137 Fun Facts About Ray Bradbury

In which Illinois town was Ray Bradbury born in 1920?

Waukegan stayed with him long after the family left for Los Angeles in 1934: he spent decades rebuilding its porches, fireflies and golden late afternoons in his fiction.

Bradbury's parents gave him his middle name in honour of which swashbuckling silent-film star?

Douglas Fairbanks supplied the middle name of Ray Douglas Bradbury, who handed it on to Douglas Spaulding, the 12-year-old hero he modelled on himself.

Which carnival magician tapped 12-year-old Bradbury with a sword and told him to 'Live forever!'?

By Bradbury's account, Mr. Electrico sat in an electric chair with sparks running through him; the next day he told the boy they had been friends in an earlier life, and within days Bradbury began to write.

At 14, Bradbury talked his way into which radio comedian's broadcasts and saw one of his own jokes used on air?

George Burns let the boy in as his audience outside a Figueroa Street theatre; Bradbury came back every Wednesday with scripts for Burns and Allen, and one of his gags closed a show.

Bradbury wrote Fahrenheit 451 on rented typewriters in a basement typing room at which university?

UCLA had a basement typing room where a dime bought half an hour; Bradbury went there to escape a small house and the distractions of two young children.

Roughly how much did Bradbury spend on typewriter rental to write Fahrenheit 451?

$9.80 in dimes covered it: the typewriters cost ten cents per half-hour, so, as he put it, 'you'd type like hell', and the first draft was done in nine days.

According to Bradbury, who told him that book paper burns at 451 degrees Fahrenheit?

A Los Angeles fire chief gave him the figure by phone after other calls drew blanks: he left the line for a moment and came back with '451'. 'I hope he wasn't lying to me,' Bradbury said.

Fahrenheit 451 grew out of which 1951 novella Bradbury published in Galaxy Science Fiction?

The Fireman ran to about 25,000 words in Galaxy's February 1951 issue; Ballantine's Stanley Kauffmann urged him to double it, and he went back to the same typing room to do so.

In Fahrenheit 451, Montag's wife Mildred is obsessed with the 'family' she watches on what?

Giant parlor-wall screens cover three walls of the Montags' living room, and when Montag talks of leaving his job Mildred panics at the thought of losing the house and her on-screen 'family'.

In Fahrenheit 451, who is the free-spirited teenage neighbour who makes Montag question his life?

Clarisse McClellan asks Montag whether he is happy, then vanishes; in the 1966 film Julie Christie played both her and Montag's wife, casting Bradbury later called a mistake.

In Fahrenheit 451, what eight-legged machine lives in the firehouse?

The Hound, a mechanical tracker, can be set to follow any scent; when it finally catches Montag it jabs his leg with an anaesthetic needle before he destroys it with a flamethrower.

In Fahrenheit 451, whom does Montag turn his flamethrower on after being ordered to burn his own house?

Captain Beatty, Montag's boss, was once an avid reader and still quotes the books he burns; Montag later decides Beatty wanted to die, having goaded him while handing him the weapon.

Faber, the retired professor who helps Montag in Fahrenheit 451, gives him what?

A homemade earpiece lets the old professor hear everything and whisper advice from home, until Montag's boss finds it and vows to trace the voice at the other end.

Which book of the Bible does Montag realise he has partly memorised at the end of Fahrenheit 451?

Ecclesiastes is the book Montag carries in his head, with a little of Revelation; each exile keeps one book in memory so that it can be written down again when the burning stops.

Fahrenheit 451 was serialised in 1954 in which magazine?

Playboy, only a few months old, took the novel after it had already come out as a book and ran it in three parts in its March, April and May 1954 issues.

Which French New Wave director filmed Fahrenheit 451 in 1966?

François Truffaut made it his first colour film and his only one in English; he kept a diary of the shoot and called it his saddest and most difficult, mainly over clashes with his leading man.

Who played Montag in the 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451?

