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’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. 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.

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 grey dust settling over a forgotten outpost on a road that leads nowhere the pungent odor of Jupiter on a returning father’s clothing. Here are eighteen startling visions as keen as the tattooist’s needle and as colorful as the inks that indelibly stain the body. The Illustrated Manis classic Ray Bradbury – a collection of tales that breathe and move, animated by sharp, intaken breath and flexing muscle.

The illustrated man stories