Fiction Reviews
The Illustrated Man
(1952/2008-2025) Ray Bradbury, Harper Voyager, £9.99, pbk,294pp, ISBN 978-0-006-47922-2
This is a welcome reprint of one of Ray Bradbury's collections of shorts from 1952. I have in fact reviewed this before, but that was nearly two decades ago The bottom line is that largely these stand up rather well for a present-day readership. True, these stories have a certain simplicity to the modern genre reader, but then that is their charm: what you are getting is a slice of the best of US science fiction and fantasy from the middle of the 20th century, so they do not reflect three-quarters of a century of genre development. If you have not come across this collection, and you consider yourself a fairly avid genre reader, then you may well want to get this.
Those knowledgeable my be saying, 'Hang on, 1952! Surely you mean 1951!'. Well, you'd be right, and wrong. This is the British edition that was published a year after it came out in N. America. Normally, we'd list this as 1951, but the 1952, British edition has only 16 stories (and the top and tail 'illustrated man' prologue and epilogue sequences) where as the N. American edition has 18 stories. So this is actually a different book.
These things happen from time to time. But at least it as not as bad as the confusion of titles over the years with the various P. K. Dick short story collections).
The bottom line is that the British edition loses four stories from the N. American edition ('The Rocket Man', 'The Fire Balloons', 'The Exiles' and 'The Concrete Mixer') and adds 'Usher II' from The Martian Chronicles and 'The Playground'.
I really would like one day for a major SF publisher (Gollancz hint – you know Malcolm Edwards would have been up for it) to bring out the definitive edition with the missing stories from each instated. One can but dream.
Having expressed my desire, this is very selfish of me in that I'd like the most complete version with all the stories from both the British and US editions. It is doubly selfish of me as I have these other stories from the complete Bradbury short stories collections, so in truth I do not really need them.
Having said that, I think that the British edition, published a year after the US edition, is the edition that Bradbury wanted his readers to have. Why? Well, the British edition 'Prologue' that introduces us to the Illustrated Man character gives a different explanation to the that in the short story 'The Illustrated Man' in a couple of subsequent editions and some other Bradbury collections. Indeed, a 1951 review in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction by two respected SF reviewers and writers (Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas) said that the original (US) editions framing story ('The Illustrated Man') was "markedly ineffective". This may have caused Ray Bradbury to tweak the prologue? I do not know.
What we do know is that editions published by Avon Books in 1997 and William Morrow in 2001 omit 'The Fire Balloons' and add 'The Illustrated Man' to the end of the book. Here the 'The Illustrated Man' story is different to the 'Prologue: The Illustrated Man' and certainly this latter story does not effectively hold the collection together, while the brief 'Prologue' to my mind does the job well enough.
Right, before we get stuck into the stories, a brief word about Bradbury's science and fantasy speculative fiction.
The first thing to say about this collection is that while Ray Braduree ('the most famous sci-fi writer in historeee') has a reputation for SF, his novels are mainly fantasy, his only proper novel that is firmly SF is arguably Fahrenheit 451. For Bradbury's SF you need to turn to his short stories. And in The Illustrated Man we do get our share.
Now, onto the stories themselves.
The stories in this edition – the British edition – I are:
'Prologue: The Illustrated Man'
A man on a walking tour meets a heavily tattooed man. They decide to make camp together for the night. But the tattoos on the stranger's body seem to have a life of their own and tell tales… As the tattooed man recounts how he obtained them it is that they were images of the future by a woman who claimed she could travel in time. Whether she could or not is down to the reader to decide. The thing is that the images can at times be seen to move and the twenty or so clusters of images each tell a story…'The Veldt'
Set in the future, and a husband and wife's home has what appears to be a virtual reality room in which their kids can play. It can produce any environment the children can imagine. However, they seem fixated upon an African wild, Veldt scene. So the parents call in a child psychologist who suggests that the room is not healthy. However, the children do not take kindly to switching it off…'Kaleidoscope'
The crew of a spaceship find their craft malfunctioning as they drift through space and begin to reflect on why they are their and their imminent fate…'The Other Foot'
Mars has been colonised, meanwhile there has been war on Earth. However the survivors of the war manage to get a craft to reach Mars. The thing is that Mars was 'colonised' by the less desired, servant class. Spying the approaching craft, the Martian colonists implement Jim Crow type laws. The people of Mars are black and they do not like the idea that the white survivors from Earth will be joining them…You have to remember that this was written at the beginning of the 1950s, and the USA was a very different place then than it is today, as imperfect as western society still is today, three quarters of a century on.
