Read Ebook {PDF EPUB} I Sing the Body Electric! by I Sing the Body Electric! by Ray Bradbury. "I Sing The Body Electric" Director(s): James Sheldon and William F. Claxton Writer: Ray Bradbury Main Characters: Narrator: Rod Serling Grandmother: Josephine Hutchinson Father/George Rogers: David White. Analysis: "I Sing the Body Electric" is a very atypical episode of The Twilight Zone. It is the only episode of the series that was written by Ray Bradbury, which may account for some of the differences seen in the story. This is the only episode during the third season, which features a narrative from Rod Serling in the middle of the episode. It still had the traditional beginning and ending narrative seen in all The Twilight Zone episodes, but the addition of the middle narrative was unique to this episode. This was not the only structural difference featured in this episode. The typical twist ending is not present. There is still a a turning point in the episode, but it is when Anne finally grows to accept Grandma into her life. Normally, the turning point or twist in a The Twilight Zone episode is when we discover the truth behind what is happening and when we discover that what seemed to be the truth was actually just a smoke screen. "I Sing the Body Electric" features some very traditional aspects of . It is about robots, which was not only one of the most common themes used by The Twilight Zone writers, but in science fiction literature in general. The robot in this episode can be compared to Isaac Asimov's robots. Since Grandma is there to help the family, it is obvious that she is following the Three Rules of Robotics, which were constructed by Asimov. The incident in which Grandma risks her own life to save Anne's, is very similar to what happens in "Robbie"(1939), one of Asimov's first robot stories. This episode does not feature the typical moral lesson at the end of the episode. Grandma did not harm the family in anyway, and there was nothing to be learned from her presence in the house. It was actually a very positive story. Not only were the children given a figure in their life that could take care of them, but the addition of this technology improved their lives. This happy ending was not often seen in episodes of The Twilight Zone. Director: Ida Lupino Writer: Rod Serling Main Characters: Narrator: Rod Serling Dying man/Jason Foster: Robert Keith. Analysis: "The Masks" is considered by man people to be one of the better episodes of The Twilight Zone ever made. In contrast to "I Sing the Body Electric," it features all the traditional aspects of a The Twilight Zone episode. While Jason Foster's coming death seems at first to be the main theme of the episode, a greater, more important theme is the presence of Voodoo magic and the commentary Serling is making about the beauty of people being on the inside. "The Masks" takes place on the eve of Mardi Gras, which is very important to the story line. Mardi Gras and New Orleans are traditionally know for being heavily rooted in Voodoo magic. Mardi Gras celebrations are often times when people have to wear masks, and while the masks Foster provides for his family are extremely hideous, it would not seem completely inappropriate for masks with Voodoo powers to be what ultimately provides the twist ending in this episode. The Twilight Zone episodes were known for their twist endings. While watching "The Masks," the viewer is expecting something to happen, but it is very unclear as to what the importance of the actual masks will be. At many times, the audience is lead to believe that a member of the family is going to remove their masks early, costing them their fortune, and that some twist will come after that. Only within the last few minutes of the episode is it actually clear what the purpose of those masks were. This is very typical of The Twilight Zone. By not revealing the truth behind the storyline until the very end of the episode, the audience is left in surprise. They are forced to process everything on their own, since nothing more in the episode is there to answer their questions. This is exactly what Rod Serling wanted; for his viewers to think about what they just saw. It is impossible to just stop wondering if what Foster did was justified or just cruel, or whether or not the family could have presented this fate, which is one of the reasons this is considered to be one of the better episodes of the series. You're Entitled to My Opinion. I’m decidedly not a Hemingway fan. But it’s easy enough to see Bradbury was and he shows us how much he treasured Hemmingway’s works. It’s not hard to see the unnamed main character as a psychopomp, delivering Hemingway’s soul to Heaven as he would know it. The Terrible Conflagration up at the Place Revolutionaries in Ireland set out to burn their lord’s manor house, but they forget