Creator / Ray Bradbury

"Don't think. Thinking is the enemy of creativity. It's self-conscious, and anything self-conscious is lousy. You can't try to do things. You simply must do things."

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was a highly acclaimed American author of Mystery, Horror, Speculative, and Literary Fiction. He was also known for his screenplays and poetry, and for organizing and editing a number of anthologies in the Science Fiction genre.

His best-known novel is probably the dystopian, Pre-Cyberpunk novel Fahrenheit 451. His most well known short story is probably "A Sound of Thunder", which gave the world the Butterfly of Doom. He Also Did the story for a Disney Theme Park ride at Epcot.

A number of his novels and short stories have been adapted to film and TV series. Back in the 1950s, he discovered that two of his stories had been adapted by EC Comics without permission. He kept his sense of humor about this, writing a note to the publisher praising the adaptations, while remarking that he had "inadvertently" not yet received the royalties. The publisher was eventually able to work something out with the author well enough to be able to print several fine authorized adaptations of his work.

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Works by Ray Bradbury include:

Novels

• The Martian Chronicles
• Fahrenheit 451
• Dandelion Wine
• Something Wicked This Way Comes
• The Halloween Tree
• Death Is a Lonely Business
• A Graveyard for Lunatics
• Green Shadows, White Whale
• From the Dust Returned
• Let's All Kill Constance
• Farewell Summer

Story collections

• Dark Carnival
• The Illustrated Man
  • "The Veldt"
• The Golden Apples of the Sun
  • "The Fog Horn"
  • "A Sound of Thunder"
  • "There Will Come Soft Rains"
• The October Country
• A Medicine for Melancholy
  • "All Summer in a Day"
• The Small Assassin
• R Is for Rocket
• The Machineries of Joy
• S Is for Space
  • "Icarus Montgolfier Wright"
• I Sing the Body Electric!
• Long After Midnight
• Dinosaur Tales
• A Memory of Murder
• The Toynbee Convector
• Quicker Than the Eye
• Driving Blind
• One More for the Road
• Summer Morning, Summer Night
• A Pleasure to Burn

Essay collections

• Zen in the Art of Writing

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Works that Ray Bradbury has contributed to:

• The Halloween Tree (adaptation of his novel)
• It Came from Outer Space (screenplay)
• The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms (based on "The Fog Horn")
• Howl from Beyond the Fog (also based on "The Fog Horn")
• The Twilight Zone (1959) episode "I Sing the Body Electric" (screenplay)
• The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (original story and screenplay)
• Again, Dangerous Visions (poem "Christ, Old Student in a New School")
• Spaceship Earth (storyline and original script)
• Curiosity Shop episode Where Do You Go to Get Out of a Scare? (episode script, The Groon poem)

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Works by Ray Bradbury provide examples of:

