When I was a kid, I lived in a small subdivision on the edge of a small town. The people who had planned out our area had counted on several dozen houses, and eventually they would be built, but throughout my youth there were only a few small homes, with gravel drives and little carports on the side, scattered over a space meant for many more. It left room in the lot next to our home for a mass of towering cane, tangled paw paws, and opportunistic cockle-burrs. In the next lot there was a foundation for a house that had been started before the money ran out. It quickly filled with water and became an impromptu breeding pond for frogs, toads, and salamanders. There were even a few bluegills cruising the shallows between the concrete block walls, refugees released after fishing trips to a nearby pond.
At one end of the would-be subdivision there was a wide field that was filled with broom sage and Indian hemp. And on one summer night in the 1960s, that was where the circus appeared.
As circuses go, it wasn't much. The master of ceremonies was also the tamer of the single lion. The woman who stood on the receiving end of the knife-throwing act, was back a few minutes later to swing from a trapeze. All in all, I don't think there were more than half a dozen performers, each of them playing several rolls as a small organ played accompaniment. One elephant. A couple of horses. There was one bear that never left its cage, but you had to hand it to the rest of the troop -- they were game. In and out of the single small tent they went through the night, with different hats, costumes, and acts. In retrospect I'm sure they all seemed a little ridiculous, but I loved it.
The next day, you could see the circus tent from my home, and the small group of performers sharing a meal at a long table. The next night they performed again. The day after that they were gone, leaving only a trampled place in the grass and the musty smell of animals. I watched for them the next summer. And for several summers after that, but they didn't come back.
So you can imagine my reaction when, on one of those warm summers sometime after the circus had come and gone, I reached into the shelves at the local library and pulled down Something Wicked This Way Comes by Ray Bradbury.
Sitting in my room, or against a tree by the lake where I fished almost every afternoon, I read the story of Jim Nightshade and of the arrival of Cooger & Dark's Pandemonium Shadow Show in his small Midwestern town. I can honestly say that I don't think any book before or since has gripped me more strongly, and frightened me more throughly. When Jim was hiding in the shelves of the library, secreted away from the sly Mr. Dark and the fierce Mr. Cooger, I held my breath with him. And when Jim is told that his mother has been placed on the terrible carousel -- where each turn adds a year to her age -- that his mother is at that moment being spun toward a premature death... Jim's helplessness and rage could not have been much greater than my own.
After reading that book, I wondered about my own little traveling circus. Had there been some darker purpose in their visit? Had the comical costume changes and the tattered tent masked something more powerful and infinitely more strange? After reading Bradbury's classic, I watched for the return of that circus with fear, but I watched for it. I longed for it to appear, to dazzle, to terrify, and to fill me with wonder.
That might give you some idea what it meant to me in 1997 when I was invited to be a guest at a convention where Ray Bradbury was to be the guest of honor, and what I felt when I opened the program book and saw this...
Just like my circus that was there and gone in a couple of days, for one weekend I was in the tall grass. I even sat next to Bradbury for an hour, signing books. I think I signed three and he must have signed three hundred. It didn't matter. Not that day.
Of course, by the time I actually appeared at that convention, I already knew that Del Rey wasn't going to buy the final book in my trilogy. The wonderful ad was also the only ad I was going to get. A couple of weeks later I'd have to drop my literary pretensions, put on a suit, and go back to the office I'd left five years earlier to see if they couldn't find a space for me. But that October I stood in the warm light, next to Ray Bradbury, and hell... what was I going to do for an encore anyway?
There are a few other books out there that capture that same kind of dusty summer-fading-into-autumn magic that Ray Bradbury has done so well for so long. I'm hoping that this summer, some kid out there is going to read these books and keep one eye on the horizon, watching for the approach of vehicles and the sound of calliopes.
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest
An amazing brew of horror, mad scientists, and steampunk, Boneshaker tells the story of an alternate 1860s where the Russians are intent on shattering the ice of Alaska to get at the mineral wealth below. To extract everything as quickly as possible, they've contracted invetor Leviticus Blue and his massive drill-engine. But a test run of Blue's device in Seattle goes... badly. Badly as in lots of people dead, and lots of people that won't stay dead. And that's just the set up for a novel that sends a woman named Briar and her son Ezekiel on a mad quest to save Leviticus, save Zeke's father, and discover what's really behind a plague of disease and zombifying gas. To do that, Zeke and Briar will need to cross over from the Outskirts into the zombie-infested ruins of Seattle to find their proof. 90% action and 90% nostaligia, you won't realize you've been reading 180 proof fiction until you're drunk on the story.
Dinosaur Summer by Greg Bear
Bear is usually known for his hard SF (though his fantasy novel The Infinity Concerto is absolutely excellent), but here he rides a line between sci fi, fantasy, and alternate history. In this novel the hidden prehistoric landscape of Arthur Conan Doyle's The Lost World was real, and for decades people have been going there and dragging back beasts to terrify and amuse the public. But by the time the novel opens it's 1947 and dinosaurs are, eh, boring. The last dinosaur circus can't make payroll and as it sells off its assets, it's not clear what will happen to the few living dinosaurs still in captivity. Fortunately the National Geographic steps in and funds a sort of reverse Challenger expedition -- to take the dinosaurs home to South America. Going along with them are a film crew that includes a young Ray Harryhausen (did I mention he was there that weekend when I sat next to Bradbury? He even signed a VHS tape of Jason and the Argonauts for me. Yeah, pretty decent weekend). Also in the crew is Peter, the son of the principal Nat Geo photographer. It's mostly through Peter's eyes that we get an affectionate view of both the men and the beasts on this journey. If Boneshaker moves at a breakneck pace, Dinosaur Summer is much more leisurely. It's an homage to Doyle, to Bradbury, to Harryhausen, and to the infinite length of those summer days when we had all the time in the world to gape at the wonders they showed us.
City by Clifford Simak
Here's nostalgia of a different sort -- a nostalgia for the future told from an even more remote future. Oh, and it's told by dogs. In a series of interconnected tales, we get vignettes of humanity's abandonment of the cities and adoption of a more pastoral existence. As these tales unfold, human society becomes more scattered and less connected. Though they are still capable of new scientific breakthroughs -- including giving speech to dogs and starting them on the way toward a society of their own -- humanity is increasingly isolated and in some ways, backwards. In many ways, City seems like a reversal of the trends we see around us -- increasing urbanization and an ever more interdependent society. It's easy to imagine that, writing in the 1950s, Simak missed these trends. But this is Simak's version of autumn for mankind; a rolling back of the tide. This is mankind going out not with a bang, but a literal whimper, as distant generation of pups are left to ask their parents "what is man?"