Alternate edition(s) of this title:
Synopsis / Contents:
There are authors I remember for their stories, other authors I remember for their people. Ray Bradbury is the only author I remember who sticks in my heart for his times of year and his places.
The October Country is a perfect Bradbury title. It gives us a time and it makes it a country. You can go there. It’s waiting.
Places: the green meadows of Green Town Il. in
Dandelion Wine; the red sandy expanses broken by crumbling canals that could only be Bradbury’s Mars; the misty Venice Beach of
Death is a Lonely Business. All of them, and so many more, locations that linger.
The Machineries of Joy is a book of places as much as it is a book of tales. Priests debate and argue about space travel, and an old woman seals her house from Death, and we ask (as Bradbury made us ask and ask and ask again)
Who are the Martians? and we wonder, was the man on the bridge in Dublin really a beggar. . . ?
Ray colonised Hallowe’en, just as the Silver Locusts colonised Mars. He built it, as he built so much, and made it his. So when the wind blows the fallen autumn leaves across the road in a riot of flame and gold, or when I see a green field in summer carpeted by yellow dandelions, or when, in winter, I close myself off from the cold and write in a room with a TV screen as big as a wall, I think of Bradbury. . .
With joy. Always with joy.
Neil Gaiman, from his Introduction