The unnamed narrator is on a walking holiday in Wisconsin. Over the brow of a hill comes a stranger. The narrator invites him to share his simple dinner. Relaxing in the sun, the stranger takes off his shirt to reveal that his body is absolutely covered in wonderful tattoos, lurid El Greco designs painted in sulphurous colours, inked into him by a crazy old woman who, he claims, was a traveller from the future. The illustrated man has tried every way he can to remove them – scraping them, using acid – nothing works. Not only this, but after sundown the tattoos start moving, each one telling a wondrous story.

This is the rather wonderful framing device which loosely introduces this collection of eighteen science fiction short stories. There are two editions. The America edition has the following stories:

1. The Veldt
2. Kaleidoscope
3. The Other Foot
4. The Highway
5. The Man
6. The Long Rain
7. The Rocket Man
8. The Fire Balloons
9. The Last Night of the World
10. The Exiles
11. No Particular Night or Morning
12. The Fox and the Forest
13. The Visitor
14. The Concrete Mixer
15. Marionettes, Inc.
16. The City
17. Zero Hour
18. The Rocket

The British edition – which I own – omits ‘The Rocket Man’, ‘The Fire Balloons’, ‘The Exiles’ and ‘The Concrete Mixer’, and adds ‘Usher II’ from The Martian Chronicles and ‘The Playground’, to produce this running order:

1. Prologue: The Illustrated Man
2. The Veldt
3. Kaleidoscope
4. The Other Foot
5. The Highway
6. The Man
7. The Long Rain
8. Usher II
9. The Last Night of the World
10. The Rocket
11. No Particular Night or Morning
12. The Fox and the Forest
13. The Visitor
14. Marionettes, Inc.
15. The City
16. Zero Hour
17. The Playground
18. Epilogue: Leaving the Illustrated Man

The stories

1. The Veldt – setting: earth in the future

Mr and Mrs George Hadley live in a soundproofed Happylife Home, which is staffed with gadgets and machinery which does their living for them – baths which run on command, shoelace tiers, food which appears on the table when commanded, and a state-of-the-art nursery where their two children, Peter (10) and Wendy spend hours conjuring up three dimensional scenes from fairy tales and children’s stories.

Recently they’ve been recreating the same scene from the African veldt over and gain, complete with lions feasting on something in the distance. Slowly George realises how spoilt and addicted to the nursery the children have become, and announces he is going to turn off the electric house and take them all on holiday to a real home where they’ll have to cook and manage for themselves.

As he turns things off the children go mental with anger and horror and tears and beg for just a last few minutes in the nursery. George relents as he and his wife go upstairs to pack. Then they hear screams from the nursery, run down and into it only for… the children to slam and lock the door behind them. Only then do they look around and see the lions advancing towards them, jaws slavering, under the hot African sun.

2. Kaleidoscope – setting: space

A rocket explodes and the half dozen astronauts inside are scattered in all directions. For a while they keep in radio contact, bitching, crying, lamenting, recounting their lives, as one heads towards the moon, one gets snared in the Myrmidon meteor shower which circles earth endlessly and the main character, Hollis, is pulled towards earth, burning up on entry into the atmosphere, the cause of wonder as a little boy out for a walk with his mom points up at a shooting star streaking across the sky.

Hollis looked to see, but saw nothing. There were only the great diamonds and sapphires and emerald
mists and velvet inks of space, with God’s voice mingling among the crystal fires. There was a kind of
wonder and imagination in the thought of Stone going off in the meteor swarm, out past Mars for years
and coming in toward Earth every five years, passing in and out of the planet’s ken for the next million
centuries, Stone and the Myrmidone cluster eternal and unending, shifting and shaping like the
kaleidoscope colors when you were a child and held the long tube to the sun and gave it a twirl…

3. The Other Foot – Mars

A striking if simplistic story set in 1985. In 1965 black people were sent in spaceships to colonise Mars. This they have done and now live under blue skies, in townships identical to those they left in the American South. Twenty years later, rumour spreads that the first spaceship from earth is due to arrive. One black man, Willie, rouses a mob, making them remember all the humiliations, discrimination, violence and murder black people suffered on earth. He prepares a noose for whichever white men step off the spaceship, and gets fellow citizens to begin marking out reservations for ‘whites only’ in cinemas, public parks, on trams.

But when the spaceship finally lands in front of a mob of angry vengeful blacks, the knackered old white man who emerges in the door announces that earth has suffered a prolonged atomic war in which every country, city and town has been obliterated. The survivors patched together the spaceship he’s come in and now are begging the Martian settlers to use their old unused rockets, to come and rescue the survivors, to ferry them to Mars where mankind can start again.

The white man begs and slowly the noose falls from Willie Johnson’s hand, and he tells the crowd that this is an opportunity to restart the relationship between the races again, from a clean slate.