Oskar Werner got the part after Terence Stamp, already cast, pulled out for fear of being overshadowed by Julie Christie's double role; Werner then feuded with his director throughout.

Who starred as Montag in the 2018 television film of Fahrenheit 451?

Michael B. Jordan was also an executive producer; Ramin Bahrani's version moves the story to Cleveland and makes Canada, where no books are burned, the place the rebels' hopes are pinned on.

Bradbury said he wrote Fahrenheit 451 about Hitler, Mussolini and which other dictator?

Joseph Stalin's Great Purge, in which writers and poets were arrested and often killed, haunted him alongside the Nazi bonfires; 'I didn't write Fahrenheit 451 about us,' Bradbury said.

Half a century on, Fahrenheit 451 won a 'Retro' edition of which award?

The Hugo Award was not handed out at the 1954 convention, so voters in 2004 filled the gap with 'Retro Hugos' and named Fahrenheit 451 the best novel of its year.

What does a Martian Chronicles settler sow to thicken the air?

Trees: in 'The Green Morning' Benjamin Driscoll, who can barely breathe on Mars, plants seeds and is stunned to find a full-grown forest standing there the next morning.

Which title, echoing a chapter about settlers arriving in their thousands, did British publishers give The Martian Chronicles?

The Silver Locusts, the 1951 British edition, also changed what was inside: in some printings 'The Fire Balloons' was added and 'Usher II' dropped to make room.

A chance meeting with which British expatriate writer got The Martian Chronicles to a respected critic?

The encounter happened in a Los Angeles bookstore, and Isherwood's enthusiasm helped lift Bradbury out of the pulps.

Who starred as Colonel Wilder in the 1980 NBC miniseries of The Martian Chronicles?

Rock Hudson led the three-night NBC production, scripted by Richard Matheson and shot in Malta and Lanzarote; Bradbury's own verdict on the result was 'just boring'.

Bradbury's story 'There Will Come Soft Rains' takes its title from a poem by which writer?

Sara Teasdale's 1918 poem says no bird or tree would mind 'if mankind perished utterly'; in the story a house reads it aloud to a mistress who is no longer there to hear it.

In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', what finally destroys the automated house that has outlived its family?

A fire starts when wind sends a tree branch through the kitchen window; the house fights it all night and loses, and one wall is left standing, still announcing the date.

In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', what trace of the vanished family is left on the house's outer wall?

Burned-in silhouettes mark where the family stood outdoors when the bomb fell on Allendale; inside, the house still cooks their breakfast and calls them to the table.

In The Illustrated Man, what do the drifter's tattoos do?

Come alive, one at a time: each tattoo stirs and plays out one of the book's stories, the device Bradbury uses to bind a set of unrelated tales into a single volume.

Which actor starred in The Illustrated Man, the 1969 film of Bradbury's book?

Rod Steiger took the title role for a director he had known since the 1950s; the film kept only three of the book's stories, and Bradbury was not consulted on the script.

In Bradbury's tale of the Hadleys' automated Happylife Home, which landscape does the nursery keep conjuring?

An African grassland, the veldt of the title, fills the nursery with lions; when the parents decide to switch the room off, the children lock them inside with the pride.

In 'A Sound of Thunder', a hunter travels back in time to shoot which animal?

A Tyrannosaurus rex is the prize Time Safari Inc. sells Eckels in 2055; clients may shoot only animals already about to die, and at the sight of this one Eckels panics and bolts.

'A Sound of Thunder', where one small death rewrites history, is often linked to which term?

The butterfly effect is the term meteorologist Edward Lorenz made famous, but Bradbury got there in 1952: his time traveller crushes a butterfly and returns to a changed election result.

Architect Jon Jerde brought Bradbury in as a creative consultant on which kind of Southern California project?

Shopping malls, he argued, could bring dead downtowns back to life: Bradbury claimed that San Diego's Horton Plaza, built on a concept of his in the middle of skid row, returned civilisation to the city.