• Absent Aliens: In "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed", there are Martian cities and villas, but the human protagonists don't know what happened to the Martians themselves. In a twist, living long enough on Mars turns them into Martians, altering their physical forms and wiping away all memory that they were ever human.
• Accidental Art:
  • In "The Year the Glop-Monster Won the Golden Lion at Cannes", a B-Movie is transformed into an acclaimed work of art when the projectionist gets drunk and shows the reels in the wrong order (and some of them upside-down and/or backwards).
  • "The Dragon Danced at Midnight"
• Advert-Overloaded Future: "The Murderer" features a man futilely destroying the myriad loudspeakers, radios, TVs, etc., which endlessly broadcast commercials at the populace.
• Alien Invasion:
  • "Zero Hour"
  • "The Concrete Mixer"
• Ambiguous Innocence: Bradbury explored the idea of an entire species of innocents, in "The Fire Balloons". It is about a human missionary who wants to save the Martians' souls. He eventually discovers that their souls do not need saving. This is not presented as making the Martians bad so much as making humanity tragic because we are comparatively destined to sinfulness.
• Ambiguously Human: M.Munigant in "Skeleton" appears completely human but the vacuum tongue and teeth strong enough to pierce bones gives you the impression that he isn't exactly normal.
• Amusement Park of Doom : "The Black Ferris"
• And I Must Scream: The protagonist of "Fever Dream" loses control of his own body.
• Animated Tattoo: "The Illustrated Man" used this as a framing device.
• Apocalyptic Log: "The Watchers" is a typewritten narrative of how the narrator and a psychologist try to cure a friend of his phobia of animals, only to find out the real danger — bacteria. The story ends with a line of gibberish as the narrator's body finally succumbs to his attackers and falls on the keyboard.
• Asshole Victim: Many characters in his stories deserve their (usually very painful) deaths.
• The Assimilator: The crowd of the short story of the same name have been assimilating accident victims into their masses for DECADES continuing with the protagonist.
• Attack of the Killer Whatever: "The Watchers" and "Fever Dream" feature evil bacteria.
• Author Avatar:
  • Almost any character who self-identifies as "a writer" tends to have the same same ideals and romantic, lyrical flair as Bradbury.
  • The unnamed writer narrator of the mystery novels Death is a Lonely Business, A Graveyard for Lunatics, and Let's All Kill Constance is almost certainly him. He's not the driving force behind the action, and is really just there to get it all down on paper.
  • The protagonist of "Banshee" might be the most explicit example, as the story is based on Bradbury's relationship with filmmaker John Huston.
• Back-Alley Doctor: In addition to being a Deadly Doctor, M.Munigant in "Skeleton" has no actual medical credentials.
• Benevolent A.I.: "I Sing the Body Electric." "Grandmother" is her name, title, directive, and job description, and she hasn't got a mean circuit in her chassis.
• Benevolent Alien Invasion: Inverted in "Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed". A group of humans flee war-torn Earth to colonize a mysteriously terraformed and abandoned Mars. After a while the idyllic climate of the planet changes the way they act and think to such an extent they forget they knew anything else. Effectively, the planet benevolently invades them.
• Big Brother Is Watching: "The Cricket on the Hearth"
• Bittersweet Ending: In "The Finnegan" the narrator's friend dies, but it seems he succeeded in destroying the titular monstrous spider at the same time.
• Blood Is Squicker in Water: "The Aqueduct"
• Body Horror: "Fever Dream" is the story of a little boy who discovers that every cell in his body is slowly being replaced by... something, but nobody believes him because they think he's just delirious with sickness. The story ends with the boy having been completely replaced by the virus, with the parents none the wiser, and he's now a vector for the disease.
• Body in a Breadbox: For someone who lives in the Deep South the protagonist of "The Jar" comes up with a pretty inventive way of disposing of evidence, he removes all the features that could be used to identify his wife and places them inside the jar he bought from a carnival
• Body Surf: "The One Who Waits".
• Book Burning:
  • "The Library"
  • "The Exiles"
  • "Bright Phoenix"
  • "Pillar of Fire"
  • "The Fireman" and "Long After Midnight", which are both early versions of Fahrenheit 451.
• Broken Angel: "Uncle Einar Has Big Green Wings". Einar Elliott normally flies at night so he won't attract attention, but after running into electrical wires, his night vision/radar is damaged, perhaps permanently. His kids come up with an ingenious solution.
• Buried Alive:
  • "The Screaming Woman".
  • Discussed in "Free Dirt".
  • "Let's Play Poison" has the protagonist be buried unconscious under a hole that is swiftly filled with dirt. The spot is eventually used to place a new step on the sidewalk
  • "The Coffin" has a variation where the protagonist is embalmed alive.
• Bury Me Not on the Lone Prairie: In "The Next in Line", Marie worries that she's going to die before she and her husband are able to leave the town and begs him not to bury her in the nearby cemetery. He brushes off her fears and (given that he's alone when he leaves town) her last request apparently goes unfulfilled.
• Canine Companion: "The Emissary" has a protagonist with a pet dog. It ends very badly for the boy.
• Cassandra Truth: There are many examples in Bradbury's stories of truth going unbelieved.
  • In "The Next in Line", the heroine suspects she's going to die and begs her husband not to bury her in the cavern that frightened her so much. He brushes her off as though she's being hysterical, but the ending of the story indicates she did indeed die that night.
