The Machineries of Joy

The Machineries of Joy is a deliberately miscellaneous collection, and Bradbury intended it that way. The twenty-one stories range from a Catholic priest debating the theological implications of Martian life to a boy discovering the pleasures of theatre, from an Irish tale of two men arguing about death in a pub to a science fiction story about the last poet on Earth.

The title story is a kind of manifesto. Two priests argue about whether the space programme diminishes or enlarges God. One sees rockets as blasphemy; the other sees them as the machineries of joy, the latest expression of the human desire to reach beyond the given. Bradbury was with the second priest entirely. He believed that wonder was a spiritual act, that curiosity was a form of prayer.

The collection also marked a deepening of his engagement with Irish material, which would eventually become the basis for Green Shadows, White Whale. The Irish stories here are among his warmest, full of argument and whiskey and the particular Irish gift for the simultaneously true and impossible story.