The strangest thing about PS Publishing's silence, though, is in something they print. The cover blurbs are clearly the reprints of the original editions, nothing is added. On the rear fold-over you can read the original blurbs praising the educational value of Bradbury's stories from the New York Times and High School recommendations. Like Bradbury's own fictions, these books have passed through a time-warp unchanged.

R IS FOR ROCKET promised "seventeen of his most popular science fiction stories, including several that have not appeared before", though some had been collected and re-collected in different volumes and fix-ups, but as his introduction dedicated this collection to all boys, "the stars are yours", it must have been aimed at a young adult readership, for whom Robert Heinlein and Isacc Asimov had been writing novels throughout the fifties; perhaps even as a school "reader". Three years later the twenty-two stories of S IS FOR SPACE promised "not only S is for Space, but D is for Dread and T is for Terrifying, or D is for Delight". More interestingly, perhaps, is a division which does not appear in this book at all, but stands out when checking a bibliography (these books come without one): R IS FOR ROCKET is the "slick" collection and S IS FOR SPACE is the "pulp" collection. I am talking about the magazines where these stories first appeared. ROCKET collects stories from the Saturday Evening Post, Esquire, Macleans's and Collier's among others, while the main sources of SPACE are Amazing Stories, Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, Galaxy and F&SF. It is not a pure division - ROCKET also includes contributions to Famous Fantastic Mysteries, Super Science Stories and Planet Stories, while SPACE has stories from Good Housekeeping and Mademoiselle amongst others - but it is a reasonable division.

After seventy pages of rockets, when readers opened "The Sound of Thunder" (Bradbury's treading on a butterfly in the past story) did they realise they were reading a story that dates back to the myth of Prometheus and passed through Dr Faustus and Victor Frankenstein? Or another third of they way through, after the three page "Gift" (boy on rocket is shown the stars on Christmas Day, shining like the lights on a Christmas Tree), when they read the long "Frost and Fire" did they realise that they were reading another Promethean tale disguised in a dystopian de-evolved cave man journey? "The Gift" and "Frost and Fire" also make an interesting pairing because in their way they deliberately avoid conceptual breakthroughs. In the last sentence of "The Gift" the child is looking into the enormities of space but he sees in it only candles burning, while in "Frost and Fire" the troglodytes reach an abandoned spaceship and become space travellers - their previous life, which metabolises from birth to death in seven days, becoming a dream as they take off. Both stories manage to drop other interpretations as easily as spent fuel tanks are detached.

Throughout these collections children both yearn for the easy life of mid-west America and wish to pass through the gates of the rocket ports that stand on the edge of their towns. Often enough their destinations in space already are, or become, the towns they have left behind. Parents are neither forceful nor reactionary - if your father is a spaceman then you don't see him very often, but then neither did Arthur Ransome's Swallows see their father in the navy. Meanwhile parents want their children to be happy, as in arranging for the portholes to be opened to see the Christmas "Gift". At least, that is in the world of "the rocket man" (and woman, though women pilots never appear).

On the other hand what if childish wonder is exploited along with childish ignorance? In "Zero Hour" Mink and her friends are playing hide-and-seek along with her new friends from the "dim, dim, dim". She cannot say "another dimension". Her parents not realising until it's almost too late just have time to hide in the attic. Then "the lock melted". There is something seminal about entrances in SF and fantasy - "the lock melted" requires no more words than Heinlein/Delaney's "the door dilated" and both are redolent with unspoken meaning. The same theme of unwitting opening has appeared in John Twelve Hawks' THE TRAVELLER in 2005, but he is going to need another seven hundred pages and two more volumes to do what Bradbury captured in ten pages.