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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