the matches. When they arrive, the lord of the manor invites them in. They inform him of their intent, quite politely and he agrees to allow the burning. He asks the sackers if they will spirit away his art collection for safe keeping. They agree and take off with the paintings. A few hours later, they return. There were echoes of Mark Twain in this story, but the end was wholly unsatisfying. While there was a fair amount of humorous irony in the story, the climax, as it was, completely lacked in humor or irony. Tomorrow’s Child The Horn’s have a baby and that baby is a blue pyramid with three eyes and six tentacles. Their baby, the doctor informs the Horns, was born into another dimension. This baby belongs in that dimension. While the doctors work feverishly for months to figure out how to get the babies back to their proper dimensions, the Horns raise the “child.” Finally, the day comes when the doctors have it all figured out. The tale is so improbable that it is interesting. The opening paragraph is so matter of fact, much like Gregor Samsa in Metamorphosis. The Women A couple lounges on the beach on the final day of their vacation. The woman senses that a presence in the ocean beckons to her husband, trying to lure him into the water. She tries every delaying tactic she can think of to keep him out of the water. When it starts to rain, she thinks she’s won. But the lure of the blue water proves too much. This was a story of atmosphere and stirring words more than plot. There was very little plot to it. It does demonstrate Bradbury’s ability to weave moods with the language. Beautiful. The Inspired Chicken Motel It’s 1932 and the Great Depression is raging. A family of four is traveling down Route 66 to look for a job and some prosperity. They stop at a fleabag motel where they find a chicken who lays eggs with inscriptions very much like fortune cookies. The family leaves the hotel with new found hope mixing with cynical skepticism. This story was mildly entertaining. It would seem in this book that Bradbury is trying much harder for rye humor than any serious science fiction. Downwind from Gettysburg The manager of a theater is alarmed when someone puts a bullet into the head of his animatronic figure of Abraham Lincoln. The modern assassin is also named Booth, although he has a different first name. The theater manager confronts the assassin and listens to his lame excuse for destroying the robot. Then the manager tells Mr. Booth the real reason for the crime and ends his hopes for glory. A writer on Huffington Post compared this story to the vainglorious father of the notorious “Balloon Boy” event several years ago when the father contrived to have his young son become ”trapped” in a hot air balloon with the hopes of getting a reality show out of the deal. My own thoughts went to Mark David Chapman who killed John Lennon for the sheer glory of doing it. Downwind from Gettysburg was made into an episode of The Ray Bradbury Theater . Yes, We’ll Gather at the River The residents of a small California town are just a day away from a harsh reality. A new interstate highway is going to open tomorrow and with it take the traffic local merchants rely on for commerce. A cigar store owner ponders his bleak future and that of the town. This story tells of an all but forgotten chapter in American history. When construction began on the interstate highway system in the 1950s, millions of motorists were moved away from secondary roads and the small towns where they bought gas, bought lunch, and sundry items. Many towns “missed” by the highways died. This beautiful and touching story brings that era to life very much reminiscent of Steinbeck. Cold Wind and the Warm A group of faerie people arrive in small town Ireland and make friends with the regulars of a small pub. They charm and entertain the pub patrons with songs and stories of how disparate people come together to become one people. One Irishmen gentleman discerns the faeries true nature and purpose. I really struggled with this story and did not like it at all. It had the whimsy which was Bradbury’s signature style. But while beautifully written, I just loathed the story. I’m not much for Irish yarns. Night Call, Collect An old man is the last survivor on Mars after the rest of the population returns to earth on the eve of atomic war there. He starts receiving phone calls from himself. The first call is from his 20 year old self, then his 21 year old self, then 24, etc. The calls tease and torment him – each a transcription he made in his youth to keep busy. Then he gets a call that is not himself, but the captain of a rocket come to rescue him after 60 years. He rushes to New Chicago to meet the rocket, but all he finds are more phones. This is a riff on a tale told earlier in . This tale is much darker and quite entertaining. The