The other children don’t like Margot for, as Bradbury says, “reasons of big and little consequence” Her classmates are jealous of her poem and accuse her of not writing it herself. When the sun does shine on Venus every seventh year, it is only just briefly. While she grew up on Earth, her classmates have all grown up on Venus and don’t know what it’s like to have frequent sunshine. She’s a nine year-old student in a school where she suffers the worst affliction of that age – being different.
The story is joined with the colonists on the brink of experiencing one of their rare “summers” – a time when the sun comes out if for only an hour – and centers around one of the more recent colonists, Margot. In this current story, Venus has been colonized by Earthmen in spite of its meteorological shortcomings. Bradbury had not the advantage of this knowledge when he was writing stories like this and “ The Long Rain” (also set on a wet, rain forest-y Venus). It seems amusing to us now, with our current knowledge of that world, with its crushing atmospheric pressure and sulfuric acid rain, that it was once imagined to be swampy and jungle-like. All he said about “All Summer in a Day” was that it was set on a world where summer lasts only a couple hours and comes only once every seven years, and a bunch of schoolkids lock a classmate in a closet so that she misses it. The Crowd, which I blogged about before). For “Week 17” of the Deal Me In 2014 Short Story Reading Challenge, I drew the four of diamonds, which I had assigned to a story I’ve really been looking forward to reading, Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day.” The director of The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies here in Indianapolis had tantalizingly summarized it for me one day after a meeting of the Kurt Vonnegut Memorial Library’s book club, so I added it to my DMI2014 roster and have been waiting patiently “all year.” I’ve mentioned before that he has a knack for telling one the gist of a Bradbury story in such a way that one really wants to read it (e.g.
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