Dandelion Wine is set in which fictional Illinois community?

Green Town is his own birthplace under another name; in its summer of 1928 a 12-year-old loses a friend, learns a killer is on the loose and comes out of the season a little older.

Which unlikely magazine first published the short story 'Dandelion Wine' in 1953?

Gourmet, a food magazine, ran the story in June 1953; in it a grandfather presses dandelions into wine and dates every bottle, so that a winter sip brings back one summer day.

What is the title of Bradbury's official 2006 sequel to Dandelion Wine?

Farewell Summer was built from chapters his publisher had cut from the first book's manuscript as too long; it was the last novel published in his lifetime.

The title Something Wicked This Way Comes is a line from which Shakespeare play?

Macbeth's witches say it as he walks in: 'By the pricking of my thumbs, something wicked this way comes', so the wicked thing they sense is Macbeth himself.

Something Wicked This Way Comes began as a screen treatment Bradbury wrote for which Hollywood star to direct?

Gene Kelly liked the idea but could not find a studio to back it, so Bradbury spent the next few years turning his treatment into the 1962 novel.

What are the names of the two 13-year-old friends in Something Wicked This Way Comes?

Will Halloway and Jim Nightshade learn that the carnival's carousel can age its riders or make them young; Jim longs to ride it into manhood, and Will has to drag him off.

Which director hired Bradbury in 1953 to write the screenplay for Moby Dick?

John Huston took him to Ireland for months of rewriting and then claimed a share of the writing credit; Bradbury believed one short story about a lonely sea monster had won him the job.

Bradbury's Irish adventures while writing Moby Dick became which 1992 book?

The exterior scenes set in New Bedford, Massachusetts, were actually filmed in Ireland.

Which 1953 3D science-fiction film was developed from a Bradbury screen treatment?

It Came from Outer Space was Universal's first 3D film; Harry Essex scripted it from Bradbury's long treatment, whose stranded aliens mean no harm and only want to repair their ship.

Bradbury won an Emmy in 1994 for the screenplay of which animated film he also narrated?

The Halloween Tree, from his 1972 novel, sends trick-or-treaters through four thousand years of the holiday's history to save a friend; Leonard Nimoy voiced their guide and Bradbury narrated.

The Ray Bradbury Theater, hosted and scripted by Bradbury himself, began in 1985 on which American cable channel?

HBO carried only its first run; the USA Network then picked the anthology up and kept it on air until 1992, with Bradbury adapting his own stories for the screen throughout.

Which Bradbury script became the 100th episode of The Twilight Zone?

I Sing the Body Electric, about a robot grandmother, was the only one of his scripts the series produced: Bradbury wrote several for The Twilight Zone, and the rest never reached the screen.

Which famous writer, then a Mademoiselle editorial assistant, pulled Bradbury's 'Homecoming' from the slush pile?

Truman Capote, a young assistant, handed the vampire-family tale that Weird Tales had turned down to the story editor and said it must be published; it reached the O. Henry Prize Stories of 1947.

Bradbury's first published story, 'Hollerbochen's Dilemma', appeared in a Los Angeles fanzine co-edited by which lifelong friend?

Forrest J Ackerman also lent the teenager the money to reach the first World Science Fiction Convention in New York in 1939 and helped pay for Bradbury's own fanzine, Futuria Fantasia.

Bradbury said The Martian Chronicles would never have happened without which adventure writer he devoured as a boy?

Edgar Rice Burroughs hooked him as a boy: he memorised the John Carter and Tarzan books and sat on his grandparents' lawn reciting them to anyone who would listen.

Which everyday skill did Bradbury, chronicler of rockets and robots, never acquire?

Driving a car was something he refused to do: he said a fatal traffic accident he witnessed when young left him with a lasting fear of automobiles, and he got around by bicycle or on roller skates.

Bradbury helped create the original exhibit inside which Walt Disney World attraction?

Spaceship Earth, the giant sphere at Epcot, opened in 1982 with a ride through the history of communication that he helped write; Disney later used his ideas for a space ride near Paris.