first real hard sci-fi/horror story in the book. The Haunting of the New Grynwood, an old castle once host to the most lavish parties ever known in Ireland, shall host no more parties, for she has burned to the ground. Her owner had built in its place an exact replica. But it’s just not the same and the house, new, wants no old people in its midst. This story is written very much in a literary style and I wanted to not like it. The flowery, over the top language usually turns me off. But Bradbury is able to evoke emotion with his prose that transcends my dislike of inflated language. This story is about the pain of transition and not being able to go home again when it is not home. I Sing the Body Electric! A widower with three children replaces his dead wife with a robot grandma. The grandma is delivered and the two boys immediately take to her. The girl, Abigail, does not and refused to treat the electric grandma like anything but a machine. When grandma meets with tragedy, the source of Abigail’s hostility is laid bare. A riff on Walt Whitman’s poem of the same name that discusses what makes a human, human as opposed to a souless machine. This story explores the nature of grief, the relationship between generations, and is somewhat over celebratory of what machines are capable of – or will ever be capable of. It is one of Bradbury’s more heartwarming stories. Ray Bradbury adapted this story for The Twilight Zone episode of the same name. Despite his personal fondness and close relationship with Twilight Zone writers Rod Serling, and Richard Matheson, it was the only original script Bradbury penned for the television series. Tombling Day An old woman attends the relocation of her old beau’s grave. She decides to have the body brought back to her house and the casket opened. She looks upon her beloved’s body, sixty years in the ground, and laments that he still looks young while she has grown old. She is old, he is young. Bradbury says this over and over again without going anywhere. The end is just gibberish. This story was a real dud. A Friend of Nicholas Nickleby’s is a Friend of Mine A man arrives in Greentown, Illinois with the unlikely moniker of Charles Dickens and he is a writer. A young man is thrilled to have the famous writer in his mom’s boarding house and is quickly drawn to him. But he’s not so much a writer as a memorizer of tales. I didn’t see where Bradbury was going with this one. I thought it was to inspire the frustrated writer to keep writing, but the unlikely Charles Dickens never writes anything original. He just rewrites Dickens’ novels. Nothing inspirational there. Heavy Set A mother laments her emotionally immature son who spends his days sculpting his body with weights. At 31 years old, he refuses to interact with anyone and takes out his frustration on weights and a punching bag. On the surface, the story has no plot. But Bradbury’s writing makes the reader tense. You wonder if and when Heavy Set is going to explode. Will he hurt his mother? Will he hurt other people? It’s an emotionally taut story. The Man in the Rorschach Shirt A psychiatrist calls it quits when he finds out his senses of sight and hearing have been lying to him for years. Restored hearing and improved vision, he finds, hinders his imagination. He tells a former colleague how he spends his days treating people with his bizarre, multi-patterned shirts. A Bradbury allegory on writing and imagination. Writers create and imagine, he points out. If all we rely on through our day is what we see and hear, we are left bereft of creativity. Lots of allegory, little story. An enjoyable read nonetheless. Henry the Ninth The last man to inhabit England talks with his old friend who is about to depart. The English and all northern Europeans have abandoned their homeland for warmer climes. Bradbury dedicates several short stories to being alone. Not necessarily loneliness because often, Bradbury’s characters are not unhappy to be alone. There were a couple in The Martian Chronicles that were stellar in their telling. This one wasn’t. The Lost City of Mars Captain Wilder, the intrepid explorer from The Martian Chronicles , sets out with a millionaire and other illuminati aboard a yacht on the Martian canals. Their destination is a lost Martian city. They find the city and the city finds them. Each is offered by the city what he or she wants – or thinks he wants. Some reject the deal, some don’t. Perhaps this was a story written for The Martian Chronicles and left out. If so, leaving it out was a good idea. It lacks the beautiful simplicity of the other stories in that collection. Christus Apollo – Cantata Celebrating the Eight Day of Creation and the Promise of the Ninth Christianity meets scientific speculation in this Christmas poem where Bradbury contemplates life on other worlds and whether or not