4. The Highway – earth in the future

Hernando is a poor peasant living next to a highway which runs through his country from America. Over the years scraps from rich cars have flown off into his property – a hub cap he and his wife use as a bowl, the wheel from a car which crashed into the river, but whose rubber he cut into shoes. He is dirt poor. One day there is a flood of cars heading north, which reduces to a trickle and then… the last car. Young pleasure seekers are in it, a man and five women, in a topless convertible. It is pouring with rain, but they are all crying.

They ask him for water for the radiator, which he fetches and pours in, asking what’s up, why the flood of cars north? It is the nuclear war, the young man cries. The nuclear war has come, it is the end of the world. And they offer him some money and drive off north… Hernando goes back to his wife in their hut.

It becomes ever clearer that Bradbury is not so interested in ‘plot’ or ‘character’ as in poetic description, playing with fanciful similes and metaphors.

He returned with a hub lid full of water. This, too, had been a gift from the highway. One afternoon it had sailed like a flung coin into his field, round and glittering. The car to which it belonged had slid on, oblivious to the fact that it had lost a silver eye…

5. The Man – strange planet

The first earth rocket expedition to Planet Forty-three in Star System Three lands and tired Captain Hart is pissed off that the natives just continue going about their work without coming to see them. He sends Lieutenant Martin into town to find out why and Martin returns a few hours later with news that this civilisation has just had a massive experience: the Holy Man whose return they have been awaiting for thousands of years just appeared, walking among them, preaching pace and healing the sick.

Captain Hart is at first completely dismissive, accusing his rival space captains, Burton or Ashley, of having arrived earlier and spreading this ridiculous story in order to pre-empt commercial contracts. But then the two other spaceships turn up badly damaged with most of their crews killed by a solar storm. So… it must be true! It must be him!!

Captain Hart, now persuaded that it is him, returns to the city, but when the mayor can’t tell him where He is, Hart turns nasty, threatening, then shooting the Mayor in the arm. Convinced that ‘He’ has moved on, Hart vows to travel on across the universe to find Him. He blasts off, leaving Lieutenant Martin and some other crew members behind. The mayor turns to them and says: Now, I can take you to meet Him.

6. The Long Rain – Venus

A spaceship lands on Venus. The four survivors struggle through the incessant torrential rain to find a ‘sun dome’, where there’ll be warmth, shelter and food.

I get it now that Bradbury likes stories (cheesy, teenage, boom-boom stories) but what really gets him going is descriptions. The setups and stories may be laughable, but you can’t help reacting to the vividness of his imagining.

The rain continued. It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain; it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles; it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains. It came by the pound and the ton, it hacked at the jungle and cut the trees like scissors and shaved the grass and tunneled the soil and molted the bushes. It shrank men’s hands into the hands of wrinkled apes; it rained a solid glassy rain, and it never stopped.

At one point a monstrous electrical storm passes overhead and burns one of the men to a crisp. The description of his burned corpse really leaped out at me.

The body was twisted steel, wrapped in burned leather. It looked like a wax dummy that had been
thrown into an incinerator and pulled out after the wax had sunk to the charcoal skeleton. Only the teeth were white, and they shone like a strange white bracelet dropped half through a clenched black fist.

Like John Donne. Or photos of Iraqis incinerated on the Highway of Death. The spacemen stagger on, mentally disintegrating, first going round in a big circle to find the spaceship again, then stumbling for miles in search of a Sun Dome only to find one that has been attacked and ransacked by Venusians (who come from the vast sea, apparently, kidnap all the men and elaborately drown them), one man goes mad and sits face up in the rain to drown, another refuses to go any further and shoots himself, the last survivor walks on, going slowly mad, until he does arrive at a Sun Dome and is saved.

7. Usher II – Mars

This is one of the two stories which look ahead to Fahrenheit 451 in that they describe a future earth (in the year 2005) in which a repressive culture is burning all books, wiping out all traces of imaginative literature (and even children’s books) in the name of Moral Purity.

Literary-minded William Stendahl has fled to Mars where, with the help of a sidekick Pike, he commissions an architect to build a replica of the grim Gothic house which features in Edgar Allan Poe’s short story ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, using robots to recreate bats, vampires and so on, using radiation to blast the landscape around it, and machines to even block out the sunlight to create an environment of menacing gloom.

Within hours of building it an Inspector of Moral Climates named Garrett turns up to demand it be torn down. Pike and Stendhal murder Garrett and quickly build a robot to replace him. But it turns out the thing called Garrett was already a robot, so they’ve simply replaced one robot with another.

Stendhal requests to hold a party in the house before it is demolished and, with wild improbability, Garrett accepts. So that evening Garrett and half a dozen other Moral Cleansers (including a number of earnest young lady reformers) attend the part – at which Pike and Stendhal arrange for them one by one to be killed in re-enactments of grim murders from Poe’s most lurid tales.

Finally Stendhal reduces Garrett to begging for his life as – bound and chained to the wall – Stendhal bricks him up into a vault, to be buried alive. As the helicopter carrying Stendhal and Pike takes off, the house of Usher (II) cracks and collapses, just like the house in the Poe story.

