Eighteen stories, Bradbury's first collection in five years. He's a sorcerer who stretches psychological infinities like no one else. Here you have a father and a mother coping With a child that has been born into another dimension; a guard dealing with the assassin of Lincoln's robot replica; tough Irish townsmen contemplating the return of modern day fairies to their land; a successful psychiatrist who realizes that he has literally been deaf to the real problems of his clients; a group of failures who find their wishes fatally fulfilled in the "Lost City of Mars"; a woman mortally terrified of her quiet, overgrown son and, in the title story, a loving look at a mechanical grandmother created to satisfy the needs of three motherless children. Ray Bradbury can be funny, sad, poetic and terrifying . . . sometimes simultaneously . . . he lights up the crackle of doom in the Rice Crispies.