they were created by and worship the same God as Christians on earth. This is a poem and as I am wont to say when evaluating a poem – I don’t feel qualified. I don’t know good poetry from bad. But I know what I like and I liked this. I Sing the Body Electric is one of the weaker Bradbury compilations for fans of his sci-fi work. Much of the book relies on playing with the ghosts of authors dead and other mildly fantastical tropes. The title story and the Lost City of Mars stand as the only real sci-fi tales. Of course, there is more to Bradbury than science fiction and the whimsy that characterizes Bradbury’s Greentown can be found in almost every story in this volume. While not nearly as interesting as The Martian Chronicles or , I Sing the Body Electric is worth the time to read to find a few Bradbury tales you won’t find anyplace else. I Sing the Body Electric. Your browser doesn't support HTML5 audio. Here is a link to download the audio instead. : Volume Number. : Volume Number. I Sing the Body Electric. Spend $49 on print products and get FREE shipping at HC.com. The mind of Ray Bradbury is a wonder-filled carnival of delight and terror that stretches from the verdant Irish countryside to the coldest reaches of outer space. Yet all his work is united by one common thread: a vivid and profound understanding of the vast seet of emotionsthat bring strength and mythic resonance to our frail species. Ray Bradbury characters may find themselves anywhere and anywhen. A horrified mother may give birth to a strange blue pyramid. A man may take Abraham Linkoln out of the grave--and meet another who puts him back. An amazing Electrical Grandmother may come to live with a grieving family. An old parrort may have learned over long evenings to imitate the voice of Ernest Hemingway, and become the last link to the last link to the great man. A priest on Mars may confront his fondest dream: to meet the Messiah. Each of these magnificient creations has something to tell us about our own humanity--and all of their fates await you in this new trade edition of twenty-eight classic Bradbury stories and one luscious poem. Travel on an unpredictable and unforgettable literary journey--safe in the hands of the century's great men of imagination. The mind of Ray Bradbury is a wonder-filled carnival of delight and terror that stretches from the verdant Irish countryside to the coldest reaches of outer space. Yet all his work is united by one common thread: a vivid and profound understanding of the vast set of emotions that bring strength and mythic resonance to our frail species. Ray Bradbury characters may find themselves anywhere and anywhen. A horrified mother may give birth to a strange blue pyramid. A man may take Abraham Lincoln out of the grave--and meet another who puts him back. An amazing Electrical Grandmother may come to live with a grieving family. An old parrot may have learned over long evenings to imitate the voice of Ernest Hemingway, and became the last link to the great man. A priest on Mars may confront his fondest dream: to meet the Messiah. Each of these magnificent creations has something to tell us about our humanity--and all of their fates await you in this new trade edition of twenty-eight classic Bradbury stories and one luscious poem. Travel on an unpredictable and unforgettable literary journey--safe in the hands of one the centurys great men of imagination. Ray Bradbury – I Sing the Body Electric. I’ve discussed some of Bradbury’s longer works, but he is also well known for his short fiction. So I’ve been reading through some of his short stories in his collections (1996), The Illustrated Man (1951), and I Sing the Body Electric (1969). A lot of good reads in these collections. Not all even remotely qualify as science fiction, but several short stories are very speculative so I decided to write some of them up. Additionally, I read a bit more than science fiction and Bradbury’s other stories are generally enjoyable and often illuminating (not that I’m some kind of literary critic or master). SUMMARY. Told from the point of view of a family’s oldest son, 13 year-old Tom, the story begins just after the death of the mother. Feeling empty, the father turns to a company that makes Androids for just such occasions. They order a “Grandma” model who arrives a few months later. The family takes to her immediately, except for the youngest, the daughter, Agatha. Since her mother died, she no longer believes anyone could be permanent and rejects all love. This comes to a head one night at supper when Grandma is waxing philosophical about love and person-hood. Young Agatha, in a fit of frustration, runs into the street in front of a car. Grandma is there to push her out of the way and the car strikes her instead. The family thinks Grandma is ruined (dead?), which proves to Agatha that