Like a Hammer horror story – but on Mars!

8. The Last Night of the World – earth in the future

This is one of a handful of stories where Bradbury almost completely neglects plot in order to create a strangely empty, hollowed-out piece of dialogue. We overhear the disembodied voices of a married couple who have both woken from a dream in which they knew that the world was going to end. So did everyone else at their workplaces. The go about their day, eat a meal, lock up the house and go to bed to wait.

9. The Rocket – earth in the future

Reminiscent of the deceptively simple stories about Mr Palomar written by Italo Calvino in the 1970s. In the future space travel becomes more and more accessible. Fiorello Bodoni, a poor junkyard owner, has saved $3,000 to enable one member of his family to take a rocket trip into outer space. Trouble is the family can’t agree who should go – they draw straws but whoever wins immediately attracts the resentment of the rest of the family.

One day an industrialist offers him the shell of a superannuated rocket, to melt down for scrap. Instead Bodoni uses his money to rig up car motors to the bottom of the rocket, and cine projection screens across the portholes then invites his children on board, makes them sit in the chairs, fires up the car motors and then plays the films of moon and stars and planets passing by, thus tricking them into believing they really have had a trip in space.

10. No Particular Night or Morning

Like The Last Night of the World this one is about psychology with little real plot, and feels strangely empty and disturbing.

On a space ship heading out from earth, there’s a full crew which includes Clemens and a guy named Hitchcock. Over the next 36 hours or so Hitchcock slowly goes to pieces. He becomes convinced nobody exists if he is not looking at them. He becomes convinced there is no space, no stars, no earth. He confides all these paranoid delusions to Clemens who he also thinks ceases to exist when he, Hitchcock, isn’t looking at him.

Hitchcock explains that he was a wannabe author who finally got a short story published but when he saw his name on the cover – Joseph Hitchcock – he realised it wasn’t him. It was someone else. There was no him.

These delusions are exacerbated when a meteor crashes through the skin of the rocket, killing one spaceman and injuring Hitchcock before the ship’s autorepairs seal up the hole. Hitchcock is convinced the meteor was out to get him.

Twelve hours later the alarm bells ring and one of the crew tells Clemens that Hitchcock put on a spacesuit and exited the ship. Now he’s left a million miles behind. For a while they hear him coming through on the spacesuit radio.

‘No more space ship now. Never was any. No people. No people in all the universe. Never were any. No planets. No stars.’ That’s what he said. And then he said something about his hands and feet and legs. ‘No hands,’ he said. ‘I haven’t any hands any more. Never had any. No feet. Never had any. Can’t prove it. No body. Never had any. No lips. No face. No head. Nothing. Only space. Only space. Only the gap.’

11. The Fox and the Forest – earth in the future and past

It is 2155 and the world is at war. New, hydrogen-plus bombs are being constructed, as well as germ warfare bombs involving leprosy. The future culture doing this is intensely militarised and repressive. At the same time, time travel machines and holidays are becoming common (don’t ask me about the logic of both happening at once).

Roger Kristen is deeply involved in building the nuclear bomb and his wife Ann, in building leprosy bombs. They sign up for one of the Time Travel holidays and select 1938 as a good year. But once they have been transported back to 1938 New York, they change their clothes, appearance and papers and high tail it to Mexico.

Only trouble is they have been followed. As the story opens one of the Searchers, Simms, confronts them in a bar. It is futile trying to run. He or a colleague will find them. Roger agrees to return on condition his wife can stay. Deal, says Simms. But next morning, instead of keeping his promise to Simms, Roger runs him down and kills him in the hire car.

Released pending further investigation, Roger and Ann fall in with a rambunctious American film crew who are down in Mexico on a recce to make a movie. The brash, fast-talking director Joe Melton invites them to join in with the crew, eat meals, maybe Ann can have a role in the movie, she’s pretty good-looking.

Right up to the moment when Melton reveals… that he and the entire crew are also Searchers. Roger’s work is simply too valuable to let him go. Roger pulls out a gun and shoots some of the crew before he’s overpowered. The hotel management come banging on the door at which point Melton reveals that the camera is a time travel device: one of the crew turns it on and all the people from the future vanish, leaving the hotel room completely bare.

This is the second story to reference the notion that in the future, the authorities will destroy culture and, in particular, burn books.

We don’t like this world of 2155. We want to run away from his work at the bomb factory, I from my position with disease-culture units. Perhaps there is a chance for us to escape, to run for centuries into a wild country of years where they will never find and bring us back to burn our books, censor our thoughts, scald our minds with fear, march us, scream at us with radios . . .

12. The Visitor – Mars

Saul Williams is suffering from the incurable disease of ‘blood rust’, and so like all its other victims he is shipped up to Mars in a space rocket, left with survival rations and abandoned. All along the shore of the barren Martian ocean he sees other people like him, coughing up blood, abandoned, solitary, anti-social.

