R is for Rocket

R is for Rocket was published in 1962 with young readers explicitly in mind, though Bradbury always resisted the implication that writing for young people required any diminishment of craft or ambition. The sixteen stories gathered here, drawn from his earlier collections, are among his most exuberant: rockets, Martians, time travel, and the limitless possibilities of a universe that has not yet been fully mapped.

The selection was personal. Bradbury chose stories that had mattered to him when he was the age of the readers he was addressing, stories that had made him feel that the universe was larger and stranger than he had been told. He wanted to give young readers what the pulp magazines had given him: the shock of the possible, the intoxication of imagining a future worth living in.

The title is both literal, a rocket ship heading for space, and metaphorical, the rocket of imagination that can take you anywhere. Bradbury always said that he was writing for the boy he used to be. R is for Rocket is the most direct expression of that impulse.