Fetch The Illustrated Man Drafted By Ray Bradbury Manuscript

stumbled across this short story collection when searching for horror literature online, However, the stories in "The Illustrated Man" are not straight up horror they're more like scifi stories and predictions on what life will look likeyears from its publication date.

The narrative frame of the stories goes like this: A man, covered in tattoos, tells another man that he stumbles across to not look too deeply at his tattoos because they all tell stories that come true.
Needless to say, the other man can't help watching and that's when the narration begins,
I very much felt like Ray Bradbury had a way too pessimistic view on the future, Basically, we are all going to destroy Earth and each other, or at least only bad things will happen such as us burning all books dealing with horror or killing each other in nuclear wars.

That being said, I did find some of the stories very interesting especially the ones that deal with religion, Bradbury has some interesting ideas that got me curious, and as is the case with most short story collections, I loved some stories whereas others didn't really speak to me.
One of the great joys of exploring old Science Fiction is coming across stories like the best works in this book, stories that make you wonder how you could possibly have gone so long without reading them.


Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit, which is deservedly famous, However to my jaded readers' eye some of his short stories deliver more bang for buck, more emotional punch per word.
Of course, not all the works in this book are great or even good, and like almost every short story collection I have read there is the occasional turd floating in what is an otherwise inviting pool.


The first story in this collection however is a gem, Kaleidoscope is a tale of the doomed crew of a ship that has torn open, sending them careening into the vacuum in their spacesuits with no hope of rescue or survival, only radio linking them as they drift further apart

We watch as the men come to terms with their deaths, assess their own lives and reflect on the lives of their fellow crew.
There is anger, sadness, regret, joy and acceptance in this poignant and touching tale, and I ate it up,

As an opener for a collection it's a real winner, a genuine classic,

From here we travel around the solar system and into the far future, In The Long Rain Bradbury tells an engaging story of a crashed crew on a Venus where the neverending rain drives visitors insane, and The City is an interesting tale of a millennialong search for vengeance.


Bradbury also engages in some particularly interesting explorations of religious faith in a science fiction context, All these ruminations, in The Man and The Fire Balloons, are from a Christian perspective, but Bradbury was raised a Baptist and writes convincingly from the deist mindset.
The Fire Balloons in particular is an interesting story of Christian missionaries going to Mars, where they must choose between ministering to the humans there or attempting to convert the strange ethereal natives of the red planet.


Like many of his contemporaries Bradbury's storytelling is refreshingly direct, There's little narrative artifice here, other than some lovely turns of phrase and some silkysmooth writing,

The central binding thread that the stories are the changing, storytelling tattoos of the 'Illustrated Man' is nice, but both unnecessary and underutilized.
The stories themselves stand without the need for a common segue and the tattooed man idea feels tacked on,

Of course, being a short story collection, there are a few weak stories in here, tainting the water somewhat, For me maybe a third of the book is comprised of weaker material, The Veldt a tale of technology warping children and our dangerous reliance on tech in general didnt really fly for me, and The Highway a seeming reflection on the differences between city and country life and perceptions of what civilization is also left me cold.
The penultimate story, Zero Hour also seemed a little trite, although it is hard to tell with older SF whether this is due to so many similar stories having been written since, turning an original idea into cliche.


Being as these stories were written inthere are a few telltale anachronisms that are common in works of the era, something that I personally love spotting in SF of this vintage.


The most noticeable of these is the ubiquity of smoking, It seems Bradbury simply couldnt imagine a world where people without nicotine addicts, and in his stories spaceship crew chainsmoke inside their vessels, and time travellers buy cartons of cigarettes on trips to the past.


Other classics SF hallmarks are present such as tape decks being used in farfuture societies, and advanced machines being comprised of cogs, gears and hydraulics.
It all seems very quaint now, although I suppose in a millennia or two we may well look back on Iain M.
Banks' superAIs and fieldpowered drones as being hopelessly dated,

Overall though, the good in The Illustrated Man strongly outweighs the bad, I urge you not to wait as long as I did before reading this several of the stories in here are genuine classics of the genre, and they are well worth your time.


.I liked about half of the stories and did not like the other half, So I would give this collection,stars. Although I am not a regular reader of science fiction, I did read The Martian Chronicles on recommendations from Goodreads reviews, and liked it immensely I gave itstars.
Some of the stories in The Martian Chronicles seemed to be timeless, even though they were written in the lates, In contrast a number of these stories written around the same time period seemed to be either dated, and/or I did not find them to be all that interesting.
Both of those observations are admittedly subjective, and certainly Ray Bradbury is a great author,

There was one short story, The Exiles, that hadthings that interested me:
, In this story written in, the yearis referred to! “War begets war, Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the yearthey outlawed our books”,
. In this story, books are burned by the authorities, Much like in Fahrenheitthat was published one year after this collection,
. In the same story, a captain of the ship who is on his way to Mars pulls out books from his vault in which he tells his crew members Martians are killing some of them on the rocket using techniques derived from these books.
Names of the books and authors are mentioned, I just found it interestingsort of a Whos Who of the macabre and spooky and scary, Here is the passage:
From the captain: “Twenty nights I was stabbed, butchered, a screaming bat pinned to a surgical mat, a thing rotting underground in a black box bad, wicked dreams.
Our whole crew dreamed of witchthings and werethings, vampires, and phantoms, things they couldnt know anything about, Why Because books on such ghastly subjects were destroyed a century ago, By law. Forbidden for anyone to own the grisly volumes, These books you see here are the last copies, kept for historical purposes in the locked museum vaults, of theth andth century of the supernatural, ”

Smith bent to read the dusty titles:
“Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe Dracula by Bram Stoker Frankenstein by Mary Shelley The Turn of the Screw by Henry James The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving

Rappacinis Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne An Occurrence at Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll The Willows by Algernon Blackwood The Wizard of Oz by L.
Frank Baum The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth by H, P. Lovecraft. And more! Books by Walter de la Mare, Wakefield, Harvey, Wells, Asquith, Huxleyall forbidden authors, All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned!”

The Illustrated Man is presented as a prologue to the collection and is a short story at the beginning and end of the collection.
He unwittingly had tattoos drawn on parts of his body by a witch and he is roaming the earth to seek her out, I guess to destroy her, because she has destroyed his life.
He meets some people, they like him, but then they stare at his illustrated body covered with intricate drawing that turn into little movies of a sort and they see themselves in the movies being hurt and/or killed, so they tell the Illustrated Man to get the hell away from them.
Thestories in this collection are on his body,

Of theshort stories, the ones that I gave,or higher half of them were:
The Veldt,stars
Kaleidoscope,stars
The Other Foot,stars
The Highway,.
stars
The Visitor,.stars
Marionettes, Inc,stars
The City,stars
Zero Hour,stars
The Rocket,stars

The paperback version of this book, first published in, as ofhad gone throughprintings.


s from among many!:
sitelink sfsite. com/b/man. htm
From blog sites:
sitelink conceptualfiction. com/illu I did not know this: It is worth remembering that this author, whose life spanned the period from the introduction of the Model T Ford to the most modern and streamlined hybrid vehicles, never learned to drive a car.
He is a proud technophobe who also scorns computers, the Internet and ATMs,
sitelink blogspot. com/
sitelink wordpress. com/
.