Along the shores of the dead sea, like so many emptied bottles flung up by some long-gone wave, were the huddled bodies of sleeping men.

Then a rocket arrives (carrying the usual regular rations) and a new young man, Leonard Mark. Turns out Leonard is a telepath and can create a kind of cyber-reality for people. For Saul he creates the impressions that a) Saul is in the middle of hustling bustling New York City and then b) that he is swimming in a rural stream, as he did when a boy back in Illinois.

Trouble is some of the other men have been affected by the disturbances and seen images of New York, too. They all want a piece of Leonard. Saul fights them off and carries Leonard up to a cave. There follow various trick moments – like when Leonard makes himself invisible to Saul – moments out of an episode of the Twilight Zone or Star Trek.

While they’re arguing about fantasies, the other men find the cave and threaten Saul. They want to share Leonard and his amazing ability. Eventually they end up fighting over him, one of them pulls a gun and shoots a couple of the rivals before Saul jumps on him, they wrestle with the gun and – like in a thousand hokey TV episodes – the gun goes off, killing… yes, you’ve guessed it! – Leonard, the man they all wanted to save. Golly, Isn’t life ironic! Aren’t humans their own worst enemies!

13. Marionettes, Inc. – earth now

A surprising anticipation of The Stepford Wives (which I’ve reviewed elsewhere). It’s based on the conversation of two men who suffer from henpecking wives. Usually Braling’s wife keeps him where she can see him so his friend Smith is surprised when he is allowed out for an evening.

Braling tells Smith there is a secret new company named Marionettes, Inc.  which will make a robot duplicate of you. A month ago he had a duplicate made of himself, keeps it in a trunk in the cellar, but brings it out now and then, prepares it to play him for the evening, while he slips out. It’s such a perfect replica his wife suspects nothing. Braling excitedly tells his friend he’s planning to go to Rio de Janeiro for a month while the robot duplicate robot covers for him at home. The only way to detect the difference is that, if you get up really close, you can hear the tick-tick-tick of the internal machinery.

Smith also has problems with his wife who, for some reason, has become extremely affectionate over the past month, petting and pinching and sitting on his lap and tiring him out. Braling gives him Marionettes, Inc.’s card and Smith goes home determined to get a copy made of himself, so he also can slip away from his wife.

But when Smith gets home and looks at his bank statement he is shocked to find $10,000 is missing from their account. He has an awful thought, bends over the sleeping form of his voluptuous wife, Nettie and… hears the fateful ticking… His wife has beaten him to it, and had a duplicate made of herself! God knows where the real Nettie is off gallyvanting!

Meanwhile Braling gets home and takes over from the duplicate Braling only for a classic ‘horror’ scenario to play out, namely when Braling I gets Braling II down into the cellar, the robot refuses to get into the trunk. He’s taken a fancy to Braling’s wife. In fact he likes being out and about in the air and hates being locked up. In fact…. he grabs Braling and stuffs him into the trunk, locks it, climbs up out of the cellar and locks the cellar door. Goes upstairs to the bedroom, slips into bed next to sleeping Mrs. Braling and gives her an affectionate kiss. Who’s to say the robot won’t make a better husband 🙂

14. The City – another planet, the future

This is another sci-fi horror story, the SF equivalent of a shilling shocker. A spaceship lands on an unexplored planet, and comes upon an abandoned city.

What makes the story novel and impressive is that it is told from the point of view of the city, which in fact is more like a live organism, with hearing devices, smelling devices, a central brain and a big mouth.

It turns out that (somehow) the inhabitants were all wiped out thousands of years ago by humans using biological weapons (don’t think about the logic of this too much; all that matters is that the reader submits themselves to the vehemence of the city’s hatred for humans).

So now it entices in the spacemen, who are tentatively exploring it in their spacesuit. Then it captures them – explains just what it is going to do – tips them down a chute into an abattoir-cum-torture chamber where they are eviscerated, disembowelled, and bled dry, and then…

In the kind of cheapjack, catchpenny but very effective way of these kind of horror stories, the city rebuilds them as perfect robot replicas of their original selves. Sends them robotically back to their ship, carrying with them a clutch of germ warfare bombs. They will return to earth and drop them over the entire globe… thus wiping out mankind!!

15. Zero Hour – earth now

This is a genuinely creepy story, the only one in the collection which genuinely gave me the shivers.

It’s told from the point of view of stereotypical 1950s American suburban mum, Mrs Morris, whose little girl Mink is playing out in the yard with a bunch of kids who have developed a new game, which they are calling ‘the invasion’. Bradbury spookily conveys effective facts like the way that kids going through puberty are excluded from the game, and how the game involves placing metal household objects, knives and forks etc, in particular positions, while drawing geometrical shapes in the dust and incanting chants or spells.

In casual phone calls Mrs Morris discovers that all the other prepubescent kids are playing the same game, even in cities a long way away (a call from a friend who’s moved to the other side of America). Mink tells Mrs Morris it’s all being done at the behest of someone called ‘Drill’. All the children talk about ‘Zero Hour’ being five o’clock.

