Title The Illustrated Man Series --- Edited By Ray Bradbury Cover Art Tim O'Brien Publisher Avon Books - 1997 First Printing 1951 Category Anthology Warnings None Main Characters See below Main Elements See below Website raybradbury.com

• "Prologue: The Illustrated Man"
• "The Veldt"
• "Kaleidoscope"
• "The Other Foot"
• "The Highway"
• "The Man"
• "The Long Rain"
• "The Rocket Man"
• "The Last Night of the World"
• "The Exiles"
• "No Particular Night or Morning"
• "The Fox and the Forest"
• "The Visitor"
• "The Concrete Mixer"
• "Marionettes, Inc"
• "The City"
• "Zero Hour"
• "The Rocket"
• "The Illustrated Man"
• "Epilogue"

Ray Bradbury brings wonders alive. A peerless American storyteller, his oeuvre has been celebrated for decades - from The Martian Chronicles and Faherenheit 451 to Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

The Illustrated Man is classic Bradbury - a collection of tales that breathe and move, animated by sharp, intaken breath and flexing muscle. Here are eighteen startling visions of humankind's destiny, unfolding across a canvas of decorated skin - visions as keen as the tattooist's needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body.

The images, ideas, sounds and scents that abound in this phantasmagoric sideshow are provocative and powerful: the mournful cries of celestial travelers cast out cruelly into a vast, empty space of stars and blackness...the sight of gray dust settling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere...the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father's clothing. Here living cities take their vengeance, technology awakens the most primal natural instincts, Martian invasions are foiled by the good life and the glad hand, and dreams are carried aloft in junkyard rockets.

Ray Bradbury's The Illustrated Man is a kaleidoscopic blending of magic, imagination, and truth, widely believed to be one of the Grandmaster's premier accomplishments: as exhilarating as interplanetary travel, as maddening as a walk in a million-year rain, and as comforting as simple, familiar rituals on the last night of the world.

We begin by meeting the titular Illustrated Man where we find that the stories that follow are each represented somewhere on his body. Beyond that, we get a wide variety of stories to enjoy, some that were just shocking, others simply sweet, and few that feel like nothing new to a modern reader (though the idea may have been novel at the time it was written) and at least one that leaves one wondering why the story was even written. Even Bradbury doesn't claim to worry about hard SF, saying most of his work is really fantasy, so the fact that people can colonize Mars in a mere 20 years and walk around breathing the air and sitting under it's trees, or even wandering exposed on Venus you should just shrug off and focus more on the tale being told and not worry much about the setting.

But regardless if a tale entirely survived the test of time, Bradbury's writing style is always a pleasure to read and reminds of why he is considered an SF master.

The Veldt warns of letting technology take over all aspect of our lives (right down to having a machine to tie your shoelaces). Kaleidoscope explores the various ways a human can react to impending death, and The Long Rain covers a similar theme only on a very rainy Venus, and The Last Night of the World is one of acceptance.

The Other Foot was a rather unbelievable utopic coming together of former enemies, while The Highway makes us consider what the meaning of "the whole world" really is. The Man explores faith, The Rocket Man explores fathers whose jobs take them away from their families.

The Exiles was a bizarre mix of fantasy and SF, with long dead authors hiding out on Mars until they are completely forgotten, but a similar theme to Farenheit 451 around the loss of books and all they contain. No Particular Night or Morning was a seemingly pointless discussion about reality. The Fox and the Forest was a fun time travel tale of a couple trying to hide from a terrible future in the past. And The Visitor, though a topic covered since antiquity, is a well written tale of people destroying the very thing they most cherish (this theme always reminds me of the National Film Board Neighbours).

The Concrete Mixer is reminscent of Wells' War of the World where an alien invasion is defeated now by arms, but by an unexpected weapon. Marionette's Inc is about A.I. and what happens when they decide they like your life better than you like your own. The City is about an ancient, sentient city just waiting for the return of the people that destroyed it's original inhabitants. Zero Hour, like The Veldt, makes one wonder if Bradbury harboured secret fears of his children coming to murder him in the night...

On the other hand The Rocket is a lovely story of a father's attempt to make his children's fantasies come true. With the Illustrated Man we get another story of tales we don't want to know, which leads to the brief Epilogue that wraps up the collection.