The Illustrated Man is a collection of eighteen of Bradbury’s short stories, very loosely held together by being supposed illustrations on a man the author met. Like his better known Farenheit 451, these stories are warnings about the direction that society is heading. Judging by the dark nature of the stories—at least Shakespeare also wrote comedies—the world in 1950 was heading down a path of doom. Although the institutional memory of the fifties is one of a happy society, Bradbury saw only excessive entertainment, censorship, and the spectre of a destructive war are all prominent themes in the stories. Each story appears to warn about something.


Bradbury’s stories evoke a very different science fiction than early twenty-first century readers are used to reading. His stories feature quite often feature Mars in some aspect, either with Martians in their unending pursuit of conquest of Earth, or as some form of Earth colony. A large number of them speak about Earth’s impending destruction, either by our own hand or by the another race. His exclusive use of the word “rocket”, which, quite unforseen on his part, enhances a bygone feeling by conjuring a 50's era curved rocket with three tail fins. And the themes are quaint because they are often obviously anachronistic.

Bradbury is obsessed with Mars. Mars is the generic setting, pressed into service either for exiles from Earth or as home to an invading army. Both seem strange to the modern reader, no doubt due in large part to the dispelling of the vestiges of Powell’s romantic canal-building civilization by the Viking landers. Mars is so well-known to be millions of years dead that Martian armies simply can no longer be conceived. But the purpose of Bradbury’s fiction was to confront social issues, rather than more modern science fiction which speculates about what might be. Bradbury probably thought Mars was just as dead as we think it is, and exploited a fascination with Mars, popularized by Orwell’s famous invasion scare, to warn about war. He may have even been parodying the popular sentiment, for inevitably the Martians are a dying civilization and end up losing the battle, as Ettil in “The Concrete Mixer” observes.

The themes of the stories, which on the surface would seem to be timeless, have ceased to have relevance to the modern reader. This reviewer is too young to remember a time when the current nuclear détente did not exist. Likewise, the mass epidemic brought back by soldiers from World War I is no longer in cultural memory, so the fear of exile for one’s incurable disease is alien to modern readers. Even something as ever-present as stifling marriages is no longer relevant because our culture is rarely committed to unhappy marriages long enough for them to become stifling. Although there are still many dysfunctional families now (although by no mean as ubiquitous as in Bradbury—his families are inevitably dysfunctional), the modern vision of a dysfunctional family is unlikely to include a mother, father, and 1.5 kids in a white picket-fenced house in the suburbs.

These stories also differ from modern science fiction in a surprising aspect—religion. Bradbury was obviously brought up in the Church, and although his Christianity is bit humanistic (at least in these stories), it is a refreshing change from the relentless atheism of modern science fiction. The Biblical allusion in “The City” was particularly well-done: “In a machine cellar a red want touched a numeral: 178 pounds... 210, 154, 201, 198—each man weighed, registered and the record spooled down into a correlative darkness. ... In twenty thousand years only two other rockets landed here. One from a distant galaxy called Ennt, and the inhabitants of that craft were tested, weighed, found wanting, and let free, unscathed from the city.” In Daniel, Belshazzar was similarly tested, weighed, and found wanting, but instead of freedom, Belshazzar’s kingdom is conquered that evening by the invading army. A subtle irony juxtaposing the physical process of determining if the visitors were humans and a reminder that the city was also metaphorically weighing the moral value of the visitors.

Fortunately, Bradbury’s dismal outlook on the future has not been substantiated. Nuclear holocaust is increasingly less of a worry, World War III has failed to materialize, no epidemic has happened in living memory (although Bird-Flu looms on the horizon), and censorship is relatively unheard of in the West. In an age where Freedom of Speech is used as a catch-all court argument, Bradbury’s fears about censorship seem particularly odd. “The Exiles” is actually more about censorship via faith in science, but we seem to have gotten over our faith in science as a cure to unenlightened mythology—as evidenced by the (overly) long run of the television show “X-Files”, in which the supernatural inevitably wins over the scientific side-kick’s natural explanation.

Like Harlan Ellison, Bradbury’s stories are very dark. Unlike Ellison, Bradbury’s stories have much more of a science-fiction feeling as the setting is much more detailed. While the characters are deep and believable, the characters themselves often do not develop, but it is rather the reader’s (and the characters') understanding of the situation that develops. This is a minor quibble, for the stories are all fresh, even where they present similar themes. The largest problem with a prolonged reading of Bradbury is the recurring fatalities. After a while, this reader began trying to guess how the characters would die, because die they did with the predictability of a Shakespearean tragedy. Even the veneer of the man with the magic tattoos that attempts to bring coherency to the collection is not immune to tragedy. To Bradbury’s credit (or this reader’s failure of imagination), though, the characters always die in a surprising fashion—while you know the end, you do not know the meaning of the end until you reach it.

The Illustrated Man is a foray into early science fiction. The stories, while no longer very relevant, are of fine quality and there are a number of quite interesting ideas. Fortunately, the themes and characters, rather than the ideas, drive the story, so they gripping to read. This is not a book that should be read in one sitting unless you are particularly immune to depression, though. Repeated, unfortunate deaths take their toll even on robust readers.