At which hour there is an eerie silence across the city. Mrs Morris’s husband comes home from work (‘Hi, honey, I’m home’) and, in a sudden panic, she forces him inside, and then pelts him up into the attic, slamming and locking the door.

All the little revelations and knowledges and sense that had bothered her all day and which she had logically and carefully and sensibly rejected and censored. Now it exploded in her and shook her to bits.

They hear voices downstairs in the house. Lots of voices. The clumping of heavy feet. Her husband shouts out ‘Who’s there?’ but his wife begs him to be quiet. Up the stairs come the clumping steps.

Heavy footsteps, heavy, heavy,very heavy footsteps, came up the stairs. Mink leading them.
‘Mom?’ A hesitation. ‘Dad?’ A waiting, a silence.
Humming. Footsteps toward the attic. Mink’s first.
They trembled together in silence in the attic, Mr. and Mrs. Morris. For some reason the electric  humming, the queer cold light suddenly visible under the door crack, the strange odor and the alien sound of eagerness in Mink’s voice finally got through to Henry Morris too. He stood, shivering, in the dark silence, his wife beside him.
‘Mom! Dad!’
Footsteps. A little humming sound. The attic lock melted. The door opened. Mink peered inside, tall
blue shadows behind her.
‘Peekaboo,’ said Mink.

Wow. This story sent a genuine thrill of fear through me.

16. The Playground – earth now

A similar effect is created by The Playground. This is pretty much a pure horror story. A middle-aged man, Charles Underhill, used to be mercilessly bullied as a boy. Now he’s married with a son of his own. He and his son regularly walk past the neighbourhood playground.

Charles sees it as a place of incredible violence, with kids smacking, stamping and beating each other. It can’t be that bad can it?

There were creams, sharp visions, children dashing, children fighting, pummeling, bleeding, screaming!

I think this is a sort of hallucination he has, which a) reflects his own neuroses, his own extreme fears but also b) sets the tone of exaggeration and extremity which artfully prepares the reader for what comes next.

His wife, Carol, thinks little Jim should be encouraged to play there with the other kids. If it’s a bit violent, well, that’s all part of growing up.

One particular kid keeps mocking him and calling him whenever he walks past, as if he has a secret, as if he knows something.

Eventually it comes out that this kid has the body of a boy but it contains the mind of an adult neighbour, Marshall. When Charles goes with Jim and his wife next go to the playground, in a terrifying moment, Charles’s soul or whatever it is that lives and perceives inside our bodies, is exchanged with his son’s.

Suddenly he finds himself on top of the slide – where his son had climbed – terrified of the height and of the taunting children around him – and looking over at the playground fence he sees two adults, his wife and himself!! And then he sees them turning and walking away, leaving him, abandoning him to a world of taunts and bullying.

He screamed. He looked at his hands, in a panic of realisation. The small hands, the thin hands…
‘Hi,’ cried the Marshall boy, and bashed him in the mouth. ‘Only twelve years here!’
Twelve years! thought Mr Underhill, trapped. And time is different to children. A year is like ten years. No, not twelve years of childhood ahead of him, but a century, a century of this!

I don’t think it has any sci-fi element at all. It is an ‘astounding’ tale, an ‘astonishing’ tale, but surely a horror story more than science fiction.

Fairly obvious but these last two stories – which are possibly the creepiest – are so in part because they’re about children – those creatures we think we know but who are often so alien, with their own worlds and mindsets – so often the subject of horror stories, books, movies, from The Midwich Cuckoos to The Exorcist.

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The American stories

The Rocket Man – earth in the future

14-year-old Doug narrates the three-monthly return visits of his father, a Rocket Man, and the troubled relationship of his parents, his father always vowing to give up flying to Mars or Venus but always, after a week or so at home, getting twitchy and looking at the stars, his mother for the past ten years imagining he is already dead, because the opposite – actually loving him in the here and now – is too risky, risks the terrible pain of losing him on his next mission.

This account of a troubled marriage through the eyes of a wide-eyed teenager is remarkably effective. And has moments of really vivid writing. Doug asks to see his dad in his uniform.

It was glossy black with silver buttons and silver rims to the heels of the black boots, and it looked as if someone had cut the arms and legs and body from a dark nebula, with little faint stars glowing through it. It fit as close as a glove fits to a slender long hand, and it smelled like cool air and metal and space. It smelled of fire and time.

Unlike Isaac Asimov, Bradbury can write.

The Fire Balloons – Mars in the future

Some priests are the first to make the flight to Mars. As usual an alien world turns out remarkably like America, everyone can breathe fine, the sky is blue and the mayor complains about all the Irish navvies who have turned up to do the heavy labour and turned the place into the Wild West with saloons and loose women.

But it is the native Martians who interest Father Peregrine. These are floating blue globes, with no bodies or limbs, who don’t speak or communicate. But the look of them transports him back to childhood memories of his grandfather letting of big red, white and blue balloons to celebrate 4th July.

