The Dragon Who Ate His Tail

by Ray Bradbury

ONE OF MANY STORIES LEADING UP TO FAHRENHEIT 451

Genres: Science Fiction

71 pages, Paperback

First published January 4, 2007

About the author

Ray Douglas Bradbury was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.

Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).

The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".

Reviews

[Forked Radish]

Human vermin self-exterminate so God doesn’t have to.

[John Esse]

The first two stories that I had already read are classics, but the screenplay in the second half is definitely not to my taste. Very obtuse uninteresting

[Noah Soudrette]

This chapbook is mostly a series of three Bradbury short stories, all about time travel. In fact, each story is basically a retelling of the next, but each from a different perspective. In the first tale, we encounter a couple who go to live in the past due to their fear of a nuclear holocaust, this of course is revealed as folly. The second involves a couple who have illegally escaped into the future to avoid working on a bomb and causing a nuclear holocaust. The third is a bout a couple who retreat to the past to, you guessed it, avoid a nuclear holocaust. While these stories are a great insight into the creative process of a great writer like Bradbury, as entertainment, they are somewhat lacking.

[Michael Tildsley]

This was basically a collection the same "time-traveling couple" story of a couple escaping some desolate future, but told three or four times from different, distinct perspectives. There is something eerie about the way Bradbury is able to write basically the same story with slightly different tones for effect. It's really hard to explain this one, and I wonder how much input Bradbury had as to the connection between all of these pieces in one work. I've read a few of the short stories before in other collections, but I hadn't connected them in my mind in this way.

[Jess]

Not bad a bit weird. But I like this very short book.