  • In "Fever Dream", the boy alleges he's being replaced by the bacteria in his body. The doctor and his parents brush it off as a fever-induced delusion.
  • The protagonist of "The Screaming Woman" hears a seemingly invisible woman calling for help, and realizes that she's been buried alive by her husband. No one believes him until the very end of the story, when he recites the lyrics from a song that his father, the woman's ex-boyfriend, had taught her years before.
  • In "Zero Hour", a daughter tells her mother about the upcoming alien invasion and all the promises the Martians made the children in exchange for help. The mother brushes it off as a new game until it's too late.
• Christmas Creep: In "The Exiles", Christmas is banned. A character remarks that it is "A regrettable situation...for the Yuletide merchants who, towards the last there, as I recall, were beginning to put up holly and sing Noel the day before Halloween. With any luck at all this year they might have started on Labor Day!"
• Chubby Chaser: "The Illustrated Woman" features a man named Willy Fleet who when he first encountered his plus-sized wife rhapsodized that "Michaelangelo would have loved you. Titian would have loved you. Da Vinci would have loved you. They knew what they were doing in those days. Size. Size is everything."
• Color Me Black:
  • "The Handler" is about a disgruntled undertaker, who defiles all the bodies sent to him with lessons they should have learned in life. In particular, a racist bigot is embalmed with ink, turning his skin 'black as night'.
  • Achieved in "Chrysalis" with a sun tan.
  • Happens to the protagonist in "The Transformation"
• The Con: Craig Bennett Stiles pulls one on the human race in "The Toynbee Convector" in order to bring about a new Golden Age. At the end of the 20th Century, Stiles (an Expy of Bill Gates) announced that he had successfully built the first functioning time machine. Bad news, it blew up when he finished his trip into the future. Good news, he brought back artifacts from the late 21st Century, proving that over the next hundred years, humanity would end war, poverty, disease and prejudice and essentially create a true Utopia. One hundred years later, the world is indeed the perfect place he had foreseen. Before dying at the age of 130 years, Stiles told the truth to a reporter; he made up the time machine and the artifacts, it was all smoke and mirrors. He had seen a world in despair, and gave the world a new vision to strive for. Stiles' utopia was based on a lie, but in the end it became the truth.
• Confessional: "Bless Me Father, For I Have Sinned..." revolves around a priest being visited in the confessional by a mysterious stranger.
• Cool Uncle: Uncle Einar in Homecoming is the kindest member of a family of monsters to young Timothy (besides his mother and sister Cecy), and cautions him to treasure his mortality. He's also the only family member Timmy is utterly overjoyed in seeing.
• Cosy Catastrophe: "The Highway" takes place in a Mexican village after a nuclear war has destroyed the outside world. Despite the holocaust and the ensuing flood of refugees, the residents of the village continue to live their lives as if nothing happened.
• Creepy Child:
  • "The Small Assassin".
  • "Zero Hour".
  • "Let's Play "Poison".
  • Douglas from "The Man Upstairs" could count as a benevolent version. He's no more evil than any other little boy his age but he is completely unaffected by things that disturb adults such as discovering a dead body and dissecting and killing a vampire-type monster.
• Cruel and Unusual Death: "Skeleton". The protagonist has his skeleton willingly sucked out of his body which causes him to degenerate into a mass of flesh. Averted in that, based on the last line of the story, they survived this, leading to this example possibly being A Fate Worse Than Death instead.
• Cruel Mercy: In "The Utterly Perfect Murder", Douglas, a successful classical pianist in his 60s, decides to seek out and shoot Ralph, a bully who tormented him as a child. When Douglas discovers that Ralph is now a frail, lonely old man living in poverty, he decides that the best revenge is to just turn his back on Ralph and let him live out the rest of his useless and pathetic life.
• Cruel Twist Ending: "The Whole Town's Sleeping" ends with Lavinia Nebbs making it back to her house and locking herself in, only to discover that a man (presumably the Lonely One killer) is in the house with her.
• Cutting the Electronic Leash: In "The Murderer" a man gets fed up with his Advert-Overloaded Future filled with wristwatch phones, portable radios, and talking appliances. He starts by crushing his wristwatch phone and happily sharing a bowl of ice cream with his car radio.
• Darker and Edgier: The people who have only read Ray's science fiction will be surprised when they read his two short story collections The October Country and ESPECIALLY Dark Carnival, which, among other things, feature:
  • A good chunk of the protagonists being buried alive.
  • Plenty of gruesome deaths and adult fears.
  • And lots of Zombies!
• Dark Is Evil: "The Thing at the Top of the Stairs" has the titular creature, which lives in darkness.
• Darkness Equals Death: "The Thing at the Top of the Stairs"
• Death Seeker: Alfred Beck in the "Blue Bottle"
• Death Takes a Holiday:
  • "The Scythe" features a man who becomes the Grim Reaper. When he learns what he's been doing he refuses to work, only to find that if he doesn't take the souls of people who are supposed to die they end up in an unconscious limbo state between life and death.
  • "Mr. Pale" is one of very few stories that treat everyone being unable to die as a good thing.
