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Where Robot Mice And Robot Men Run Round In Robot Towns
Ray Douglas Bradbury
One of Ray Bradbury’s classic poetry collections, available in ebook for the first time.Ray Bradbury writes of childhood, Melville, and God as well as space launchings and other-world things in this second collection of his poems.
WHERE ROBOT MICE AND ROBOT MEN
RUN ROUND IN ROBOT TOWNS
Ray Bradbury
Copyright (#ulink_58bd5de4-c255-51fc-8552-0670cdc58750)
HarperVoyager An imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers Ltd. 77–85 Fulham Palace Road Hammersmith, London, W6 8JB
www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk (http://www.harpervoyagerbooks.co.uk)
Copyright © Ray Bradbury 1974, 1975, 1976, 1977
Cover design by Mike Topping.
Cover layout design © HarperCollinsPublishers 2014
Cover photographs © Shutterstock.com
Ray Bradbury asserts the moral right to be identified as the author of this work.
A catalogue copy of this book is available from the British Library.
This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities is entirely coincidental.
All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereinafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
HarperCollinsPublishers has made every reasonable effort to ensure that any picture content and written content in this ebook has been included or removed in accordance with the contractual and technological constraints in operation at the time of publication.
Ebook Edition © JULY 2014 ISBN: 9780007539956
Version: 2014–07–18
Dedication (#ulink_448ff507-0fab-5575-9d78-2e36879bfc98)
Again for Marguerite/Maggie—because of thirty-two years
Table of Contents
Cover (#u25bfcc57-377e-57f4-94a1-73cf1ac1e020)
Title Page (#u7ebd0f87-5141-5a35-bb62-db94ae7a1c18)
Copyright (#ulink_a12bad37-dba9-5de4-be52-19a0ec2c7555)
Dedication (#ulink_80cf7368-4cc6-573d-b985-d94ae95295fb)
Prologue (#ulink_99c483a0-d64a-5871-8368-97e0a6fc0e13)
Byzantium I Come Not From (#ulink_46787ebc-0260-5348-9f79-ca4e3720c359)
What I Do Is Me—For That I Came (#ulink_287bc0cd-6504-5212-a1dc-5c1df95ad381)
I Am the Residue of All My Daughters’ Lives (#ulink_b52e1c85-b03c-5461-943e-670e23dcd0c0)
We March Back to Olympus (#ulink_a066cf8c-7fd9-53eb-9064-29eda0070063)
Ghost at the Window, Hive on the Hearth (#ulink_37f64bf7-69f1-569b-b842-08ee0a9359d7)
Boy Pope Behold! Dog Bishop See! (#ulink_53b766f7-7ae3-5169-85d0-a01050cf8138)
I Have a Brother, Mostly Dead (#litres_trial_promo)
Why Viking Lander, Why the Planet Mars? (#litres_trial_promo)
We Have Our Arts so We Won’t Die of Truth (#litres_trial_promo)
I Die, so Dies the World (#litres_trial_promo)
My Love, She Weeps at Many Things (#litres_trial_promo)
Death as a Conversation Piece (#litres_trial_promo)
Remembrance II (#litres_trial_promo)
J.C.—Summer '28 (#litres_trial_promo)
The Young Galileo Speaks (#litres_trial_promo)
The Beast Atop the Building, the Tiger on the Stairs (#litres_trial_promo)
Why Didn’t Someone Tell Me About Crying in the Shower? (#litres_trial_promo)
Somewhere a Band Is Playing (#litres_trial_promo)
The Nefertiti – Tut Express (#litres_trial_promo)
Telephone Friends, in Far Places (#litres_trial_promo)
Death for Dinner, Doom for Lunch (#litres_trial_promo)
Out of Dickinson by Poe, or The Only Begotten Son of Emily and Edgar (#litres_trial_promo)
Lo, the Ghost of Our Least Favorite Uncle (#litres_trial_promo)
That Son of Richard III (#litres_trial_promo)
A Poem with a Note: All England Empty, the People Flown (#litres_trial_promo)
The Syncopated Hunchbacked Man (#litres_trial_promo)
If Man Is Dead, Then God Is Slain (#litres_trial_promo)
Thoughts on Visiting the Main Rocket Assembly Building at Cape Canaveral for the First Time (#litres_trial_promo)
Their Names in Dust, Their Dates in Grass (#litres_trial_promo)
Long Thoughts on Best-Sellers by Worst People (#litres_trial_promo)
Keep Reading (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
Also by the Author (#litres_trial_promo)
About the Publisher (#litres_trial_promo)
Prologue (#ulink_cc9f8553-b1df-5812-bf29-2e957d1ad5c7)
They asked me where I’d choose to run, which favored? Ups? or Downs?
Where robot mice and men, I said, run round in robot towns.
But is that wise? for tin’s a fool and iron has no thought!
Computer mice can find me facts and teach me what I’m not.
But robot all inhuman is, all’s sin with cog and mesh.
Not if we teach the good stuff in, so it can teach our flesh.
There’s nothing wrong with metal-men that better dreams can’t chalk.
I’d find me robot-Plato’s cave if he lived on my block;
And though his eyes electric were, computerized his tongue,
Is that more wrong than Berlioz on LPs harped and sung?
So much electric fills our lives, some bad, some good, some ill.
But look! there Shaw and Shakespeare dance on Channel 7’s sill:
A gift of hearts and minds and eyes to see our dark/light face,
To weigh and balance halos/blights that half-destroy our race;
To midget make our rocket-ships, and squeeze grand Kong down small
Then Giants grow from Shavian seed to taunt, provoke us all.
As man himself a mixture is, rambunctious paradox,
So we must teach our mad machines: stand tall, pull up your socks!
Come run with me, wild children/men, half dires and dooms, half clowns.
Pace robot mice, race robot men, win-lose in robot towns.
Byzantium I Come Not From (#ulink_2945dfcf-d83f-53b6-a92f-1cd535916d0b)
Byzantium
I come not from
But from another time and place
Whose race is simple, tried and true;
As boy
I dropped me forth in Illinois,
A name with neither love nor grace
Was Waukegan. There I came from
And not, good friends, Byzantium.
And yet in looking back I see
From topmost part of farthest tree
A land as bright, beloved and blue
As any Yeats found to be true.
The house I lived in, hewn of gold
And on the highest market sold
Was dandelion-minted, made
By spendthrift bees in bee-loud glade.
