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Summary
Story Summaries & Analyses
“January 1999: Rocket Summer”
“February 1999: Ylla”
“August 1999: The Summer Night”
“August 1999: The Earth Men”
“March 2000: The Taxpayer”
“April 2000: The Third Expedition”
“June 2001: —And the Moon Be Still as Bright”
“August 2001: The Settlers”
“December 2001: The Green Morning”
“February 2002: The Locusts”
“August 2002: Night Meeting”
“October 2002: The Shore”
“February 2003: Interim”
“April 2003: The Musicians”
“June 2003: Way in the Middle Air”
“2004-2005: The Naming of Names”
“April 2005: Usher II”
“August 2005: The Old Ones”
“September 2005: The Martian”
“November 2005: The Luggage Store”
“November 2005: The Off Season”
“November 2005: The Watchers”
“December 2005: The Silent Towns”
“April 2026: The Long Years”
“August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”
“October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
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A wealthy man named William Stendhal meets with Mr. Bigelow, an architect who has finished building a strange house to Stendhal’s explicit specifications, most of which are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Bigelow is unaware of the story of Poe due to an intellectual purge thirty years previous on Earth called the Great Fire during which all creative works of the imagination, including Stendhal’s 50,000 title library, were destroyed by political and religious groups. Stendhal is pleased with Bigelow’s work on the house (which he calls the House of Usher) and the property but is disgusted by his ignorance and angrily dismisses the man.
Stendhal is next visited by a man named Mr. Garrett, an Investigator of Moral Climates from an administrative body on Earth. Stendhal distastefully greets the man, and Garrett informs him that the “Dismantlers and Burning Crew” (142) will be there in a couple hours to demolish the House of Usher, quoting a law against books, houses, and anything “produced which in any way suggests ghosts, vampires, fairies, or any creature of the imagination” (143). The only permissible artistic works, Stendhal reveals, are those which deal in Plus, gain access to 8,500+ more expert-written Study Guides. Including features:
By Ray Bradbury