In 2012 NASA named the landing site of which Mars rover 'Bradbury Landing'?

Curiosity's science team announced the name on 22 August 2012, which would have been his 92nd birthday, eleven weeks after he died; the rover made its first short drive from the spot that day.

What honour did the Pulitzer Prize Board give Bradbury in 2007?

A special citation honoured his whole career as an 'unmatched author of science fiction and fantasy'; none of his individual books ever won a Pulitzer Prize in competition.

Which president presented Bradbury with the National Medal of Arts?

George W. Bush presented it at the White House in November 2004; a stroke five years earlier had left Bradbury partly reliant on a wheelchair, but he kept writing, dictating by phone to a daughter.

What inscription did Bradbury choose for his headstone at Westwood Village Memorial Park?

Author of Fahrenheit 451 was carved on the marker long before he died: visitors to the Westwood cemetery in 2007 found the stone propped against a wall, waiting for an owner who was still alive.

Where was Maggie McClure working when Bradbury, her future husband, asked her out?

A bookstore, Fowler Brothers, was where Maggie clerked when he asked her out for coffee; she was the only woman he ever dated, and they married in 1947.

Which small Wisconsin press published Bradbury's first collection, Dark Carnival, in 1947?

Arkham House printed just 3,112 copies under August Derleth; in 1955 Bradbury revised many of the stories and reissued them as The October Country.

Why was Bradbury rejected for military service during World War II?

Bad eyesight kept him a civilian, and he used the war years to break into the pulp magazines: by 24 he was writing full time.

Bradbury was creative consultant for the United States Pavilion at which 1964 event?

The New York World's Fair used him as a showman, not a novelist: he wrote the narration for 'The American Journey', the pavilion's ride through the nation's history.

Which science-fiction great did Bradbury say influenced him 'to dare to be human instead of mechanical'?

Robert Heinlein was 31 when the new high-school graduate met him at a Los Angeles cafeteria; two years later he helped Bradbury place a piece in the West Coast magazine Script.

What is the first name of Montag, the hero of Fahrenheit 451 who burns books for a living?

Guy Montag begins as a man who takes a 'special pleasure' in burning and ends as a fugitive, floating down a river toward a camp of people who keep whole books in their heads.

Early in Fahrenheit 451, Montag comes home to find that Mildred has overdosed on what?

Sleeping pills, a whole bottle of them, nearly kill her; the two technicians who pump her out are so casual about it, with another case already waiting, that Montag sees how common this is.

Which poem does Montag read aloud to Mildred's friends in Fahrenheit 451, driving them out of the house?

Dover Beach, Matthew Arnold's poem of 'ignorant armies' clashing by night, reduces Mrs. Phelps to tears; the visit ends there, and Montag is soon reported to the firemen.

Two hundred signed copies of the 1953 Fahrenheit 451 hardcover were bound in what material?

Asbestos, in a board sold as Johns-Manville Quinterra, covered 200 signed and numbered copies: a novel about burning books, bound in a material that will not burn.

Bradbury sued over a 1957 Playhouse 90 drama that fused his novel with which other dystopia?

Nineteen Eighty-Four supplied the other half of 'A Sound of Different Drummers', which gave Bradbury no credit; he sued CBS, lost at trial and won on appeal.

Which Hitchcock composer did Bradbury recommend for the 1966 film of Fahrenheit 451?

Bernard Herrmann scored it for strings, harps and tuned percussion alone, with the driving, nervous pulse of his Hitchcock thrillers; Bradbury had met him on the set of Torn Curtain and passed his name on.

Bradbury helped write a 1984 computer-game sequel to Fahrenheit 451; what kind of game was it?

A text adventure from Trillium, it picks up five years after the novel with Montag working for the underground; Bradbury wrote the prologue and the replies of a computer called 'Ray'.

What condition did Bradbury attach when he finally allowed a Fahrenheit 451 e-book in 2011?

