:

> We’re going away. Pack your shit, folks. We’re going away. And we won’t leave much of a trace, either. Maybe a little Styrofoam … The planet’ll be here and we’ll be long gone. Just another failed mutation. Just another closed-end biological mistake. An evolutionary cul-de-sac. The planet’ll shake us off like a bad case of fleas.

Well I enjoy mowing my lawn (with a mechanic mower of course). Anything but the office chair and monitor.

People still cook in houses with microwaves and wash dishes despite owning dishwashers

Yeah. All they needed back then was a healthy dose of some of those new chemical fertilizer/herbicides to broadcast onto their monoculture non-native grass lawns. They could look forward to the smell of fresh-cut grass while they enjoyed snorting the exhaust from their leaded gasoline lawnmowers and edgers. They could have the nicest, greenest lawn on the block and be the envy of all their neighbors.

Later on, like their neighbors, they can stumble thru the last years of their lives with Parkinsons or other chemically-induced afflictions or just slowly waste away with internal cancers while their lead-addled offspring elect criminal pedophiles and imbeciles to lead the whole country - backwards.

Man, I need to go to sleep. I do agree with your analysis though.

Bradbury wrote rockets the way other writers wrote sunsets

This is such a surprising comment! Bradbury's style is very sparse and plain, and much closer to Hemingway's end of the spectrum than to the other. Where would you put, say, Nabokov, Melville, or Lovecraft?

As "Forever and the Earth" shows it wasn't just stylistic, but essential.

Interestingly, I had the exact opposite reaction - I enjoyed the writing itself, but didn't find the premise all that interesting.

Zarelli - Falling Light ft. Leonard Nimoy https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7_ekjpJWSvY

It was published 5 years after World War II was ended via the first ever nuclear warfare. The silhouettes on the house wall are a clear allusion to the shadows of people left on buildings in Hiroshima. The bleakness was a warning and reminder of what was at stake at the time.

if you find this to be bleak, don't read his "The Small Assassin", or much of anything in The October Country.

OT: Selected Shorts is wonderful.

My one complaint: it's rarely revealed when a story was published, and it took me far, far, far too long to realise that many of my favourites were many decades old.

That said, hearing a story read and acted by a skilled player is its own joy. I'm a good reader, but I'm not that level of good, and a few decades of listening to Shorts has improved my own inner-reading voice.

Available as a podcast, though the back-catalogue is parlous brief, largely due to copyright, I suspect. Still worth following.

Yes, I set a calendar notification then.

Don't mind the dup, though.