'The Highway'
Hernando lives a simple life with his family by a highway in Mexico. Then one day refugees from the US start to pass though speaking of a nuclear war and the end of the world. They pass and Hernando returns to his life but wonders what 'the world' means…'The Man'
Visitors from Earth arrive on a utopic alien world whose inhabitants seem to have a blissful philosophy given to them by a passing being. The Earth crew believe that this may be Jesus and so some of the crew follow on through space hoping to catch up with this being, but when they arrive on other planets they keep on just missing him…'The Long Rain'
A small group of troops on Venus have to traverse a tropical rain forest while enduring continual showers. Soaked, they are seeking a 'Sun dome' that the military has left across the planet as shelters, complete with a central source of warmth and light.This story reflects one of the common imaginations in both SF and science of the early-to-mid twentieth century as to what Venus might be like.
'Usher II'
I could imagine this so easily being the basis of a Vincent Price Hammer horror film set on Mars… Earth is suffering under dictatorial regimes that restrict expressions of thought and thinking. So wealthy William Stendahl has gone to Mars to escape the censorship. However, eventually the regimes of Earth decide to control Mars too. But Stendahl has used his wealth to construct a highly automated house based on the Edgar Allan Poe short story 'The Fall of the House of Usher'. When the Moral Climate Monitors finally arrive to assess the building's destruction, each is invited in…'The Last Night of the World'
People awake with the almost certain knowledge, a feeling really, that this day will be the Earth's last day. As they continue life as usual, they seemingly accept that there is no future…This – as is oft the case with Bradbury – an allegorical story with much relevance to today. As an environmental scientist into human ecology and the Earth system I am acutely aware as to how we (our global society) are heading for a critical transition despite our having been acutely aware of what is coming for well over half a century.
'The Rocket'
Humans are travelling to other worlds in the Solar system, but only those with a reasonable amount of wealth. This was something that Fiorello Bodoni, a poor junkyard owner yearned for: he wanted to take him and his family to Mars. However, the amount of money he had saved could not take them all: some would have to be left behind. So, instead he bought a used rocket…'No Particular Night or Morning'
Two crew members of a spaceship discuss philosophy. One of them insists that nothing is real and this belief takes him to an almost inevitable conclusion… or madness.'The Fox and the Forest'
This is one of those short stories that to my mind would make a great feature film. In a war torn, high-tech future, a couple work for the industrial-military complex. But those whose serve do get rewarded and some, occasionally, can take a short, time holiday in the pre-war past. The couple have earned such a trip but decide not to return to their dystopic present but remain in the pre-war, pre-disaster past. However, will the authorities let them?'The Visitor'
In the future, Mars is used as a quarantine world for those ill with an untreatable, debilitating, wasting illness. Then one new patient arrives on this isolation world, and those there to meet him realise that he has telepathic powers that can project the illusion that they are back on Earth in happier times. However, as everyone fights to control him and live their last days in an imaginary state of paradise on Earth, things do not go well…'Marionettes, Inc.'