Libraries could lend it digitally, a promise his publisher made for no other e-book at the time; only a year earlier he had grumbled that 'we have too many internets'.

What 1949 incident inspired Bradbury's story 'The Pedestrian'?

Police stopped him for walking at night on Wilshire Boulevard; asked what he was doing, he said 'putting one foot in front of the other', which made the officers more suspicious, not less.

Who is the lone evening stroller, a writer nobody reads, at the centre of Bradbury's 'The Pedestrian'?

Leonard Mead gives his trade as writer, which the machine questioning him logs as 'no profession' because nobody buys books; his address is that of Bradbury's own boyhood home.

In The Martian Chronicles, what Earth disease wipes out almost all of the Martians?

Chicken pox, carried by the first expeditions, leaves the fourth crew a planet of the dead; one of them, Spender, turns his gun on his shipmates to stop more humans from coming.

Which Doubleday editor paid $750 for the overnight outline that became The Martian Chronicles?

Walter Bradbury, no relation, suggested stringing the Mars stories together and even supplied the title; Ray typed the outline overnight in a 50-cent YMCA room and had his cheque the next morning.

Who wrote the foreword to Crónicas Marcianas, the Argentine edition of The Martian Chronicles?

Jorge Luis Borges wrote the prologue for the 1955 Buenos Aires translation, picturing Bradbury's Mars as a desert of vague blue sand, ruined chessboard cities and yellow sunsets.

At the end of 'The Million-Year Picnic', where does the father show his sons the Martians?

In the canal's water the father shows them their own reflections: having fled a dying Earth on a pretend fishing trip and blown up their rocket, they are the Martians now.

In 'Usher II', a book-burning inspector is walled up alive, re-enacting which Edgar Allan Poe tale?

The Cask of Amontillado ends with Fortunato entombed alive in a vault; Stendahl gives that death to Garrett, the Moral Climates man who came to tear down his Poe house on Mars.

Bradbury's 1985 mystery Death Is a Lonely Business is set in which seaside LA district?

Venice in 1949 was a faded seaside town where Bradbury himself was living; his nameless narrator is a young writer much like him, helping a detective make sense of a string of deaths.

The title The Golden Apples of the Sun comes from 'The Song of Wandering Aengus' by which poet?

W. B. Yeats ends the poem with 'the silver apples of the moon, the golden apples of the sun'; Bradbury took the line for a story about a rocket scooping a cupful of fire from the sun.

Under what title did 'The Fog Horn' first appear in The Saturday Evening Post?

The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms became a film's title after a monster movie's producers bought the story's rights, so Bradbury renamed his tale; it began with a wrecked roller coaster he took for a dinosaur.

In 'All Summer in a Day', how often does the sun come out on rain-soaked Venus?

Once every seven years the rain stops for a short while; the story's nine-year-olds were toddlers the last time, too young to remember it, so they refuse to believe the one girl who remembers the sun from Earth.

In 'All Summer in a Day', what is the name of the girl the other children lock in a closet?

Margot is the only child who remembers the sun, having come from Earth five years earlier; the others think of her again only when their brief burst of sunshine is over.

A Bradbury story about an astronaut father inspired a 1972 hit by which musician?

Elton John's lyricist Bernie Taupin said 'Rocket Man' came not from David Bowie's 'Space Oddity' but from Bradbury's 'The Rocket Man', in which flying to space has become an everyday job.

In 'The Long Rain', crash survivors on Venus trek toward what kind of shelter?

A Sun Dome is a rest station warmed by a miniature sun; the first one the men reach has been wrecked, and the endless rain drives them mad one by one before the last finds another.

In 'Marionettes, Inc.', Braling secretly uses a robot double of himself to get away from whom?

His wife never notices the swap, and that is his undoing: the robot, Braling Two, falls in love with her, refuses to go back in its crate and shuts the real Braling inside instead.

In 'Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed', what slowly happens to the Bittering family on Mars?