• Defiant Strip: In "Sun and Shadow", a man named Ricardo stops a photographer from using the poor neighborhood he lives in as a prop for his photoshoot by dropping his pants every time the man tries to take a photo.
• Demonic Dummy: "And So Died Riabouchinska"
• Depraved Dwarf:
  • In "Skeleton", M. Munigant is an extremely small gentleman who happens to have a taste for human bones.
  • Averted in "The Dwarf". The eponymous character is a peaceful guy, who isn't doing anything more in the hall of mirrors than seeing himself as a man of normal height. The owner of the hall of mirrors does more harm to him than vice versa.
• Downer Ending: Several of Bradbury's stories end unhappily.
  • "Zero Hour": The parents are found by their daughter, who is leading the Martian invaders to them because she thinks life will be a lot more fun when she doesn't have adults spoiling it.
  • "The Illustrated Man": The protagonist ends up killing his wife after she tells him she's getting a divorce and taunts him unceasingly about how repulsive he is, and he is then hunted down by his fellow circus folk.
  • "The Veldt": The Hadley parents are killed by the holographic lions at the behest of Peter and Wendy, who don't want to have the nursery shut off and go live somewhere else.
  • "Skeleton": M. Munigant sucks out the narrator's skeleton, leaving him a helpless pile of flesh, just before his wife comes home to discover him.
• Dramatic Space Drifting:
  • "Kaleidoscope". Most of them are alive (for now), and able to talk to each other by radio till they get out of range.
  • "No Particular Night or Morning" ends with an insane astronaut jettisoning himself out into space, though unlike most examples he actually finds such a fate rather comforting.
• Droste Image: "The Illustrated Man" ends with the circus folk discovering that the tattoo on the man's back shows them standing over him, looking at a tattoo which shows the same thing, ad infinitum.
• Eat Me: The narrator's detective friend in "The Finnegan" takes poison and gets the titular monster to grab him so it will die after feeding on him. (He was terminally ill.)
• Empathic Environment: "Here There Be Tygers".
• The End of the World as We Know It:
  • "Bonfire".
  • Subverted in "The End of the Beginning". The narrator describes people all over the world staring at the sky waiting for the world to end because they know the exact date, time and place that it will begin. Eventually a searing white light appears in the sky and ends the world. The twist is... the bright light is a spaceship that has visited the first intelligent life humanity discovered. Naturally this marks the "end" of the world and the "beginning" of the universe.
  • "Embroidery"
  • The Atomic Wars mentioned in the beginning of "Night Call Collect".
• Enfant Terrible:
  • "The Small Assassin" (maybe).
  • In "Zero Hour", every child in the world is convinced by an alien race to set things up to let them invade Earth and kill all of the adults. And they agree because they are promised later bedtimes, no baths, and all the TV they want. And it ends with the main character's daughter leading a group of aliens straight to her parents, while calling to them as she searches the house.
  • In "The Veldt", two children fantasize about their parents being gruesomely devoured by lions so often that their automated house makes it happen
• Evil Hand: In "Fever Dream" the protagonist loses control of one of his hands which then tries to attack him.
• Evil Is Not Well-Lit: "The Thing At the Top of The Stairs" which makes sense since the creature is banished by light.
• Evil Phone: "Night Call, Collect".
• Faking the Dead: Dudley Stone in "The Wonderful Death of Dudley Stone" fakes his death to go into retirement.
• Fantastic Racism:
  • In "The Reincarnate" humans are prejudiced towards the zombies and vice versa.
  • In "A Matter of Taste" the humans distrust the friendly Giant Spider aliens because of their appearances.
  • In "The Other Foot", Mars has been colonized by black Americans escaping racism. The rumored arrival of a white man kicks off some nasty undercurrents of retributive racism and prejudice.
• Fauxtastic Voyage: "The Rocket".
• Fever Dream Episode: "Fever Dream"
• Fingerprinting Air: The murderer protagonist in "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" took this trope too much to heart: the police catch him while he's compulsively scrubbing the entire house in fear of what he may or may not have touched.
• First Time in the Sun: Most of the characters in "All Summer in a Day". They're children who live on a perpetually wet, cloudy Venus where the sun only comes out for one hour every seven years.
• Fisher Kingdom: Mars in "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed." The human colonists gradually change into Martians and forget they were ever human.
• Food Pills: Food-capsules (AKA concen-tabs) in the short story "R is for Rocket".
• Fountain of Youth : "The Black Ferris" has the titular Ferris Wheel which can reverse or increase aging depending on what direction it's going.
• Framing Device: His short story anthologies are tenuously linked with ones. In The Illustrated Man, all the stories are animated tattoos on a carnival sideshow's back and The Martian Chronicles is supposed to be a chronological history of Earth's trips to Mars.
• Future Me Scares Me : "A Touch of Petulance"
• Genius Loci:
  • The city in "The Lost City of Mars". After being rediscovered by Earthlings, it tries to trap them inside so that it has someone to entertain.
  • "Here There be Tygers" has an entire sentient planet. The planet is very friendly and wants to do anything to please the astronauts who landed there, from creating fish that cook themselves to perfect weather up to attractive female companions. When several of the astronauts leave, one decides to stay behind. Despite the planet appearing unfriendly with volcanoes appearing on it, the astronauts know the one who remained will be spoiled rotten by the planet. The astronauts decide to list the planet as unfriendly since it would be to those who would exploit it (rather than appreciate its gifts).