Father Peregrine makes his colleagues climb up into the mountains in pursuit of the blue globe Martians, and are saved by them when there’s an avalanche. Convinced they are intelligent beings with free will, and therefore capable of right and wrong, and therefore in need of ‘saving’, he gets his grumbling colleagues to build a chapel for the blue globes up in the mountains.

But at the climax of the story the blue globs come to Father Peregrine and, using telepathy, explain very simply that they are peaceful and virtuous and have no need of saving.

Obviously there’s a SF component to the setting and story, but the imaginative force of the story really comes from Peregrine’s poignant memories of being a boy and watching his his grandfather letting beautiful coloured balloons fly into the sky over small town America.

The Exiles – Mars

This a weird story which starts strange and then gets weirder. It is 2120. A shiny spaceship is en route to Mars crewed by shiny white American jock spacemen. But they are all having florid hallucinations – bats in space, arms turning into snakes, imagining they are wolves – and dying, of shock, of heart failure.

‘Bats, needles, dreams, men dying for no reason. I’d call it witchcraft in another day. But this is the year 2120!’

Since the story opens with three witches on Mars reciting spells familiar to any literate person as being quotes from Shakespeare’s Macbeth the reader knows these affects are caused by witches. So far, so SF shocker. What’s interesting is it’s the third of the stories to refer to the idea that in the future, books are banned.

‘Our whole crew dreamed of witch-things and were-things, vampires and phantoms, things they couldn’t 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…  All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned!’

OK, this much I can accept. But the story then goes to an entirely new, delirious level, when it is revealed that the witches from Macbeth are there because Shakespeare is there! Shakespeare and Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft and all the other writers of horror and the supernatural whose books were burned back on earth – somehow, they are gods, they are immortal, and they fled earth when their creations were burned by a moralising puritanical civilisation, they fled to Mars to escape… and now the earthmen are coming to Mars.

So the core of the story is Edgar Allen Poe and Ambrose Bierce trying to recruit Charles Dickens for their army to oppose the invaders (he refuses, being in the midst of the Christmas celebrations in A Christmas Carol) along with Machen and Blackwood and all the other authors of the mysterious.

So when the spaceship lands, they summon up a vast army of snakes and monsters and fire to attack it. But then we switch to the spacemen’s point of view and they see… nothing at all. A bare uninhabited plain. And to mark their arrival the squeaky-clean-cut all-American captain decides they will burn the last copies of all those nonsense books, the last copies which he had brought on the ship.

And as they make a funeral pyre of The Wind In the Willows and The Outsider and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Wizard of Oz, and Pellucidar and The Land That Time Forgot and A Midsummer Night’s Dream, they hear thin distant screams… which are the screams of the souls of the authors perishing one by one.

What comes over is Bradbury’s investment in reading, in the imagination, in the wildest reaches of fantasy and horror – and his instinctive opposition to all those forces in Puritanical American society which are constantly trying to stamp it out.

The Concrete Mixer – Mars

The Martian Ettil Vrye refuses to join the Martian army preparing to go and invade earth. His wife, Tylla, is ashamed, his father-in-law is furious. (You can see how this isn’t really science fiction, it is human beings being described.)

It’s a would-be comic story in which Ettil is arrested, and charged with possessing earth science fiction comics, which are what have persuaded him the invasion is a bad idea. When the army threaten to throw him into a ditch of flaming oil he gives up and joins the army and flies through space in the fleet to invade earth.

But as they approach they get a radio message welcoming them. Earth is a peaceful federation now, has abolished all its atom bombs and has no weapons. There is a comic scene as the mayor of a California town makes a big welcome speech to the Martians as they emerge from their shiny spaceships, Miss California 1965 promises to give them all a big kiss and  Mr. Biggest Grapefruit in San Fernando Valley 1956 gives them all baskets of fresh fruit.

The Martians fraternise. Most of them love it and pair off with earth women to visit the movies and sit in the back row smooching. Ettil doesn’t fit in. He delivers satire about women in beauty parlours apparently being tortured by their hairdo headsets. He sits on a park bench and is propositioned by a young woman. When he won’t go to the movies with her she accuses him of being a communist. Then an old lady rattles a tambourine at him and asks whether he has been saved by the Lord.

Then he meets a movie producer, van Plank, who whisks him off to a bar, buys him cocktails, promises him a percentage of the take and some ‘peaches’ on the side, if he’ll be an adviser to his new movie project, MARTIAN INVASION OF EARTH. The Martians will be tall and handsome. All their women will be blonde. In a terrific scene a strong woman will save the spaceship when it’s holed by a meteor. there’ll be merchandising, obviously, a special martian doll at thirty bucks a throw.

Not to mention the brand new markets opening up on Mars for perfume, ladies hats, Dick Tracey comics and so on. The producer leads him back out onto the pavement, shakes hands, gets him to promise to be at the studio at 9 prompt tomorrow morning and disappears.

