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.

Forgotten Short Stories: Main Currents of American Thought - Irwin Shaw

I believe I’ve mentioned here before that Irwin Shaw’s “Main Currents of American Thought” is my favorite short story. I’ll get to the reasons for that in a minute. I think it qualifies as a forgotten short story because, like a lot of other former bestsellers, pretty much all of Shaw’s work seems to be forgotten today. A few of his novels may still be in print, and I’m sure some people remember the Seventies TV mini-series “Rich Man, Poor Man”, based on Shaw’s excellent novel of the same name. But check your local used book store, and you probably won’t find many – or any – of his books. Which is a shame, because he was as good as anybody at writing about America during the middle of the Twentieth Century, from the Thirties to the Sixties.

“Main Currents of American Thought” was first published in the August 5, 1939 issue of THE NEW YORKER and later reprinted in several places, including the massive collection of Shaw’s short stories, FIVE DECADES. Because of its subject matter, I’m admittedly biased when I say it’s my favorite short story. I think it’s the best story about being a freelance writer that I’ve ever read. The protagonist, a young man named Andrew, writes scripts for a couple of daily radio dramas, and in a few thousand words, Shaw perfectly captures what it’s like to deal with all the pressures of trying to write for a living. Some of the lines, which I can’t quote without ruining their impact, are just devastating. And there are other little details, like figuring expenses in terms of how much writing you’ll have to do in order to pay for them, that are utterly true. I don’t know how many times I’ve said things like, “We can afford that. It’s only half a Longarm.” There’s a lot packed into this story, and it’s dated a little, but its core is still true. And if you’re a writer, it’ll break your heart.

Shaw’s best-known short stories are “The Eighty Yard Run” and “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses”, and both of those are fine stories. In fact, everything I’ve read by him has been very good to excellent. FIVE DECADES is a great collection, and I recommend it highly. But “Main Currents of American Thought” is a story I reread at least once a year (I picked it up to glance at it before writing this post and wound up rereading the whole thing), and it’s the only story of which that’s true.