“It was a warm afternoon when I first met the illustrated man.”
This is a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury first published in 1951. I think, but I am not sure, that many of the stories here were kind of scurf or detritus from his early years, looking for a home. So the packaging them together here gave them a way to live in a collection that might otherwise not work to celebrate their individual status, especially the ones that feel especially old.
The frame story involves a narrator, who reminds me most of the speaker from the Percy Shelley poem “Ozymandias” who “met a traveller from an antique land” who tells him of seeing the fallen statues of Ozymandias in the desert. Here the Illustrated Man is a heavily tattooed man who has otherwise worked at various carnivals. We don’t know much about him except that he has never kept a job for very long. He insists that the narrator look at his tattoos, which clearly portray elements of stories that the rest of the book will share. If you think that these stories will be particularly connected thematically, they won’t. There’s a lot of good ones here, and some bad ones, but there’s definitely not any kind of cohesive collection. The title story, not the same as the frame, is among the best, where we find out that the former strong man in a carnival who falls in and out of love, gains a lot of weight, and must get tattooed to stay employable ends up meeting a woman who will imbue his body with meaning through the tattoos. It’s a pseudo-fantasy story that has a mysterious mood to it. Other of the stories are more straight forward metal rockets to Mars kinds of stories. There’s a story here where all the Black people on Earth have moved to Mars and set up colonies, ala separatist or immigration movements post Civil War, only to find out that Earthlings (whites) blew themselves up and need help now. There’s a story about a man who buys a robotic clone of himself, only to find that technology comes with consequences. There’s a lot of stories about people taking rockets somewhere, to some end. The most famous story I would think is “The Veldt” which is about a kind of holodeck like device that can begin to manifest the illusions. It’s not as good as the later collections of as cohesive as something like The Martian Chronicles, but it’s got its highlights.
