Posted on by jameswharris · 8 Comments

How To Buy the Most Ray Bradbury Short Stories with the Fewest Purchases

Ray Bradbury published hundreds of short stories over and over again in various collections. Bradbury and his publishers often repackaged his stories into new collections or reprinted older collections with a slightly different lineup of stories. Ray Bradbury’s bibliography at ISFDB.org is so confusing that we’ve decided to select those collections that will provide the most stories by buying the fewest books.

Mike, the programmer for the Classics of Science Fiction website, coded several programs to find the right combinations of Bradbury collections that would give the widest selection of stories to read. The permutations turned out to be excessively large, so we simplified the procedure.

Our solution was to pick the collection that provided the most Bradbury stories. Then add a second collection that provides the most additional stories not in the first collection. Then add the third collection that contributes the next most additional stories, not in the previous two. And so on. Study the table, and the technique will become obvious.

Here are the twenty-five collections we used. We only used collections that are in print, either in hardback, paperback, e-book, or audiobook. Hyperlinks are to Amazon affiliate links.

  1. 1947 – Dark Carnival
  2. 1950 – The Martian Chronicles
  3. 1951 – The Illustrated Man
  4. 1955 – The October Country
  5. 1957 – Dandelion Wine
  6. 1965 – Vintage Bradbury
  7. 1976 – Long After Midnight
  8. 1980 – The Stories of Ray Bradbury
  9. 1983 – Dinosaur Tales
  10. 1988 – The Toynbee Convecter
  11. 1996 – Quicker Than the Eye
  12. 1997 – Driving Blind
  13. 1997 – The Golden Apples of the Sun and Other Stories
  14. 1998 – A Medicine for Melancholy and Other Stories
  15. 1998 – I Sing the Body Electric and Other Stories
  16. 2002 – One More for the Road
  17. 2003 – Bradbury Stories
  18. 2004 – The Cat’s Pajamas
  19. 2007 – Now and Forever
  20. 2009 – We’ll Always Have Paris
  21. 2010 – A Pleasure to Burn
  22. 2010 – Killer, Come Back to Me
  23. 2011 – The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury 1: 1938-1943
  24. 2014 – The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury 2: 1943-1944
  25. 2017 – The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury 3: 1944-1945

Here are Mike’s calculations.

James Wallace Harris, 3/30/25