Ettil is left to realise that the invasion will fail because all the Martians will get drunk, be fed cocktails and hot dogs till they’re sick or got cirrhosis, gone blind from watching movies or squashed flat by elephant-sized American women. He walks towards the spaceship field, fantasising about taking the next ship back home and living out his days in his quiet house by a dignified canal sipping fine wine and reading peaceful books when… he hears the tooting of a horn and turns to find a car driven by a bunch of Californian kids, none older than 16, has spotted him and is driving full pelt to run him over, now that’s entertainment.

(And reminiscent, of course, of the classic scene in Fahrenheit 451 when the joyriders try to kill the protagonist, Montag – having already, apparently, run over and killed the book’s female lead, Clarissa.)

Epilogue

The epilogue is short enough to quote in its entirety and gives you a good sense of the simple style and vocabulary of most of the tales

IT WAS almost midnight. The moon was high in the sky now. The Illustrated Man lay motionless. I had seen what there was to see. The stories were told; they were over and done. There remained only that empty space upon the Illustrated Man’s back, that area of jumbled colors and shapes.

Now, as I watched, the vague patch began to assemble itself, in slow dissolvings from one shape to another and still another. And at last a face formed itself there, a face that gazed out at me from the colored flesh, a face with a familiar nose and mouth, familiar eyes.

It was very hazy. I saw only enough of the Illustration to make me leap up. I stood therein the moonlight, afraid that the wind or the stars might move and wake the monstrous gallery at my
feet. But he slept on, quietly.

The picture on his back showed the Illustrated Man himself, with his fingers about my neck, choking me to death. I didn’t wait for it to become clear and sharp and a definite picture.

I ran down the road in the moonlight. I didn’t look back. A small town lay ahead, dark and asleep. I knew that, long before morning, I would reach the town. . . .

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Thoughts

1. Many of his stories use science fiction tropes – most obviously the use of space ships to other worlds and  encounters with aliens. But Bradbury’s heart is really here on earth . And his stories’ deep roots are more in the horror and horror-fantasy tradition than in sci-fi, as such.

2. The stories are all told in amostly flat, spare prose – flat and plain like fairy stories.

The rocket men leaped out of their ship, guns ready. They stalked about, sniffing the air like hounds.
They saw nothing. They relaxed. The captain stepped forth last. He gave sharp commands. Wood was gathered, kindled, and a fire leapt up in an instant. The captain beckoned his men into a half circle about him.

… from whose white flatness occasionally burst vivid similes, or entire paragraphs of poetic prose.

And as if he had commanded a violent sea to change its course, to suck itself free from primeval beds,
the whirls and savage gouts of fire spread and ran like wind and rain and stark lightning over the sea
sands, down empty river deltas, shadowing and screaming, whistling and whining, sputtering and
coalescing toward the rocket which, extinguished, lay like a clean metal torch in the farthest hollow.

Sometimes he uses repetition of phrases and grammatical structures to intensify the moment or to create dream-like hallucinations. But for the most part it is a verbally, grammatically and lexically simplified style, well suited, in its simple-mindedness, to conveying the spooky, spine-chilling impact of his simple and sometimes terrifying horror stories.

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Related links

• The Illustrated Man online
• The Illustrated Man Wikipedia article
• Ray Bradbury’s website

Ray Bradbury reviews

1950 The Martian Chronicles
1951 The Illustrated Man – eighteen short stories which use the future, Mars and Venus as settings for what are essentially earth-bound tales of fantasy and horror
1953 Fahrenheit 451
1955 The October Country
1957 Dandelion Wine
1959 The Day It Rained Forever
1962 Something Wicked This Way Comes

Other science fiction reviews

1888 Looking Backward 2000-1887 by Edward Bellamy – Julian West wakes up in the year 2000 to discover a peaceful revolution has ushered in a society of state planning, equality and contentment
1890 News from Nowhere by William Morris – waking from a long sleep, William Guest is shown round a London transformed into villages of contented craftsmen

1895 The Time Machine by H.G. Wells – the unnamed inventor and time traveller tells his dinner party guests the story of his adventure among the Eloi and the Morlocks in the year 802,701
1896 The Island of Doctor Moreau by H.G. Wells – Edward Prendick is stranded on a remote island where he discovers the ‘owner’, Dr Gustave Moreau, is experimentally creating human-animal hybrids
1897 The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells – an embittered young scientist, Griffin, makes himself invisible, starting with comic capers in a Sussex village, and ending with demented murders
1898 The War of the Worlds – the Martians invade earth
1899 When The Sleeper Wakes/The Sleeper Wakes by H.G. Wells – Graham awakes in the year 2100 to find himself at the centre of a revolution to overthrow the repressive society of the future
1899 A Story of the Days To Come by H.G. Wells – set in the same London of the future described in the Sleeper Wakes, Denton and Elizabeth fall in love, then descend into poverty, and experience life as serfs in the Underground city run by the sinister Labour Corps

