Forgotten Ray Bradbury: "Jonah of the Jove Run", PLANET STORIES, Spring 1948

I'm cheating a little since "Jonah of the Jove Run" is a short story, not a book, but I wanted to write about something fairly obscure for Ray Bradbury Week, and as far as I can tell, this is one of the few Bradbury short stories that has never been reprinted since its appearance in the Spring 1948 issue of PLANET STORIES.

I'm not sure why it hasn't been reprinted. "Jonah of the Jove Run" is a pretty good story, certainly not up to the level of some of Bradbury's other work but well-written and very entertaining. It's about an old man named Nibley who has a unique, almost supernatural ability to calculate the orbits of objects in motion. That's a valuable ability to have for navigating in space, of course, but science has passed Nibley by and all rockets now have radar computators to handle such navigation. But then an accident happens and the fate of the entire Earth colony on Jupiter relies on getting a supply ship through the Asteroid Belt without its instruments, with only a dying old man to guide the way . . .

Bradbury really packs a lot into this story. There's the poignancy of science versus natural ability, the gritty, blue-collar setting of the supply ship, and some espionage involving the barely touched upon background of a Cold War-like rivalry between Earth and Mars. These days this plot would be enough for a novella, at the very least. The writing is good solid pulp for the most part, with occasional poetic flourishes that foreshadow the sort of thing Bradbury would be doing a few years later. Of course, none of the science is believable, but I've never been one to care about that. I like my rocket ships with fins and always have.

And since I had this issue of PLANET STORIES out anyway, I figured I might as well go ahead and read the rest of it for the Sunday Morning Bonus Pulp series, although it may take me a few weeks to get to it.

UPDATE: A friend of mine pointed out that "Jonah of the Jove Run" has indeed been reprinted, in an e-book collection available on Amazon called NINE RARETIES. I'm off to check it out now to see what else is in it.