Toynbee Convector

The Toynbee Convector (1988) collects twenty-three short stories, most of them on the lighter or more sentimental end of Bradbury's range. The title story is the strongest and most thematically coherent: Craig Bennett Stiles, a man who claimed a century earlier to have traveled to a utopian future and returned with photographs and descriptions of a world remade, confesses on his deathbed that the journey was a fabrication. The hopeful lie, he argues, was itself the mechanism that produced the better world people believed they had seen. The story takes its name from historian Arnold Toynbee's conviction that any civilization that fails to seize and shape its future is doomed. The remaining stories range from a Laurel and Hardy romance to an encounter with a banshee on an Irish road, and are generally more whimsical than speculative. The collection sits at the periphery of Bradbury's dystopian concerns, though the title story's meditation on hope and collective will does tie in to the questions he raised in Fahrenheit 451.

Inscribed copy. This copy is signed & inscribed by Bradbury on the front free-endpaper.

Hardcover. First Edition, First Printing. Octavo, cloth-backed boards. New York: Knopf, 1988. ISBN: 0394547039. #10028.
Fine in near fine dust jacket.