  • "The Wind" is a horror story about sentient wind.
  • "The City" involves a sentient alien city ambushing human explorers and changing them into cyborgs, so they'll launch a bioweapon attack on Earth and avenge its creators' defeat in an ancient war with humanity's forgotten ancestors. And the story is pretty much told from the POV of the city itself.
• The Ghost: The title character of "The Man" is frequently referred to but is never seen.
• Giant Spider: The creature responsible for the deaths of various children in "The Finnegan" is one of these. "A Matter of Taste" has an entire alien race of giant spiders.
• Glasgow Grin: "The Smiling People" combines this with a slit throat.
• Glamour Failure: In "The Man Upstairs", Douglas looks at the titular lodger through a stained glass window (and later, pieces of the same) and sees that he has no human organs.
• A God Am I:
  • In "The Miracles of Jamie" a young boy convinces himself that he is Jesus Christ. He loses this belief after his terminally ill mother dies despite his efforts and he can't resurrect her.
  • In "Jack In The Box" a boy is raised in a secluded house to eventually become god, like his father before him.
• Gods Need Prayer Badly: The continued existence of their books is the only thing keeping the authors in "The Exiles" alive.
• Go Mad from the Isolation: Emil Barton in "Night Call Collect" has spent 60 years all by himself on Mars, and has understandably grown rather unhinged. When he was younger, he even rigged up automatic systems in the empty martian cities to make it seem like there were other people around, but he eventually stopped. And instead started recording phone calls from himself to call up his older self decades in the future.
• Good Stepmother: In "I Sing the Body Electric", a robot nanny is brought in as a therapist to help children complete the grieving process for their dead mother.
• Grand Inquisitor Scene: In "The Flying Machine", a man in ancient China invents a flying machine, and the Emperor informs him that his machine must burn and he must die lest enemies use the contraption to attack the Empire.
• Grand Theft Me: Cecy Elliot can jump into the bodies of anyone without them ever knowing.
• Hall of Mirrors: "The Dwarf"
• Halloween Episode:
  • In "The October Game", a spooky game at a Halloween party takes a genuinely disturbing turn.
  • The Halloween Tree takes a group of boys through the history of Halloween as they try to save their missing friend.
• Heartbreak and Ice Cream: The protagonist of "The Illustrated Man" eats and drinks a lot (including sweet things like soda) to deal with the stress of his unhappy marriage. It goes on so long he becomes fat and loses his job as a roustabout, forcing him to get tattooed to continue to work for the circus.
• Heat Wave:
  • "Touched with Fire" has its main characters theorizing about heat and its effects on people: one character asserts that the most murderous temperature is 98 degrees Fahrenheit (cooler than that you can cope with; hotter than that and you don't want to expend energy in violent behavior).
  • "The Burning Man" takes place on an extraordinarily hot day.
• Historical Domain Character:
  • Ambrose Bierce, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood, and William Shakespeare are all protagonists of "The Exiles".
  • Dickens appears again in "Any Friend of Nicholas Nickleby's is a Friend of Mine".
  • Thomas Wolfe is one of the main characters of "Forever and the Earth".
  • A robot version of George Bernard Shaw appears in "G.B.S. Mark- V".
• Hooks and Crooks: The elderly woman in "Touched with Fire" is implied to be killed with a meat hook.
• Hot Witch: Cecy Elliot.
• Humans Are Bastards: Several. This is not how Bradbury portrays humans or thinks of humans but several characters could qualify for this.
• I Choose to Stay: "Here There Be Tygers" involves a benevolent sentient planet and a team of prospectors encharmed by it. They all consider staying and one of them does.
• I Just Want to Have Friends: The sea monster in The Fog Horn has been lonely for millions of years and believing the titular fog horn is one of its own kind, desperately wishes to befriend it.
• Ironic Echo: In "The Emissary", the narrator marks Miss Haight's first visit by saying Martin had company. At the end of the story, the phrase appears again, but more ominously because Miss Haight has died in the meantime.
• It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Let's All Kill Constance, with Lampshade Hanging.
• Just Before the End: "The Last Circus", if the brief discussion about nuclear weapons strong enough to incinerate Chicago in a single blast is any indication.
  • "The Last Night of the World"
• Kids Are Cruel:
  • "All Summer in a Day". The kids make fun of Margot for trying to tell them what the sun looks like, and trap her in the closet when the rain stops, causing her to miss the opportunity to go out and see the sun.
  • "The Playground" features, well, a playground full of children who enjoy fighting, attacking and otherwise tormenting each other. It's so bad that the protagonist is willing to trade places with his young son to spare him having to live through it.
• Kill and Replace:
  • "The City": The astronauts are murdered by the city and turned into robots as part of the city's plan for revenge.
  • "Marionettes, Inc": A man buys a robot double to please his wife so he has more time to have fun. Eventually when he tries to put the robot back in the box after realizing the robot has fallen in love with his wife, the robot puts him in the box where he presumably dies.
