The Illustrated Man Ray Bradbury(1951)
Throughout his writing career Ray BRADBURY
mixed fantasy, horror, and science fiction almost
indiscriminately, preferring to tell the story he
wanted to write rather than conform to any genre
standards. His science is often questionable, but
even though the planet Mars portrayed in The
Martian Chronicles(1950), for example, does not
conform to what we know of that world and fre-
quently displays properties we might describe as
magical, the book is popular among fans of both
fantasy and science fiction.
The Illustrated Manis actually a collection of
unrelated stories, some of which are technically
science fiction such as “The Rocket Man” (1951)
and “Marionettes, Inc.” (1949), and others of
which are not. The frame story, a brief prologue
and epilogue, describes an encounter with the man
of the title, whose body is completely covered with
what might seem to be tattoos but which are actu-
ally “body illustrations” whose exact forms are not
entirely fixed. The stories are then introduced in
turn after an examination of a related image. The
individual stories are drawn from the period during
which Bradbury was at his most productive, and
the quality is very high throughout the collection.
Bradbury’s tendency to blur the lines between
science fiction and fantasy are evident in the very
first story, “The Veldt” (1950), set in a near future
when the technology exists to create holographic
duplicates of real world situations. There is some-
thing wrong with one family’s nursery program,
which is programmed to project an African land-
scape, but the protagonists fail to realize the dan-
ger until they are confronted by all-too-real lions.
Bradbury never explains his fantastic surprise end-
ing, but the transition from rational to irrational is
so smooth that most readers never notice.
“The Last Night of the World” (1951) involves
a mystical catastrophe. Although the mechanism is
never explained, all the adults in the world have
learned through their dreams that the world is
about to come to an end. For the most part they
continue to spend their last day of life doing exactly
as they would have done if the end were not immi-
nent, not even telling their children what is about
to happen. The tables are turned in “Zero Hour”
(1947), in which all the children in the world have
been involved in a quiet conspiracy with inhuman
creatures who are about to take over the entire
planet. “The Exiles” (1949) is set on a fantasy Mars
that has become the refuge for all the characters
from myths and fiction, where they can escape the
disbelief that prevails on Earth. Several of their
writers/creators have fled to Mars as well. There is
a Christ figure on another planet in “The Man”
(1948), though not a traditional one.
There has been some slight variation of the
contents in different editions of The Illustrated
Man.Three of the stories were selected for a lack-
luster film version in 1969.“The Immortals” Jorge Luis Borges(1949)
This haunting story opens with the discovery of a
manuscript written by a man now believed to beI
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