The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

Brett’s staff pick:
The Illustrated Man is a 1951 book of eighteen science fiction short stories by Ray Bradbury that explores the nature of humankind. While none of the stories have a plot or character connection with the next, a recurring theme is the conflict of the cold mechanics of technology and the psychology of people.

The unrelated stories are tied together by the frame device of “the Illustrated Man”, a vagrant with a tattooed body who the unnamed narrator meets. The man’s tattoos, allegedly created by a woman from the future, are animated and each tell a different tale. All but one of the stories have been previously published elsewhere, although Bradbury revised some of the texts for the book’s publication.

The concept of the Illustrated Man would later be reused by Bradbury as an antagonistic character in Something Wicked This Way Comes, the tattoos coming to represent the souls of sinful victims of a mysterious carnival.

The book was made into a 1969 film starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. It was adapted by Howard B. Kreitsek from the stories “The Veldt”, “The Long Rain”, and “The Last Night of the World”, and directed by Jack Smight.

A number of the stories, including “The Veldt”, “The Fox and the Forest” (as “To the Future”), “Marionettes Inc.”, and “Zero Hour” were dramatized for the 1955-57 radio series X minus 1.