  • "Usher II": The protagonist keeps his "guests" from realizing that they're being killed one by one by having them impersonated by robots and telling the remaining "guests" that the dead ones are actually robots.
• Last of His Kind: While not outright stated, it's heavily implied for Emil Barton in "Night Call Collect", a Martian colonist who was left behind when all the other settlers returned to Earth on the eve of the Atomic War. Considering it's been 60 years, with no one from Earth returning to Mars, total extinction of the human race is a strong possibility.
• Left Field Description: In The Fight of the Good Ship Clarissa, there's this description "They had been throwing the same party so long the party looked like a worn out first edition of a trapeze artist."
• Lensman Arms Race: "Golden Kite, Silver Wind" describes an arms race of superstition.
• Life Embellished: Many of Bradbury's stories are quasi-autobiographical tales, re-imagined with elements of the fantastic and strange.
• Lighthouse Point: "The Fog Horn" is set in a lighthouse on an isolated stretch of coast.
• Literary Allusion Title: Several.
• The Little Shop That Wasn't There Yesterday: Appears in "Doodad", in which a man on the run from The Mafia or some equivalent helps a man who turns out to be a shopkeeper of such a shop: it sells "gadgets, gimmicks, doodads, doohingeys" and so on, which are composite imaginary tools capable of doing anything that any item ever described by that name can do.
• Madness Mantra: "The Long Rain".
• Madness Montage: "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl".
• Magic Realism: Many of his short stories fall into this, usually combined with a hefty dose of nostalgia.
• Missing Child: "The Night" centers around the disappearance of a child.
• Moral Guardians: The villains of a great many of his stories, particularly his dystopian fiction.
• Multipurpose Tongue: M. Munigant from "Skeleton" use his tongue as some kind of organic vacuum.
• Mummy: One is constructed in "Colonel Stonesteel's Genuine Homemade Egyptian Mummy.".
• My Future Self and Me : "A Touch of Petulance"
• Names to Run Away from Really Fast:
  • Invoked in "The Small Assassin"; David plans to give his son the name "Lucifer" after coming to believe his late wife's fear that the child had tried to kill her was right.
  • A somewhat meta example: If a Bradbury story features the word "October", something horrible is likely to ensue.
• Native American Casino: The setting of "Hail to the Chief"
• Never Mess with Granny: The protagonist of "There Was an Old Woman" who not only defies death for years but also manages to cheat death after she has died BY GOING TO THE MORGUE AS A GHOST AND FORCING THE ATTENDENTS TO GIVE HER BODY BACK!
• Ninja Pirate Zombie Robot: "2116", a Bradbury-penned Christmas musical with robots.
• No Communities Were Harmed: Green Town, Illinois, which features in several Bradbury works, is basically a fictionalized version of the author’s real-life hometown of Waukegan.
• Nothing Is Scarier: The main source of generating fear in "The Trapdoor" and "The Thing at the Top of the Stairs".
• Not Using the "Z" Word: The zombies in "The Reincarnate" are only referred to as "walkers".
• Our Banshees Are Louder: "Banshee"
• Our Genies Are Different: "The Blue Bottle" has the titular bottle which grants whoever holds it anything they want.
• Our Ghosts Are Different: "On the Orient, North", "Another Fine Mess", "Hello, I Must Be Going"
• Our Vampires Are Different:
  • "The Man Upstairs" has a very different example; in addition to apparently having no internal organs, Mr. Koberman can only be identified as a vampire by looking at him through stained glass, which lets you see his aforementioned lack of organs. The mere presence of silver also causes him severe physical discomfort.
  • Several members of the Elliott family display vampire-like characteristics, such as the ability to shapeshift and the inability to be seen in mirrors. They habitually drink blood and sleep in boxes during the day, but apparently that's all voluntary. Timothy and a few other members, like Uncle Einar, get by quite well without drinking blood, and sunlight doesn't seem to hurt any of the family. Zig-Zagged, to say the least.
• Our Zombies Are Different:
  • "Interim"
  • "The Emissary": Not much is actually said about her condition (other than she's slower and clumsier), but Dog brings Mrs. Haight back to visit Martin after her death in an accident.
  • "The Handler"
  • The zombies in "Pillar of Fire" can only be resurrected if they actually believe in an afterlife.
  • In "The Reincarnate" zombies are apparently a everyday fact of life and they behave the same as normal humans save for their difficulty with movement and weakened senses.
• Perpetual Storm:
  • "The Long Rain": a rocket crashes on Venus, where it rains constantly. The crew must locate a Sun Dome in which they can find shelter, or die.
    It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping in the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
  • "All Summer in a Day". The planet Venus has constant rain, except for a 1 hour period each seven years.
• Persecution Flip: In "The Other Foot", the population of Mars is entirely black. Because the planet was colonized within recent memory, adults have memories of segregation and lynchings, and when the news arrives that a rocket manned by whites is entering the atmosphere, a furious mob gathers, planning to institute Jim Crow laws in reverse. They are ultimately deterred when it's revealed that Earth has been bombed out after a nuclear war, and the story ends with the survivors settling on Mars and the hope of a new start for humanity.
