Each astronaut flies off on his own trajectory, hurtling to his doom.
Quietl “Kaleidoscope” is one of my favorite Bradbury short stories.įirst published in the October 1949 edition of Thrilling Wonder Stories this describes a scene where a spaceship is hit by a meteor and torn apart – ejecting the crew into space. For a time they can all communicate through their helmet comms, but slowly, as the separation becomes millions of miles apart, they wind up as solitary figures, alone with his thoughts. First published in the October 1949 edition of Thrilling Wonder Stories this describes a scene where a spaceship is hit by a meteor and torn apart – ejecting the crew into space. A Shot in the Dark by Deborah L.“Kaleidoscope” is one of my favorite Bradbury short stories.Where Oaken Hearts Do Gather by Sarah Pinsker.The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! The Extraterrestrials Are Coming! by Peter Wood.Colors of the Immortal Palette by Caroline M.Story link.Įnter your email address to subscribe to this blog and receive notifications of new posts by email. This is an uncharacteristically bleak and reflective story for the time, and it shows a distinct lack of the sentimentality that spoiled some of Bradbury’s later work. He wonders if anyone will see him burn on re-entry-and the story ends with a short paragraph where a small boy and his mother wish upon a falling star. 131Įventually (spoiler), Hollis achieves a painful self-awareness about his (“terrible and empty”) life, and realises the only good he can do now is for his ashes to be added to the land below. There was a happy day, there a bad one, there an evil face, there a good one, the film burned to a cinder, the screen was dark. When life is over it is like a flicker of bright film, an instant on the screen, all of its prejudices and passions condensed and illumined for an instant on space, and before you could cry out. I put the black mark on you just before I was tossed out myself.” “You wanted to get to the top all your life, Hollis. The abstraction had returned and he was a thing of dull concrete, forever falling nowhere. This is more reflectively existential than you would expect from a twenty-nine year old writer appearing in Thrilling Wonder Stories, and there is similar material earlier in the story, in a conversation Hollis has with Applegate: And this knowledge began to pull Hollis apart, with a slow, quivering precision. He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while Lespere had memories of things done and accomplished. There were differences between memories and dreams. With a feeling of cold water gushing through his head and his body, Hollis knew he was right. “Because I got my thoughts I remember!” cried Lespere, far away, indignant, holding his memories to his chest with both hands.Īnd he was right. Where’s your life any better than mine, now? While it was happening, yes, but now? Now is what counts. “When anything’s over, it’s just like it never happened. It’s just as if it had never happened, isn’t it?” They are all in radio contact, but there is no chance they will be rescued: some of the men say nothing at all, some let the veneer of civilization slip away, and one of them just screams endlessly (until Hollis grabs hold of him and smashes his faceplate).ĭuring the various conversations that take place over the radio, Hollis becomes jealous of Lespere, who has been talking about his three wives on as many planets, how he once gambled away twenty thousand dollars when he was drunk, etc.: The main character, Hollis, ends up drifting towards Earth, and re-entry. The men move in different directions, some towards the sun, others out to Pluto.
Kaleidoscope by Ray Bradbury ( Thrilling Wonder Stories, October 1949) begins with an explosion on a spaceship which spills its crew into space “like a dozen wriggling silverfish”.