This weekend I read two vastly different short stories, but each equally good in different ways. I started with Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains". I found it in The Martian Chronicles. I was a bit confused about this book. Initially I thought it was a novel, then assumed it was a collection of short stories. It looks as though it is more of an episodic novel (in other words somewhere between the two). "There Will Come Soft Rains" was altered slightly when it was included in The Martian Chronicles. And being the non-poetry reader that I am I had no idea that the title of the story is actually a poem by Sara Teasdale. It's amazing what you can learn from a short story. I may have to keep up this weekend short story reading even after finishing Carl's RIP Challenge. It's much easier to read short stories on a whim than trying to read a whole collection of them, I'm finding!
I have a feeling I might be giving away a few details, so please beware of spoilers. I hate giving away plot, but it's hard to talk about short story without doing so.
"There Will Come Soft Rains" takes place over one day in August 2057. I'm not sure when Bradbury wrote this novel, but as it appeared as a chapter in The Martian Chronicles in 1950, it must have been sometime in the 40s? Bradbury, and maybe this is true of many or all science fiction writers, was exceptional at anticipating the world to come and what sorts of devices and inventions we might have. The main character in the story is a house. It is a very smart house that does everything anyone could want it to. It makes breakfast, it cleans up afterwords, waters the lawn, entertains the children. What is eery about this house is that it is devoid of it's owners. It is the last house standing after some sort of nuclear holocaust. A radioactive haze hangs over the city. It doesn't matter that there are no humans, the technologically advanced house will continue on without them for as long as it can. At the end of the day it selects a poem to read, which it does daily. As there is no owner to choose, it automatically picks the owners favorite:
There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground, And swallows circling with their shimmering sound; And frogs in the pool singing at night, And wild plum trees in tremulous white; Robins will wear their feathery fire, Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire; And not one will know of the war, not one Will care at last when it is done. Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree, If mankind perished utterly; And Spring herself when she woke at dawn Would scarcely know that we were gone
And here lies the irony of the story. The world will continue on without us humans and our little gadgets and devices. At the end of the day even the house will self destruct. A tree branch crashes through a window causing a fire. All that will remain standing after the fiery conflagration will be one wall. This is an excellent story and I highly recommend it! It is simply written, but beautifully done.
Mary Shelley's "Transformation" was quite different reading. Like Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho this is an example of a Gothic tale. It is set primarily in Genoa, Italy in the 15th century. There are references to the picturesque landscape, and there are elements of horror and the supernatural. Guido, our hero, is a handsome young man and rather Byronic in temperament. He is in love the lovely Juliet. As children they promised to marry, but first Guido must sow his wild oats. He goes to Paris, and sow he does. He's also an irresponsible and profligate young man, running with the wrong crowd until his inheritance is drained away to nothing. He plans to return to his beloved Juliet, but now he is penniless. He ends up on a beach, depressed, alone and despairing. To his astonishment he sees a ship break apart upon some rocks, and out of the waves appears the strangest creature. A hideously deformed dwarf holding on to a chest swims to shore. Although Guido is repulsed by the man, he tells him of his woes. The dwarf seems to have some sort of supernatural power. He raises his arms and seems to be able to quiet the angry sea with mere words. He offers Guido the treasure in his chest, but in payment they must trade bodies for three days. The arrangement is made and the dwarf, now in Guido's body goes off. The days pass insufferably slowly, yet the dwarf does not return. Any guesses where he has gone off to?
There are all sorts of subtexts to this story. Guido's transformation is more than just a bodily one. He learns what it is to be an outcast--particularly one so distrusted and reviled by society. It's interesting to see a parallel between the dwarf and the monster in Frankenstein (which I read last year at this time). As in Frankenstein, Mary Shelley uses an excerpt from Coleridge's The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, which I can see I really do need to reread. I have the Hesperus Press edition that contains "Transformation" as well as two other stories by Mary Shelley, which I plan on reading. Hesperus Press will be publishing The Pilgrims by Shelley next Spring (so far off?), which I am looking forward to (it will actually contain four other short stories as well). I am finding I rather like Gothic very much. I wonder if Hesperus Press would ever consider publishing some stories by Ann Radcliffe? I was hoping to find them on Project Gutenberg, but they only have two of her novels.
I'm not sure what I'll be reading next weekend. Maybe Washington Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow"...though I was hoping to save that one for closer to Halloween. I'll have to search around for something appropriate or perhaps I can find some short story reviews here. Of course this gives me a good excuse to browse the library stacks, too!