• Possessive Paradise: Here There Be Tygers, the paradise planet seems to be this way. Once almost all the astronauts leave, since one was killed eaten by a tiger since he was trying to drill into the planet they see the beautiful planet now covered with nasty storms, volcanic eruptions, lightning storms and the likes. The twist is one astronaut stayed behind; the nastiness is an illusion, as the one who stays will be spoiled rotten by the planet.
• Protect This House: Averted in "The Island" where the family could fight off the person invading their home, but they are too scared to even try and end up with all but one of them dead.
• Public Domain Character:
  • Dorian Gray in "Dorian in Excelsus".
  • The three witches from Macbeth appear in the beginning of "The Exiles".
  • The witches appear again in "The Concrete Mixer".
• Purple Prose: Bradbury is prone to this in his writing. He's pretty good at it, though.
• Reality Warper: The various famous authors in "The Exiles".
• Recycled In SPACE: Leviathan '99 is literally Moby-Dick in a futuristic setting, but with a comet replacing a whale and the ethnic stereotypes replaced with aliens.
• Refugee from TV Land: The titular character from "Ma Perkins Comes to Stay".
• Revenge: The only reason that "The City" was built and has maintained itself for thousands of years. When that revenge is achieved, the City allows itself to finally die.
• Riddle for the Ages: "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" never does explain what happened to the native Martians — only that they disappeared long before humans arrived on the planet.
• Ring-Ring-CRUNCH!: "The Murderer".
• Safe Zone Hope Spot: The first Sun Dome the team encounters in "The Long Rain".
• Science Destroys Magic: "On the Orient, North" and others.
• Science Is Bad: "The Murderer" and others.
• Science Marches On:
  • There's several pieces he's written that describe one-piece rockets being used for interplanetary and interstellar travel, as opposed to the multi-stage rockets that have actually been used.
  • Several stories, including "All Summer in a Day" and "The Long Rain", depict humans living on a Venus that is much like Earth except for the incessant rain, having been written when little was known about Venus except that it was a similar size to Earth and completely covered by clouds. It's since been discovered that Venus's cloud cover is not composed of water but sulfur dioxide, and furthermore that due to the resulting greenhouse effect Venus has the highest surface temperatures of any planet in the solar system — anybody who tried to set foot on Venus would be incinerated in moments, long before they had time to get depressed by the precipitation. (This makes "The Long Rain", in which a group of astronauts stranded out in the endless downpour long for the warmth of one of many "Sun-Domes" that provide shelter and warmth, particularly amusing in hindsight.)
• Sea Monster: The unseen creature in "The Fog Horn" is a massive behemoth from the depths of the ocean, millions of years old.
• Send in the Search Team: Several.
• Sense Freak: In "The Fox and the Forest", people from 2155 have been embroiled in a war and deprived of creature comforts for a long time. One of the giveaways as to a time traveler is how many things like food and cigars they buy.
• Serial Killer: The Lonely One in "The Whole Town's Sleeping" has strangled many old maids in the town.
• Shakespeare in Fiction: William happens to be one of the protagonists of "The Exiles".
• Shell-Shocked Veteran: The old man in "Lafayette Farewell", a fighter pilot for Nazi Germany.
• Silver Has Mystic Powers: Douglas in "The Man Upstairs" hears the adults discussing this around the dinner table. Meanwhile Mr Kooberman eats with a wooden knife and fork and carries only copper pennies. Douglas kills him by stitching six dollars and seventy cents worth of silver dimes inside his chest.
• Skeletal Musician: Inverted in "Skeleton"; aside from eating them M. Munigant likes to use bones to make instruments.
• Sliding Scale of Idealism vs. Cynicism: Works can go anywhere on the scale. Fahrenheit 451 could be more cynical considering its a dystopian novel, but The Halloween Tree is clearly more idealistic.
• Spiked Blood: In "The Finnegan", the narrator's friend, knowing he's dying, takes poison and baits the Giant Spider plaguing the town into feeding on him. It seemingly kills it, given that the attacks stop afterwards.
• Spontaneous Crowd Formation: "The Crowd".
• Stock Ness Monster: The creature in "The Fog Horn" resembles a plesiosaur, similar to Nessie and other aquatic cryptids. Unlike a plesiosaur, however, it can also walk on land.
• Storyboard Body: In the short story "The Illustrated Man", the protagonist gets many tattooes on his body, done by a mysterious old lady. Most of them are normal, but the ones on his chest and back foretell the deaths of his wife and himself.
• Stress Vomit: At the end of "The Illustrated Man", the thin man throws up when he sees the final image on the illustrated man's back: a depiction of the man's death scene.
• Surprisingly Creepy Moment: With so many of his works being lighthearted, tongue-in-cheek affairs, it's easy to forget that Bradbury could do dark and twisted horror with equal skill. The real surprise is the ease with which he can bounce between "whimsical" and "blanket clutching terror" multiple times within a single short story.
• Talk to the Fist: An anecdote attributed to Bradbury, though nobody seems to know the source:
  "A horrible little boy came up to me and said, 'You know in your book The Martian Chronicles?' I said, 'Yes?' He said, 'You know where you talk about Deimos rising in the East?' I said, 'Yes?' He said 'No.' — So I hit him."
• Textile Work Is Feminine: "Embroidery"
• The Tape Knew You Would Say That: "Night Call, Collect".
• Those Wacky Nazis: "Unterderseaboat Doktor", "Darling Adolf".
• Til Murder Do Us Part: A fair amount of people in Bradbury's short stories are murdered by their spouses.