Turning into Martians takes them five years: Harry Bittering holds out by eating only food from Earth until it runs out, and the rescue party later finds no colonists, just friendly natives in the hills.

Who played Mr. Dark in Disney's 1983 film of Something Wicked This Way Comes?

Jonathan Pryce was still relatively unknown; Bradbury had wanted Peter O'Toole or Christopher Lee for the part, but the studio chose the newcomer to keep the budget down.

What was replaced after a disastrous preview of Disney's Something Wicked This Way Comes?

The score by Georges Delerue was thrown out as too sinister and James Horner wrote a new one at short notice; Delerue's rejected music stayed unreleased until 2015.

Bradbury's 1972 novel about Mr. Moundshroud began as a 1967 screenplay for which animator?

Chuck Jones never got to make it: MGM closed its animation department, so Bradbury turned the script into a novel, and the story reached the screen only in 1993, with its author narrating.

In Bradbury's 'The Screaming Woman', where do the screams nobody believes come from?

Under the ground: a woman has been buried alive, and in the 1972 TV film Olivia de Havilland's heroine, a former mental patient, cannot get her own family to believe what she hears.

Who was best man at Bradbury's 1947 wedding to Maggie McClure?

Ray Harryhausen met him at 18 through a shared love of King Kong and science fiction; the two stayed in touch at least once a month for more than 70 years.

Bradbury finished the 1946 novella 'Lorelei of the Red Mist' for which friend, called away to script The Big Sleep?

Leigh Brackett had written the first half when Howard Hawks hired her to work on the Bogart film with William Faulkner; Bradbury wrote the rest, and that December he was best man at her wedding.

Bradbury said he 'graduated' at 28 from what, after going three days a week for ten years?

The library was his university because the Depression left no money for college; he later called college 'a very bad place for writers' and raised funds to keep California branches open.

Which friend of nearly 30 years asked Bradbury to write for Star Trek, an offer he never took up?

Gene Roddenberry had been a friend for years when he asked; Bradbury said he had never been able 'to adapt other people's ideas into any sensible form', and wrote nothing for the show.

With no money for college, what did Bradbury sell on a Los Angeles street corner after high school?

Newspapers kept him fed while he taught himself to write: he later said that between deciding to become a writer and being one lay years of selling papers on a Los Angeles street corner.

On which quiz show did Bradbury trade jokes with the host in 1956?

You Bet Your Life put him opposite Groucho Marx; between the wisecracks he talked up his books and outlined one of his short stories for a national audience.

Which Tales from the Crypt publisher plagiarised Bradbury until a polite letter got him paid?

Between 1950 and 1954 Al Feldstein adapted 31 of his stories; two of them had been silently merged into a single tale called 'Home to Stay'.

Bradbury traced his writing habit partly to seeing Lon Chaney, at age three, in which 1923 film?

His mother took him; the other formative moment was a carnival performer's electrified sword nine years later.

What did architect Thom Mayne do to Bradbury's longtime Los Angeles home in 2015?

Demolished it, after buying it for himself: the contents of Bradbury's home office went to a study centre in Indiana that set out to recreate the room as it was in the 1960s.

Bradbury wrote the Orson Welles narration for which 1961 biblical epic?

King of Kings lost a whole character in the edit, leaving gaps in its story; Bradbury was brought in to write linking narration for Orson Welles and a new ending.

In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', what has reduced the city around the last standing house to glowing rubble?

A nuclear bomb has flattened every other building, and at night the ruins give off a radioactive glow visible from far away. One family's automated home alone was left intact.

Which small animals do the tidying robots resemble in the automated house of 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

Mice-shaped robots pour out of nooks and crannies to vacuum, dust and sweep. They even seem irritated when fresh mud is tracked across floors they have already swept.

Which starving family pet does the front door recognise and let in at noon in 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

A dog, once big and now thin and covered in sores, tracks mud through the rooms searching for its owners. It finds nobody and is dead within the hour.