1901 The First Men in the Moon by H.G. Wells – Mr Bedford and Mr Cavor use the invention of ‘Cavorite’ to fly to the moon and discover the underground civilisation of the Selenites
1904 The Food of the Gods and How It Came to Earth by H.G. Wells – two scientists invent a compound which makes plants, animals and humans grow to giant size, leading to a giants’ rebellion against the ‘little people’
1905 With the Night Mail by Rudyard Kipling – it is 2000 and the narrator accompanies a GPO airship across the Atlantic
1906 In the Days of the Comet by H.G. Wells – a passing comet trails gasses through earth’s atmosphere which bring about ‘the Great Change’, inaugurating an era of wisdom and fairness, as told by narrator Willie Leadford
1908 The War in the Air by H.G. Wells – Bert Smallways, a bicycle-repairman from Bun Hill in Kent, is eye-witness to the outbreak of the war in the air which brings Western civilisation to an end
1909 The Machine Stops by E.M. Foster – people of the future live in underground cells regulated by ‘the Machine’ – until one of them rebels

1912 The Lost World by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle – Professor Challenger leads an expedition to a plateau in the Amazon rainforest where prehistoric animals still exist
1912 As Easy as ABC by Rudyard Kipling – set in 2065 in a world characterised by isolation and privacy, forces from the ABC are sent to suppress an outbreak of ‘crowdism’
1913 The Horror of the Heights by Arthur Conan Doyle – airman Captain Joyce-Armstrong flies higher than anyone before him and discovers the upper atmosphere is inhabited by vast jellyfish-like monsters
1914 The World Set Free by H.G. Wells – A history of the future in which the devastation of an atomic war leads to the creation of a World Government, told via a number of characters who are central to the change
1918 The Land That Time Forgot by Edgar Rice Burroughs – a trilogy of pulp novellas in which all-American heroes battle ape-men and dinosaurs on a lost island in the Antarctic

1921 We by Evgeny Zamyatin – like everyone else in the dystopian future of OneState, D-503 lives life according to the Table of Hours, until I-330 awakens him to the truth
1925 Heart of a Dog by Mikhail Bulgakov – a Moscow scientist transplants the testicles and pituitary gland of a dead tramp into the body of a stray dog, with disastrous consequences
1927 The Maracot Deep by Arthur Conan Doyle – a scientist, engineer and a hero are trying out a new bathysphere when the wire snaps and they hurtle to the bottom of the sea, there to discover…

1930 Last and First Men by Olaf Stapledon – mind-boggling ‘history’ of the future of mankind over the next two billion years
1932 Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
1938 Out of the Silent Planet by C.S. Lewis – baddies Devine and Weston kidnap Ransom and take him in their spherical spaceship to Malacandra aka Mars,

1943 Perelandra (Voyage to Venus) by C.S. Lewis – Ransom is sent to Perelandra aka Venus, to prevent a second temptation by the Devil and the fall of the planet’s new young inhabitants
1945 That Hideous Strength: A Modern Fairy-Tale for Grown-ups by C.S. Lewis– Ransom assembles a motley crew to combat the rise of an evil corporation which is seeking to overthrow mankind
1949 Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell – after a nuclear war, inhabitants of ruined London are divided into the sheep-like ‘proles’ and members of the Party who are kept under unremitting surveillance

1950 I, Robot by Isaac Asimov – nine short stories about ‘positronic’ robots, which chart their rise from dumb playmates to controllers of humanity’s destiny
1951 Foundation by Isaac Asimov – the first five stories telling the rise of the Foundation created by psychohistorian Hari Seldon to preserve civilisation during the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1952 Foundation and Empire by Isaac Asimov – two long stories which continue the future history of the Foundation set up by psychohistorian Hari Seldon as it faces down attack by an Imperial general, and then the menace of the mysterious mutant known only as ‘the Mule’
1953 Second Foundation by Isaac Asimov – concluding part of the ‘trilogy’ describing the attempt to preserve civilisation after the collapse of the Galactic Empire
1954 The Caves of Steel by Isaac Asimov – set 3,000 years in the future when humans have separated into ‘Spacers’ who have colonised 50 other planets, and the overpopulated earth whose inhabitants live in enclosed cities or ‘caves of steel’, and introducing detective Elijah Baley to solve a murder mystery
1956 The Naked Sun by Isaac Asimov – 3,000 years in the future detective Elijah Baley returns, with his robot sidekick, R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve a murder mystery on the remote planet of Solaria

1971 Mutant 59: The Plastic Eater by Kit Pedler and Gerry Davis – a genetically engineered bacterium starts eating the world’s plastic

1980 Russian Hide and Seek by Kingsley Amis – in an England of the future which has been invaded and conquered by the Russians, a hopeless attempt to overthrow the occupiers is easily crushed
1981 The Golden Age of Science Fiction edited by Kingsley Amis – 17 classic sci-fi stories from what Amis considers the Golden Era of the genre, namely the 1950s