"I sing The Body Electric" is a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury.

The mists of decades since I first read this collection allowed me to re-read it with a feeling of newness that I usually don't experience with other short story collections. Part of this is due to the wonderful story telling style of Mr. Bradbury who writes in a field filled with one man. For those of you unfamiliar with the works of Mr. Bradbury, let me just say that he does not write science fiction or fantasy or faerie tale or normal fiction. Instead he blends across genre lines giving us stories about people and meaningful snippets of their lives. And the only frustrating thing is that when you try to actually describe an individual Ray Bradbury short story, you suddenly realize that there isn't much there to describe!

Take _The Inspired Chicken Motel_ about a very run down farm that has a couple of rooms it lets out as a motel, in this story to a family driving through the area in the 1930s. Although the father is out of work, the family is able to live on his savings and visit others for awhile. This trip might be their last and there is a hint of gloom around when they get to the motel. Luckily there is a chicken there that lays strange eggs and happens to lay one with a message obviously directed to the family: 'Rest in peace. Prosperity is Near'. Family drives off not wanting to believe but believing anyways... Yes there IS actually a story here! How Mr. Bradbury is able to cram multiple subtle inter-relationships between the family members, the farmer's wife and a chicken is impossible to write about. Yet such a simple story can be made compelling by Mr. Bradbury.

And, as this is a more or less theme based collection about bodies, each of the stories does feature a body or bodies unto which something strange is happening. In the title story _I Sing The Body Electric_ the body in question is that of the robotic grandmother that is acquired to take care of a family after the untimely death of their mother. A simple story about the wounds left by loss and how a magical robot can fulfill the needs of nearly all the family members as they cope with their loss and their need for completion.

Or the body can be an entire city as in _The Lost City of Mars_ in which a group of rich Earth folk search out for that lost city. The city itself is hidden from all in a huge mountain and the city contains all sorts of devices to fulfill the wishes of everyone. And that is the reason the Martians fled it many thousands of years ago: the wishes and dreams of people are enough to kill them if let loose. And so it is that these modern travelers find delight and ultimate horror in a city long dead.

Thus the bodies we get to examine vary from a child who's birth was so hard it got squeezed into another dimension and looks human THERE but not to us in our limited dimensional scope all the way to the body of the dead island of Great Britain with its final King coming to stay with it in their mutual twilight. And almost all of these stories are under 20 pages long and most under 10! Eighteen stories all told, and glimpses of people and worlds near and far to us, and each and every one of them recognizable and fully drawn in so short a span.

About the only story that didn't work for me is _The Haunting of the New_ which tells of one woman who has rebuilt her mansion down to the finest detail. She claims that the old place went up with too much distilled debauchery over the years and now the new house will have none of that! One of the very few stories that Mr. Bradbury has ever written that didn't really click with me. That said it is only one out of eighteen, so can be passed on rather quickly to get to something better...

As Mr. Bradbury writes in the field of Ray Bradbury stories, about the only other books I can recommend are those from Ray Bradbury! "The Vintage Bradbury" is, for my money, the best of what Ray Bradbury has written and should be a 'must have' for anyone interested in his works. One of his longer works is "Death is a Lonely Business" about a young writer in Venice, California in the 1940's and the mysterious deaths of anyone who seems to be associated with him.

Recommended: Yes