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The Other Foot

by Ray Bradbury

Listen to the Audiobook: The Other Foot

Read the book online: The Other Foot

This week in the Tales from the Library Book Club we will be reading the short story 'The Other Foot' by Ray Bradbury. This story was originaly published in 1951 in the short story collection 'The Illustrated Man'. 

In a distant future Bradbury paints a world in which all of the black people of earth have left and collonised mars, leaving earth to the white men to wage war and bomb into oblivion. The story begins when Hattie Johnsons children hear news of a rocket aproaching mars. For the first time in years, the white men are visiting mars. How will they be greated? The power is now in the other hands and the shoe very much on the other foot...

Bradbury sees this story as best paired with the story "Way Up in the Air" from The Martian Chronicles, which shows an actual exodus from Earth to Mars by African Americans tired of racism on their home planet.

This story deals with themes on the human condition, race, injustice,war, forgiveness and revenge. It should be noted there is mention of lynching, and use of some language some might find offensive.

"All along the road people were looking up in the sky, or climbing in their cars, or riding in cars, and guns were sticking up out of some cars like telescopes sighting all the evils of a world coming to an end."

“They can come up and live and work here; why, certainly. All they got to do to deserve it is live in their own small part of town, the slums, and shine our shoes for us, and mop up our trash, and sit in the last row in the balcony. That’s all we ask. And once a week we hang one or two of them. Simple!”

About the Author

Ray Douglas Bradbury, American novelist, short story writer, essayist, playwright, screenwriter and poet, was born August 22, 1920 in Waukegan, Illinois. He graduated from a Los Angeles high school in 1938. Although his formal education ended there, he became a "student of life," selling newspapers on L.A. street corners from 1938 to 1942, spending his nights in the public library and his days at the typewriter. He became a full-time writer in 1943, and contributed numerous short stories to periodicals before publishing a collection of them, Dark Carnival, in 1947.

His reputation as a writer of courage and vision was established with the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, which describes the first attempts of Earth people to conquer and colonize Mars, and the unintended consequences. Next came The Illustrated Man and then, in 1953, Fahrenheit 451, which many consider to be Bradbury's masterpiece, a scathing indictment of censorship set in a future world where the written word is forbidden. In an attempt to salvage their history and culture, a group of rebels memorize entire works of literature and philosophy as their books are burned by the totalitarian state. Other works include The October Country, Dandelion Wine, A Medicine for Melancholy, Something Wicked This Way Comes, I Sing the Body Electric!, Quicker Than the Eye, and Driving Blind. In all, Bradbury has published more than thirty books, close to 600 short stories, and numerous poems, essays, and plays. His short stories have appeared in more than 1,000 school curriculum "recommended reading" anthologies.

How to join the club to chat

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