I Sing the Body Electric!

I Sing the Body Electric! takes its title from a Walt Whitman poem, and Bradbury wore that inheritance proudly. The eighteen stories here are among his most philosophically ambitious, most concerned with what it means to be human in a world of increasingly convincing machines.

The title story, later adapted for television, imagines a family that rents a mechanical grandmother after their mother's death. She is perfect in every way, and the children's gradual acceptance of her, and the question of whether their love for her is real, is handled with extraordinary tenderness. Bradbury was not afraid of artificial love. He thought all love was a kind of miracle, whatever its origin.

Other stories here range from a man who discovers a mirror that shows him his true self, to a boy who befriends a dinosaur on the last day of its existence. The collection is generous and expansive, full of the sense that Bradbury was writing at a pace that matched his enthusiasm, that he could not get the stories out fast enough.