Ray Bradbury, Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) FMW 49

I picked this off the virtual shelf (although I also have the print copy) after the recent death of Ray Bradbury as a way of honouring the passing of an influential and much-loved author whose works I am not as conversant with as I would like to be.

Something Wicked This Way Comes describes the encounter of adolescents Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade with the mysterious Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show, an eerie circus sideshow that arrives in the middle of the night by railroad.

On discovering the dark purposes of the troupe's visitation, Halloway and Nightshade do what they can to stave off its threat to their own persons as well others prior to embroiling Halloway's father Charles in events.

Stylistically, I found the work uneven. Bradbury seems to lurch between the most chokingly florid prose and undeniably majestic passages that are startling and arresting in equal measure.

Structurally, the novel is disappointing. For me, the plot lacks interest and development and Bradbury relies on careering from set piece to set piece in order to retain such engagement as the work is able to muster. Personally, I found this tedious in the extreme.

Thematically, the struggle between an under-defined evil and a less-than-convincing goodness lacks interest, the depiction of adolescence is strained, and the delineation of the father-child relationship too oblique.

Consequently, more than once I felt I was left 'holding a book but reading the empty spaces' (loc. 487-77). However, Something Wicked This Way Comes does deliver some wonderful passages between the breathless and underwhelming plot devices, and is an acceptable late entry in the numbered run of the Fantasy Masterworks series.

For these beings, fall is the ever normal season, the only weather, there be no choice beyond. Where do they come from? The dust. Where do they go? The grave. Does blood stir their veins? No: the night wind. What ticks in their head? The worm. What speaks from their mouth? The toad. What sees from their eye? The snake. What hears with their ear? The abyss between the stars. They sift the human storm for souls, eat flesh of reason, fill tombs with sinners. They frenzy forth. In gusts they beetle-scurry, creep, thread, filter, motion, make all moons sullen, and surely cloud all clear-run waters. The spider-web hears them, trembles - breaks. Such are the autumn people. Beware of them. (loc. 2892-96)

Life in the end seemed a prank of such size you could only stand off at this end of the corridor to note its meaningless length and its quite unnecessary height, a mountain built to such ridiculous immensities you were dwarfed in its shadow and mocking of its pomp. (loc. 3436-38)

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Philip K. Dick, The Man in the High Castle (1962) SFMW 73

The wall falls back into the moat.
Use no army now.
Make your commands known within your own town.
Perseverance brings humiliation.

Undeterred by the unfavourable reading of the I Ching, Frank 'Goldfish' Frink muses 'I should take my tools[...] be working, creating in my own way right up to the end, living as best I can, as actively as possible, until the wall falls back into the moat for all of us, all mankind' (pp. 54-55)
Philip K. Dick's 1962 work The Man in the High Castle is an alternate history set in a fictional world within which the Axis powers were victorious in the Second World War and the political map of the world has been redrawn accordingly.

It is a book about chance, belief, the shaping of fate and the making of history in a figurative and literal sense. The interpretation and manipulation of history is the dominant theme of the work at both a personal and a societal level.

From the former perspective, the I Ching serves to influence the decisions of the work's protagonists, Frank and Juliana Frink, who although formerly married do not encounter oneanother in the novel's time line.

From the latter, the novel-within-the-novel entitled The Grasshopper Lies Heavy by Hawthorn Abendsen, who appears in the work towards its conclusion, posits an historical outcome to the Second World War which will be more familiar to the reader and which informs the work's thrilling conclusion.

'Now one appreciates Saint Paul's incisive word choice... seen through glass darkly not a metaphor, but astute reference to optical distortion. We really do see astigmatically, in fundamental sense: our space and our time creations of our own psyche, and when these momentarily falter - like acute disturbance of middle ear' (p. 225)

The Man in the High Castle is often introduced as Dick's greatest work, and its intricate world-building, ability to create a firm sense of place within the context of the societal alterity it crafts, and the prismatic, shifting perspectives of its inner textual histories provide ample support for this assertion.

The text reveals itself in a precise and satisfying manner, akin to unfolding the geometries of a piece of crisp origami:

'One by one Hawth made the choices. Thousands of them. By means of the lines. Historic period. Subject. Characters. Plot. It took years. Hawth even asked the oracle what sort of success it would be. It told him that it would be a very great success, the first one of his career. So you were right. You must use the oracle quite a lot yourself, to have known' (p. 245)

'I'm not sure of anything,' he said.
'Believe,' Juliana said. (p. 247)

'Truth, she thought. As terrible as death. But harder to find. I'm lucky.' (p. 248)

Note: The Man in the High Castle was the third entry in the 2001 hardback SF Masterworks series (first cover image above), and the seventy third entry in the numbered SF Masterworks series (second cover image; 2009). A printing error saw the volume bear the number '72'.

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