Question

Ray Bradbury’s “All Summer in a Day” is a piece of science fiction. Discuss plots of similar stories with your partner and share your ideas with the class.

Answer 1

We read a story called “The thief’. Yarmuk is one of the top thieves of the solar system. He overhears a secret about planet ‘X’. There is no crime on planet ‘X’. There are no policemen. Most of the shops had no assistants. They were all honesty stores. Yarmuk wanted details about the location of the planet so that he could steal from a jewel store there and settle for life. He mixes a tranquilizer in his friend Makin’s second drink. When Makin loses his consciousness, he obtains the address of a man who knows the coordinates of the planet ‘X’. He steals into the house of that man. He uses a hallucinogen to get the information he wants from the man. He prowls the space parking lot. On visiting a spaceship dealer, he collects information on different spacecraft and narrows down on MIG-31 spacecraft for his trip to planet ‘X’. He finds a newly married couple parking in a hotel. He takes a room just next to the couple. Using a false key, he enters their room. He gasses them both and takes the space-port parking lot pass; the electronic card which opens their spaceships airlock and controls its engines and the hyper-wave radio key. He vacates the room explaining that he got a video call from his wife that she was sick. Yarmuk enters the spaceport and explaining his wife’s sudden illness gets permission to blast off. He reaches planet ‘X’. The parking charges in the spaceport are ridiculously cheap. To try to find out, if the alarm goes off, he stealthily picks up socks in an unmanned textile showroom. Nothing happens. Emboldened by the attempt he goes to one of the posh jewelry shops. He makes a mental note of which every jewel he wants to steal the following day. He takes two big suitcases and stuffs all valuable jewels and rushes back to the hotel. Nobody checks him. He sleeps gladly. The next morning when he leaves the hotel, he is stopped by the security guards with stun guns. He does not understand how his theft got found out. Later he learns that planet ‘X’ is full of telepathists, mind readers, and clairvoyants. Stray customers who had seen him at the jewelry and the hotel staff have read his thoughts and just communicated in a flash of a second through their minds. He is sentenced to 20 years in the alien’s jail.