Books

The first time I read Ray Brad­bury’s The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, I was 16 or 17, in high school. All the dates were in the future, then.

The sec­ond time I read The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, I was 40, Ray Brad­bury had recent­ly died, and only the last three chap­ters were in the “future”.

I’ve grown a lot in those twen­ty+ years. I’ve matured as a read­er and as a writer. I’ve actu­al­ly had one of my short sto­ries com­pared to Brad­bury’s writ­ing, which I thought was an immense honour.

When I was a teenag­er — heck, into my thir­ties — I was a sci­ence fic­tion snob. I sniffed in dis­dain at fan­ta­sy (except­ing, of course, Ter­ry Pratch­et­t’s oeu­vre and the then-ongo­ing Dark Tow­er saga from Stephen King — yes, I was a hyp­ocrite.) The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles was the first thing I read that meld­ed sci­ence fic­tion and fan­ta­sy — not the swords-and-sor­cery type that I was so dead-set against back then (and still am not a huge fan of), but the sub­tler fan­ta­sy that allows a rock­et launch to turn win­ter into flow­ers-bloom­ing sum­mer for a day. The fan­ta­sy that has a trav­el­er on a lone­ly road meet­ing up with a Mar­t­ian mil­len­nia dead, a Mar­t­ian that views him as the ghost instead. A John­ny-Apple­seed fig­ure that plants oaks that grow large enough to pro­vide shade in a sin­gle night.

There’s a poet­ry to Brad­bury’s writ­ing, the same sort of poet­ry that I find in William Gib­son’s writ­ing, though in a very dif­fer­ent way. They both have a tal­ent for find­ing le mot juste, that elu­sive turn of phrase that makes every­thing clear in the read­er’s mind.

If you haven’t read The Mar­t­ian Chron­i­cles, go, do so.

Horns is a page-turn­er.  Most nights the only rea­son I stopped read­ing was because I had to make a choice between find­ing out what comes next and being use­ful at work in the morning.

The sto­ry con­cerns one Ignatius “Ig” Per­rish, who wakes up one morn­ing after an ill-remem­bered night of drink­ing to dis­cov­er that he has grown horns overnight.  They look a bit like dev­il horns, and they hurt to touch.  He dis­cov­ers the horns seem to have giv­en him cer­tain pow­ers, too:  peo­ple can’t help but reveal their dark­est secrets to him, and they don’t seem to remem­ber talk­ing to him.

Ig’s girl­friend Mer­rin died about a year ago, a hor­rif­ic sex-mur­der; all the evi­dence seemed to point to Ig as the cul­prit, but he knows he did­n’t do it.  The evi­dence con­ve­nient­ly van­ished, and no one was ever con­vict­ed.  The towns­folk all assumed Ig’s rich par­ents bought off the jus­tice sys­tem to pro­tect the fam­i­ly name.