  • In "The Illustrated Man", the protagonist's chest tattoo, when unveiled, turns out to be an image of him strangling his wife. While he initially insists he doesn't plan on doing this, he loses it when she berates him and tells him she's getting a divorce and ends up fulfilling the prophetic tattoo anyway.
  • In "The Jar", Charlie kills his wife Thedy after she reveals that the jar he bought contains a lot of junk and threatens to tell the townspeople (with whom Charlie has become very popular) what's in it.
  • In "Touched By Fire", the protagonists pass Mr. Shrike coming up the stairs to the apartment on their way down from trying to reason with the verbally aggressive Mrs. Shrike, and it's implied they expect he'll kill her at some point soon.
• Token Human: Timothy Elliot is the only member of his family with out any sort of special powers. Keep in mind that almost everyone in his family are immortal, not to mention that many of them are also vampires, Ambiguously Human, or ghosts.
• Tomato in the Mirror: "The Town Where No One Got Off" has a protagonist who is suddenly threatened by an old man, so he reveals that he was planning on killing someone in this town, which surprises the protagonist, too.
• To Win Without Fighting: "A Piece of Wood" has the soldier protagonist realize how stupid the conflict he's fighting for actually is he then causes his side to lose by way of a quickly spreading rust virus and the murderous general and soldiers can't even do anything to a man who refuses to even fight them.
• Traumatic C-Section: Part of the backstory in "The Small Assassin". The doctor originally believes Alice's fear of her child is due to the caesarean she underwent, which nearly killed her.
• Unique Moment Ruined: Happens in the short story "All Summer in a Day". Once every seven years, the unrelenting rains on the planet Venus stop and there are two hours of sunshine. Most of the nine-year-old schoolchildren in a classroom can't remember the last time it occurred because they were only two years old at the time. However, one of them came from Earth five years ago, so she spent her first four years living in sunlight. On the day the sun comes out, the envious other children force her into a closet so she will miss the two hours of sunshine.
• Unsettling Gender-Reveal: In "Long After Midnight," police find a suicide victim who appears to be a teenage girl. Only on the way back to the station do they realize that the victim is either a crossdresser or transgender.
• Venus Is Wet:
  • "The Long Rain" is set on Venus, where it rains constantly.
    It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping in the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.
  • In "All Summer in a Day", the planet Venus has constant rain, except for a one-hour period each seven years.
• Very Loosely Based on a True Story: "The Whole Town's Sleeping" (according to Bradbury) is apparently based on several real murders that occurred in his hometown.
• Villainous Breakdown: Happens to the Villain Protagonist of "Pillar of Fire" after his plan to cause a Zombie Apocalypse fails and he is given a "Reason You Suck" Speech.
• Villain Protagonist: Many examples
• Villain Teleportation: The titular crowd of people in "The Crowd" can seemingly appear anywhere out of thin air as long as an accident has occurred.
• Voodoo Doll: One of the witches in "The Exiles" kills an unnamed astronaut with one of these.
• Walking Wasteland: The protagonist of "Fever Dream" becomes this.
• What Measure Is a Non-Human?: "Punishment Without Crime" features a company that makes extremely life-like robotic replicas of living people, so that if someone wants to kill or maim someone, they can take it out on the company's replicas instead of the actual person, with the idea that killing the robot version would be so disgusting that the client would be swayed from committing any actual murder. It's noted that they're rather controversial in-universe: the public is quite anxious about the practice, and people have started debating about whether the robots should be considered alive, with entire religions splitting apart around the issue. Ultimately, the government takes a sort of Take a Third Option approach: regardless of whether they are really alive, it's so close to being an actual murder (after all, you might not have the victim, but you certainly have the motive, the means, the perpetrator, etc.) that they persecute it as one. As a result, they shut down the company and prescribe the death penalty on the people running it and the people who used it, which includes the protagonist.
• Winged Humanoid: Uncle Einar of the Elliot family, unlike his relatives, is completely normal, save for the enormous green wings sprouting from his back.
• The World Is Not Ready: In "The Flying Machine", a man invents the titular device in ancient China. The Emperor realizes that the machine could be used for war (such as for flying over the Great Wall of China), and has the inventor executed and the machine destroyed.
• Would Hurt a Child:
  • The end of "The Small Assassin" has the doctor go looking for Lucifer with a scalpel, intending to kill him, having become convinced that David and Alice's suspicions of him being murderous were right.
  • In "The October Game", an embittered and depressed father, disgusted by the fact that his wife and daughter have turned against him, decides to murder and dismember his daughter as revenge against her and his wife.
• You Are the New Trend: The protagonist of "The Watchful Poker Chip of H. Matisse" is so immensely boring that he becomes the center of attention in the Avant Garde scene.
• Zombie Apocalypse: One of the zombies in "The Reincarnate" wants to have this happen.
  • Attempted by the protagonist of "Pillar of Fire" but never actually happens because he is Driven to Suicide

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