This is almost a P. K. Dickian story… It is the future and a man leads a sad life in an unhappy marriage into which he was tricked by his wife. So, he decides to buy the latest thing, a duplicate: a robot with his exact likeness. This robot can live with his wife instead of him. What could possibly go wrong?'The City'
An exploratory spaceship from Earth arrives on a planet to find a well preserved, but apparently desolate city. Yet all is not as it seems, and the city has been waiting for them…'Zero Hour'
It is the near-future and the children have found a new game to play with an imaginary friend. Only it seems that children everywhere have the same friend and play the same game, 'Invasion'…'The Playground'
This was a story that made me wonder whether Ray Bradbury was working out some childhood angst..? Charles Underhill's wife wants their young son to start playing in the local playground. However, this brings up memories for Charles of when he himself was a youngster and the terror he experience at the hand of child bullies…'Epilogue'
It was near midnight and the traveller in 'Prologue: The Illustrated Man' has seen many tales as revealed by the moving tattoos. But then a face forms on the tattooed man's back: the face of the traveller. And then a tattooed image of the illustrated man appears and seems to be strangling the image of the traveller. Terrified, the traveller runs off…The one story the British edition reader may want to be included from the N. American edition is 'The Illustrate Man' as this gives added meaning to this collection's 'Prologue' and 'Epilogue'. It tells of how the illustrated man, an overweight carnival worker got his tattoos and how he became an outcast from society…
The thing is that this story
Three quarters of a century on these stories stand up rather well. Certainly, the sense-of-wonder is there and there is a purity, albeit born of a certain simplicity of mid-twentieth century fiction there which you can find also in the short stories of Asimov, Clarke, Heinlein et al. Other than the glaring lack of appreciation of astronomical distance – Bradbury these stories are relatively blemish free. But then Bradbury had no real education in science, though as a youngster he loved reading books by Wells, Verne, Poe, Edgar Rice Burroughs and the like. So his speculative fiction was borne of other writers and he was not able to imbue his own tales with any real scientific understanding of his own. Perhaps this was a good thing as it enabled him from an early age to focus on the craft of writing. Who knows.
Apparently, this collection came to exist by happenstance. Desperate for money to keep his young family going, he went to New York to talk to editors in person. All wanted novels and not short-story collections. However, the editor at Doubleday enquired after all those Martian shorts he had seen of Ray's and wondered if Ray had a Martian novel in him. Ray, reportedly, went away and decided to write a 'fix-up' novel weaving a more coherent theme into a number of his earlier Mars stories and so The Martian Chronicles (1950) came to being. The next day Doubleday accepted the pitch and reportedly Bradbury got US$750 (1950) or US$18,500 (about £15,000) in 2025 value. He also pitched for The Illustrated Man as another fix-up collection and also received US$750 for that.
This collection was short-listed for the International Fantasy Award (the pre-cursor to the World Fantasy Award) in 1952 and so is a testament as to its reception when originally published.
The collection had sufficient a reputation that there was a film adaptation in 1969 that used the framing prologue and epilogue (Rod Steiger plays the Illustrated Man) with three of the shorts adapted: 'The Veldt', 'The Long Rain', and 'The Last Night of the World'. I saw this three or four decades ago and my memory of it is that it was a fine film. Do seek it out from a streaming service if you can, and if not then hope that a decent convention (one that does not predominantly rely on gawd-awful panels but has things like a film programme stream) screens it.
Five stories were also adapted in the US for the TV show The Ray Bradbury Theater. There have been other story adaptations especially to radio.
Finally, for serious scholars or collectors who like to know their books' detailed provenances, a brief word about this 2025 Harper Collins edition. It is in fact a reprint of the 2008 Harper Voyager edition and is billed as such. So, how come do we have 2025 in the publication details heading this review? Well, this edition appears in Harper Collins Fiction Catalogue for January to June 2025 as coming out in April 2025. However it is exactly the same in livery, copyright page, etc as the 2008 edition with just two difference: first the price has gone up by £2 (as noted on the back cover) and the inside front page with Ray Bradbury's brief, summary biography notes that the man died in 2012, which is a neat trick for an edition the copyright page says came out in 2008 (perhaps the Illustrated Man's time-travelling tattooist struck?).
Further, the 2008 edition itself has the same cover livery as the 2005 Harper Perennial (a sister imprint of Harper Voyager) edition. Also the 2005 Perennial, 2008 Harper Voyager and the 2025 version all have the same ISBN despite their (minor) differences. In short multiple editions, and not just reprints, abound but the publisher has not always made this clear on the copyright page: nonetheless, that we have so many editions and reprints is a testimony as to this collection's longevity.
Highly recommended.
Jonathan Cowie
You can see Jonathan's other review of this from nearly two decades ago here.
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