The name of "The City" was and is Revenge, upon the planet of Darkness - and after 20 millennia of waiting, Earthmen have come calling.

"The Concrete Mixer" Ettil objects to the Martian invasion of Earth - he's been reading illegally imported Earth fiction, and knows how all such invasions end.

Meet "The Exiles" - the reverse image of Bradbury's "Usher II".

"The Fire Balloons" Father Peregrine and his colleagues have come to Mars as missionaries to the Martians. But there are two species of Martians - the dying race of the Martian Chronicles, and a species of fire globes that humans can't communicate with yet.

"The Fox and the Forest" Fleeing from a war-torn future, two time travellers have taken new identities in 1938.

"The Highway" provides occasional windfalls for Hernando and his family - tourists driving south into Mexico who want to photograph him as a picturesque poor farmer, for instance. The drivers always complain - until today, as they flee the atom-bombing of the cities.

"Kaleidoscope" Although the crew were spacesuited when the ship was torn open, none had propulsion units - so here they are, falling, scattered so that they mostly can't see each other, unable to do anything except talk to pass their last few hours. (One twist is that they aren't all caught by Earth's gravity - some go one way, some another.)

On "The Last Night of the World", all the adults *know*, from having had the same dream, that the end has come. 'You don't scream about the real thing.'

"The Long Rain" Bradbury's Venus is a jungle suffering near-perpetual rain - in this story, rain that *never* ceases. The planet's only continent has been seeded with Sun Domes for lost spacemen - but the natives occasionally manage to destroy them. The survivors of a rocket crash are trying to make it to shelter before the endless water torture cracks them up...

"The Man" Hart, Martin, and the crew of their rocket have discovered a new world - but none of the inhabitants take any notice, because something *really* big has just happened - a messiah appeared the day before. Hart's first reaction is to ask if his competitors have beaten him here. :) ('I sympathize, Martin. I overlook your petty insubordination.' 'I don't overlook your petty tyranny.') Hart is driven to go on and on, so much so that he can't quite recognize what he's been looking for.

"Marionettes, Inc." Unlike _I Sing the Body Electric!_, here robots are illegally sold as replicas of specific people. Braling wants to escape his marriage, but gets more than he bargained for.

Hitchcock lives only in the moment, rejecting the pain of both memory and anticipation. But in space, it's "No Particular Night Or Morning".

"The Other Foot" - In _The Martian Chronicles_' "Way Up High in the Middle of the Air", African-Americans left Earth's segregation for Mars' freedom. Now the first rocket for 20 years brings the first white men the children have ever seen, while their parents aren't feeling charitable to these survivors of an atomic war. But Hattie Johnson doesn't want to see her husband turn into everything he hated.

"The Rocket" - The Bodonis dream of Mars - but have money for only one ticket.

Doug's childhood memories of his father, "The Rocket Man", are of a man gone for months at a time without a word, for fear he'd want to be with his family, "home" for three days or so, then gone again. Doug's mother treats space as though it doesn't exist, wanting her husband to stay and have a life with his family - hard, knowing that you can see all the places where he's been, while they're forever out of reach.

"The Veldt" - The Hadleys live in the kind of automated-to-the-max house seen in "There Will Come Soft Rains" in _The Martian Chronicles_. The adults worry that the nursery, with its full-sensory storytelling experiences, has supplanted them in their children's hearts - and what with the African stories they've been reading lately, the screams coming from the lions' kills are unnerving.

"The Visitor" - Victims of 'blood rust' are permanent exiles quarantined on Mars, and they suffer most from homesickness. When a newcomer displays a gift for creating illusions of home, though, whose home will it be?

"Zero Hour" - Children under nine have suddenly taken up a new game: invasion. It's creepy how Mrs. Morris' friends across the country *all* say their kids are pretending that the Martians are coming...


Great classic sci-fi   November 27, 2002
 5 out of 7 found this review helpful

This was the first Bradbury I've ever read, and was much better than that horrible show on cable. Essentially, this is an anthology loosely linked by a wrap-around story involving the titular "Illustrated Man". A carnival worker laid up by a broken limb, he decided to get fully tatooed in order to get another job. Unfortunately, the artist who turns our hero into a walking canvas is something of a witch. It's peak season for carnivals when, on a later summer afternoon, he meets our narrator.

..... and there doesn't seem to be a carnival in America that will hire him. His tattoos become living stories when stared at by customers. With spaceships, monsters and other oddities covering every inch of his body, he has become an unwitting page on which Bradbury writes his awesome stories. (None of the fictitious carnival-goers care for the stories since, we're told by the Illustrated Man himself, they all end with the viewer's horrible death). As night falls, the illustrations come alive, and the narrator comes to see tales of:

- astronauts forced to confront their doom as they drift in space after their spaceship suddenly explodes (years later, this would be parodied in the movie "DarkStar".)

- a living city built by a race of aliens annihilated by Earthlings and unwittingly discovered by exploring humans;

- Human explorers seeking their outpost on Venus where it never stops raining (this was a strangely prophetic take on Vietnam, right down to references to congressional funding for additional outposts)

- A mother and son driven to desperation by the occupational hazards of the husband's/father's job as a rocket pilot;

- A community of African Americans driven to colonize Mars in an effort to escape earthbound prosecutions now confronts survivors of Earth's last great war;

- Tourists who are really refugees from an oppressive future and will do anything to keep from having to back (or forth I guess);

- A family in a future age in which artificial intelligence and virtual reality affect almost every aspect of their daily existence ("The Veldt"; this cautionary and visionary tale of AI and VR run amok seems to have provided the basis for far too many episodes of ST:TNG, none of which have come close to matching its subversive quality.)

And other tales of exotic aliens, distant planets, rocket ships and the end of the world. This is what science fiction sounds like when your characters can't mask what's going on with meaningless techno-babble.


Review for The Illustrated Man   March 12, 2001
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

I think overall this book, The Illustrated Man, was one of the best books I ever read. It was funny and very easy to read and understand, which for me is a good thing because I don't really like to read books that are hard to follow. I also liked how it was about a man who has tattoos all over his body and each one tells a story about someone's life. My favorite story out of this book would have to be the Veldt and also Marionettes Inc. They both had a more twisted end to them and were almost unreal but I really enjoyed reading both of them. Over all I liked all of the stories and the ending of the book. I would recommend this book to any of my friends or family, especially if they like these types of books.


Bradbury is an absolute master of the short story   February 27, 2004
 4 out of 4 found this review helpful

While the cover of the paperback that I read states that Bradbury is "The World's Greatest Living Science Fiction Writer", I respectfully disagree. Science fiction is so broad a field that there is significant overlap with horror and fantasy. I would without question call Bradbury the best author ever in the field of horrific science fiction. For, while his stories are generally based on a scientific theme, the real power is in the horrific aspects of the events.
When I was young, my favorite short story was "The Veldt", the first one in this collection of Bradbury's best short stories. A modern house contains what we would now call a holodeck, and instead of the children conjuring up delightful images, they are interested only in a scene of the African veldt, where lions pursue and devour their prey. Complete with the smell, sound and heat of the plains, the parents of the children are concerned that it is unhealthy. The parents try to do something to stop it, but they end up being consumed by the lions conjured up by the room.
Most of the other stories deal with the same theme, technology gone wrong. Atomic and biological warfare appears in many of the stories. However, the best part of all the stories is the tension and the unusual endings, often based on the frailties of human psychology. The intertwining of science fiction and horror makes these stories unique and I see a lot of similarities between Bradbury and Stephen King. In this area, he is better than King.