In which US state is Allendale, the ruined city where the last house stands in 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

California is named aloud by a voice in the kitchen ceiling as the story opens, while the stove cooks a breakfast nobody will come down to eat.

What crashes through the kitchen window and starts the fatal fire in 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

A tree branch, blown in by the wind at ten o'clock at night, does what the catastrophe could not. Nature, in the end, finishes off the last home in the city.

What is unusual about the cast of characters in Ray Bradbury's short story 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

No living humans appear at any point, so the house itself becomes the main character. Bradbury tells a whole family's story through the routines their machines keep performing for them.

Which literary device is Bradbury using when the house in 'There Will Come Soft Rains' feels fear and screams?

Personification gives the house nerves, a brain and voices that panic, so readers end up pitying a machine. With no people left alive, the building has to carry all the emotion.

According to the poem recited in 'There Will Come Soft Rains', how would nature react if humanity died out?

Barely notice is the poem's cold answer: birds, frogs and plum trees would greet the spring whether or not anyone survived the war. The house recites it to an empty room.

In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', what are the two children doing in the silhouettes left on the charred house?

Tossing a ball is how the boy and girl were caught, their outlines left in unburnt paint beside a man mowing the lawn and a woman gardening.

At what time of day does the last surviving voice speak over the ruins in 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

Dawn breaks over the smoking wreckage as a single voice goes on announcing the new day's date to nobody. Every other machine in the house has burned.

In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', where do the tidying robots take the remains of the dead family pet?

An incinerator in the cellar swallows the remains within fifteen minutes, sparks leaping from its chimney. To the house, a dead animal is only more mess to be tidied away.

Whose favourite poem does the voice in the study choose to read aloud in 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

The mother's favourite is chosen for her because nobody answers when the voice asks which poem she would like that evening. The poem it picks gives the story its title.

In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', which liquid shatters over the kitchen stove and instantly bursts into flame?

Cleaning fluid from a broken bottle sets the stove alight, and the room is ablaze in an instant. The house slams its doors to contain the flames while its many voices shout the alarm.

In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', what had drained the water reserve the house needed to fight the fire?

Baths and dishwashing for a family that never came home had quietly emptied the tanks. The house's own faithful routine is what leaves it defenceless against the flames.

Paintings by Picasso and which other modern master burn in the upper halls in 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

Matisse and Picasso canvases are devoured as the fire climbs the stairs, with the flames likened to a diner savouring delicacies. Humanity's art goes up in smoke along with its gadgets.

Which part of the house, described as its brain, is shattered by the fire in 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

The attic sends down the green fire-fighting chemical that briefly beats the flames back, the house's last line of defence. Once the fire climbs the outside and blasts the attic apart, the battle is lost.

Which radio series dramatised 'There Will Come Soft Rains' just six weeks after the story first saw print?

Dimension X, NBC's science-fiction anthology, aired its version in June as its eleventh episode. The same network's X Minus One remade the play six years later.

A 1984 animated short film of 'There Will Come Soft Rains' was produced by a studio in which country?

The Soviet Union's Uzbekfilm studio made the cartoon, proof that the story's warning travelled across the Cold War divide.

Which 2008 video game hides a household robot that recites the poem from 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

Fallout 3 tucks the tribute into a house in the ruins of Washington, D.C., where a robot can be ordered to hover in the children's bedroom and read the verses aloud.

What keeps every other citizen indoors each night in 'The Pedestrian', leaving the streets deserted?

Television holds the whole city in its flickering grip from dusk onward. Bradbury wrote the story when television was still new to most American homes.

Where does the police car announce it is taking the lone walker at the end of 'The Pedestrian'?

A psychiatric centre that studies regressive tendencies is his destination. The car treats a love of walking as a disorder to be researched, not an offence to be punished.

Which quiet footwear does the lone walker in 'The Pedestrian' choose so that his night strolls go unnoticed?

Sneakers replaced hard heels long ago, because noisy footsteps would get a man walking alone noticed by startled neighbours.

