Ray Bradbury 1 hr 9 min read

During the night, Sim is born, wailing on the cold cave stones, his blood beating a thousand pulses a minute, for on this savage world, a whole human life is lived in a mere eight days.

Ray Bradbury's 1946 story (later 'Frost and Fire') is a vivid, poetic post-apocalyptic adventure. Lush, intense, pure Bradbury. Read it for a breathless tale of people who are born, love, and die in eight furious days on a planet of killing heat and cold, and one man's desperate race against his own brief clock.

In its time

Published in 1946, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

1 hr 9 min read (a novelette, room for a turn or two).