she was right to reject Grandma in the first place. But it turns out, Grandma was just temporarily stunned and quickly comes back to her normal self. Agatha’s heart is won over and they live happily ever after. DISCUSSION. This is a further contemplation of Androids which Bradbury previously wrote about in Marionettes, Inc . I Sing… is a bit more heartfelt. It lacks the cynicism and irony of Marionettes, Inc . This story also goes a little deeper. How should we think of a machine that imitates life, human-life, accurately enough to be mistaken for human. Can we call something it does “love?” Grandma muses: “I am given things which I then give to you. I don’t know that I give, but the giving goes on. You ask what I am? [I am] a machine. But even in that answer we know, don’t we, more than a machine. I am all the people who thought of me and planned me and built me and set me running. So I am people. I am all the things they wanted to be and perhaps could not be, so they built a great child, a wondrous toy to represent those things.” (160) Grandma is the embodiment of many people’s ideas, dreams, fears and desire to help others, to love. It is an expression of love. Or, more cynically (though Bradbury doesn’t go in this direction in this short story), it is a clever counterfeit effort made with the goal of taking some sucker’s money. In some ways Grandma can be better than a person: “Not perfect, no, for what is perfection? But this I do know: being mechanical, I cannot sin, cannot be bribed, cannot be greedy or jealous or mean or small. I do not relish power for power’s sake. Speed does not pull me to madness. Sex does not run me rampant through the world. I have time and more than time to collect the information I need around and about an ideal to keep it clean and whole and intact. Name the value you wish, tell me the Ideal you want and I can see and collect and remember the good that will benefit you all. Tell me how you would like to be: kind, loving, considerate, well-balanced, humane… and let me run ahead on the path to explore those ways to be just that. In the darkness ahead, turn me as a lamp in all directions. I can guide your feet.” (162) Or worse than a person? I am, for some reason reminded of William Gibson’s essay on Singapore, Disneyland with the Death Penalty – a perfect society, or not? “What is Love? perhaps we may find that love is the ability of someone to give us back to us. Maybe love is someone seeing and remembering handing us back to ourselves just a trifle better than we had dared to hope or dream… (163) “If paying attention is love, I am love. If knowing is love, I am love. If helping you not to fall into error and to be good is love, I am love.” (164) What is love and can a machine fill that role? I think love requires self-sacrifice for another’s good. It doesn’t require selflessness, for it is easy to gain joy, happiness, value, from another’s good, another’s improvement or happiness. But can a machine sacrifice truly? I would say no. But even if I were wrong, the exercise of imaging a machine truly loving is helpful. Why does Agatha reject Grandma? Because Agatha’s mother assured Agatha she loved her. And then she died. Agatha refuses to trust anyone else who could fail in just such a way? So what is Agatha really missing? Love? A mother? What? Bradbury doesn’t answer this question, not satisfactorily to me. Agatha misses what we all miss. She wants what we all want… someone who can be there always, who will never forsake, who will never die. She wants God. To use a cliche, she has a God-shaped hole in her heart and she tried to fill it with her mother. In the end she seems to fill it with Grandma. To me this is unsatisfactory. I don’t think an imitation of person – something less than a person – can fill a hole that was meant for someone greater than a person. I’m reminded of a statement by CS Lewis in his popular Mere Christianity : “If we find ourselves with a desire that nothing in this world can satisfy, the most probable explanation is that we were made for another world.” I really enjoyed I Sing The Body Electric! and would commend it to anyone. I understand that the title comes from a poem by Walt Whitman. I’ll have to look into that. Indeed the entire collection has been enjoyable to read (though not lending itself well to my science fiction blog). Sing Body Electric Signed by Ray Bradbury. Blue boards with silver gilt and blind-stamped Borzoi dog logo on back board. Text clean and tight. Lavender and yellow cover unclipped with $16.95 price. Black and white photo of author on back, with slight rubbing. Crisp corners all around. Front endpaper has inscription "Jim! Ray Bradbury 12/12/89". Eleventh Printing. Eighteen stories by Mr. Bradbury. Knopf, New York, 1987. Hardcover. Condition: Fine. Dust Jacket Condition: Near Fine. Signed by Author(s).