Even in the strongest story in the collection ‘The Long Rain’ the execution of soldiers is described so calmly that any sense of violence is robbed. Multiple stories relate to nuclear annihilation, but from the perspective of these who survive unharmed. ‘The Last Night of the World’ shows a couple dealing with the knowledge that the world is ending, and that all they can do is make their last moments peaceful. ‘Kaleidoscope’ sees a crew slowly dying in space as their rocket fails, and is bleak without losing its sense of wonder. There’s a sense of loss and tragedy overhanging the whole collection. To be fair, they are great at doing this. The stories here are more about creating mood than posing problems for the characters to overcome. That’s not what you’ll find in The Illustrated Man. And therein lies my dissatisfaction.Ĭall me a traditionalist, but I’m a big fan of stories in which things happen. A lot of these stories are not so much narratives as slices of life. Even with a large font size, these stories rarely pass twenty pages. These are stories that place as much focus on the presentation as on the content. Some of that success comes from the fame of Farenheit 451, but reading these stories, it’s easy to see why. Ray Bradbury is one of those rare science fiction authors who has managed to gain traction in mainstream literature rather than being stomped back into the ghetto of science fiction by overzealous academics. Why would Ray Bradbury, in all his wisdom and skill, not just drop it all together and leave the stories to stand alone. Aside from being an incredibly lacklustre link between stories, it doesn’t have any relevance to the stories themselves. Other than that, the framing narrative simply does not exist. This features in a prologue, an epilogue, and as an insert into one story. The narrative conceit employed to connect the stories (which have no other connection) is that all are depicted in the tattoos of a mysterious wanderer. But if we’re not being pedantic, are we really science fiction fans? I mention all of this because The Illustrated Man sets itself up as a fix-up, then almost immediately falls over. This is all pretty simple, and largely unimportant in the grand scheme of things. A fix-up is a group of short stories that have been arranged into an overarching narrative. An anthology is the work of multiple authors gathered by an editor.

A collection is the work of a single author. There are short story collections, anthologies, and fix-ups. This man can easily be recognised by his many tattoos. There is a man who wanders the world with disaster and death following in his wake. This edition published by Harper Voyager.

Bradbury the illustrated man