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Originally Posted by CRussel
But that would have been a completely different book. Not at all what Bradbury was trying to do, IMO. That's like thinking Catcher in the Rye should be told from the perspective of someone other that Holden Caufield.
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Seems to me what he was trying to do was cobble together a bunch of short stories that differed widely in tone. I think the book would have been more cohesive with an older version of Douglas telling the stories, as a framing device. I could imagine a father, say, telling these stories to his sons around a campfire, with both the father and the sons commenting on them.
I don't think
Catcher in the Rye is at all analogous. I was thinking of books like
Mama's Bank Account and
Cheaper by the Dozen, which are episodic but still hang together.
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While I'd say that the Happiness Machine is probably my least favourite part of the book, I don't dislike it, and it's not at all sentimental, but an important commentary on the modern attitude that everything can be fixed with technology, something that Bradbury was fairly passionate about. He comes back around to that theme again with the demise of the trolleys because they're too slow compared to buses.
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It didn't feel like it belonged--it's fantasy, and it's jarring here. The story is rather obvious and not too original or remarkable, but fine in an anthology or a magazine. Here, though, it (and the ladies' witchcraft story) didn't fit.