The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury

THE ILLUSTRATED MAN – RAY BRADBURY

It's a disturbing idea in itself that your tattoos might come alive and start moving and crawling about over your skin, talking in tongues and acting out stories. Can you imagine? To an extent, the kind of stories enacted would be dictated by the kind of tattoos you have but even the most incongruous of tattoos can be folded and twisted into something other depending on how feverish your imagination is. Which leads us to The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury, whose imagination seems not only to have been feverish but near-tripping into delirium.

In the film of the book, the illustrated man is played by Rod Steiger and it's perfect casting. He's the itinerant worker whose body is covered head-to-toe in tattoos that take on a life of their own when looked at for too long. It's a simple device that Bradbury uses to connect 16 short stories but it works brilliantly. Each story being precise, economical and inspired. Each of them unique and innovative with a dark, adult undertow.

The Void almost predicts the Internet and virtual gaming, and how children will become the masters of it to the detriment of their parents.

Kaleidoscope describes a crew of astronauts falling through space after their rocket ship has been destroyed. Falling away from each other in different directions as tiny meteorites slice through them, cutting off hands and feet like a silent butcher. As one of them plummets towards Earth he knows that when he hits the atmosphere he'll burn like a match and he wonders if anyone will see him? On a country road in Illinois a small boy looks up and screams “Look, Mom, look! A falling star!”. “Make a wish,” says his mother “Make a wish.”

The Long Rain depicts a planet where the rain falls ceaselessly like Japanese water torture, sending the astronauts trudging through the jungle landscape insane.

Usher II is a precursor to Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 but depicting a world where all art has been banned and burnt, not just books.

The Rocket is the wonderful story of a future world where holiday trips in rockets to the stars are for rich people only and how a poor man treats his children to his own specially made trip in his own specially made rocket. It's a joy to read.

No Particular Night Or Morning is about the madness-inducing madness of space.

The Fox And The Forest has similarities with the films The Matrix and Terminator but written years ahead of both. The main characters have fled into the past from a future world of constant war involving the use of 'leprosy bombs'. Can you imagine the sheer terror of such a thing as a leprosy bomb?

The City also concerns itself with war but with a twist. A group of astronauts land on a planet in a far flung galaxy but little do they know that the planet has been waiting for them and is in fact a trap laid by the long gone former inhabitants of that planet for the descendants of the race that destroyed them whom they knew would one day return.

And then, in what is probably the most interesting and most disturbing of the stories there is The Playground that also depicts a world of endless war, terror and violence but this time that world is the world of childhood.

I met this guy once back in the 1980s who had spent years travelling around the world, doing the Hippy Trail thing. He told me of how in India he'd had a knife thrust into his guts and had come face-to-face with death. He was returning to England and was going to write about his experiences and in doing so essentially write about life and its meaning. He believed Science Fiction was the perfect medium for such things as not only can it fire the imagination and entertain but can also if required convey messages of sorts or at least some words of wisdom to make the reader wonder. I'm no Science Fiction aficionado but on reading Ray Bradbury I can see now what he meant.

The blurb on the back cover of The Illustrated Man describes the book as a collection of 'visionary tales' and that, I must say, is exactly what they are and this book is: Visionary.

John Serpico