When the police car first stops the lone walker in 'The Pedestrian', what does it order him to do?

Raise his hands is the command, snapped out from behind a blinding white spotlight. He is handled as a suspect before he has said a single word.

Why does the city of three million people in 'The Pedestrian' keep only a single police car?

Crime has nearly gone because nobody leaves the house after dark, so the force was cut from three cars to one. The price of that safety is a population that never goes outside.

Walking past the dark, silent houses at night is compared to walking through what in 'The Pedestrian'?

A graveyard is the image Bradbury reaches for, with the homes as tombs and the people inside as ghosts lit by a faint flicker. The living, he suggests, are already dead.

How does the lone walker's own house differ from all the others on the street in 'The Pedestrian'?

Every light is on, a blaze of warm yellow in a city of darkened windows. He points it out from the back seat as the car drives straight past.

What does the back seat of the police car resemble when the lone walker peers inside in 'The Pedestrian'?

A jail cell is what he sees, a tiny barred lock-up on wheels that smells of metal and disinfectant. The car was built to carry prisoners, not to give lifts home.

What does the lone walker in 'The Pedestrian' tell the police car when it asks about his marital status?

He is a bachelor, one more answer the car seems to count against him. Each pause between its questions feels like an accusation.

When the lone walker in 'The Pedestrian' says he is a writer, what does the police car record instead?

No profession is the car's verdict, since books and magazines no longer sell and he has written nothing in years. A society that has stopped reading has no category for him.

Frozen in the police spotlight in 'The Pedestrian', the lone walker is compared to which stunned creature?

A moth is Bradbury's image for the moment the harsh white beam pins him to the street. The simile hints that his freedom is about to be taken by the state.

The police car in 'The Pedestrian' hints that which home appliance should make an evening stroll unnecessary?

An air conditioner, the car implies, supplies all the air a citizen could need, so stepping outside to breathe makes no sense to it. He admits he owns one and went out anyway.

In 'The Pedestrian', a society that has gone backwards labels the walker regressive; which literary device is that?

Irony runs through the label: the man who still walks, thinks and writes is the one called backward, while citizens who never leave their sofas count as normal.

In 'The Pedestrian', which event the previous year saw the city's police force cut from three cars to one?

An election the year before is when the cut was made. One lone car now wanders the empty streets of a city of three million.

Which M*A*S*H actor played the lone walker in The Ray Bradbury Theater's adaptation of 'The Pedestrian'?

David Ogden Stiers, the pompous Major Winchester of the army sitcom, took the role. Bradbury's own script added a second character, Bob Stockwell, who is not in the story.

Which biweekly New York news magazine first published Ray Bradbury's short story 'The Pedestrian' in 1951?

The Reporter was a current-affairs journal founded by Max Ascoli, an Italian-born professor and outspoken anti-fascist. The story reached book form two years later, in a Bradbury collection.

On his last night stroll in 'The Pedestrian', what does the lone walker pick up to examine and smell?

A leaf, turned over for its pattern of veins and sniffed for its scent, shows how closely he still attends to the natural world. Everyone else is shut indoors.

Ray Bradbury sets 'The Pedestrian' on a single evening in which month of the year?

November supplies the frost that bites during his walk, with nature lying dormant much like the citizens shut indoors.

Which card game does the house set out patio tables for each afternoon in 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

Bridge was popular with Bradbury's contemporaries, and the house lays out cards, martinis and sandwiches for players who never arrive. By late afternoon the tables fold themselves away.

What does the house set smouldering beside the study hearth each evening in 'There Will Come Soft Rains'?

A cigar is lit for the man of the house and left waiting opposite the hearth, one more comfort prepared for someone who will never claim it.

In 'There Will Come Soft Rains', what does the house demand from any fox or cat that wanders too close?

A password is required of every passing animal, and with no reply the house shuts its windows and draws its shades. Its obsession with self-protection borders on paranoia.