Reviews for La Nariz Y Otros Cuentos

The average rating for La Nariz Y Otros Cuentos based on 2 reviews is 4 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-11-02 00:00:00 Seth Graham Poetic science fiction. Being set in the future and involving space travel, Mars and futuristic technology makes this fit into the science fiction genre, but Bradbury is a writer of literature. This is beautiful writing and Bradbury is an artist with a mastery of the language. Mars could be another dimension, or fairy land, it does not really matter, Bradbury has concocted an alternate reality to explore psychological ethos. If Heinlein is the science fiction ideologist / sociologist, and Clarke the science fiction anthropologist, and Asimov the science fiction theologist; then Bradbury is the science fiction psychologist. But there is no doubt that this is more fantasy than SF; Bradbury tickles and cajoles and playfully steps around all technology and goes right to a more spiritual, psychological narrative - a dreamlike, absurdist voice, a whispered incantation. Martian Chronicles is a chronological set of short stories tied together around the theme of Earth colonization of Mars, but it is really about the human psyche and a study of what is best and worst about us. SF must read. *** 2020 reread - Bradbury's beautiful language is on full display, still charming and timeless more than sixty years later. This time around I was again struck by his seamless surrealism, blending with fantasy to evoke a psychological, almost fable like quality. Modern readers who are more accustomed to hard science fiction may be disconcerted by Bradbury's watercolor style - until the reader accepts that this is far more fantasy than science fiction, more dream than vision. One of the short stories was a none too subtle criticism of racism and was well ahead of its time in its stark depiction of institutionalized hate and prejudice. This may become an annual re-read for me.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-10-18 00:00:00 Nancy Johnson RIDDLE ME A MARTIAN RIDDLE ۞ A Riddle: What walks on two legs, uses two arms, talks like a human, acts like a human, kills humans, replaces humans, wants to be accepted and loved by a human? Answer: A Martian! ۞ A Riddle: What walks on two legs, uses two arms, talks like a human, acts like an animal except that's unfair to animals, kills others of its kind, wages war on its own kind, and destroys its own planet? Answer: A Human! ۞ A Riddle: What is built like a succession of linked stories, feels at times like a play by Brecht, feels at times like a mournful and elegiac ode to the dying of small towns, is a wise tale of human nature, is written with melancholy and sighs, is quietly sinister, is gently tragic, yet is also a science fiction novel? Answer: The Martian Chronicles! ۞ A Riddle: What is a ball of blue fire, a transcended entity, a being that lives in God's grace, a model of wisdom and goodness, and a terrifying symbol of the unknowable? What is meek and shall inherit their earth - but has lost the inclination? Answer: A Martian! ۞ A Riddle: What should have stayed on its own planet? What does not belong on Mars? What persists in persisting? What flees from home? What destroys that home? What flees back to that destruction? What eradicates much of what it comes into contact? What is a hopeless fool? What has a little - just a little - hope for it yet? Answer: A Human! ۞ A Riddle: What is science fiction as parable? What creates a series of haunting and haunted tableaux onto which we can project our own desires and fears? What transcends genre trappings? What is a landscape of forgotten plans and failed goals? What is like a waking dream? What is a journey that begins in death and ends with a small, fragile chance that all is not lost? What is like tears painted on a page? What is witty and sardonic and tender and angry and, finally, full of its own strange and painfully human soulfulness? Answer: The Martian Chronicles!