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Summary: Bradbury is a master storyteller
Review: These are stories that go beyond "science fiction." The technology aspects are part of the canvas, but these stories are powerful because Bradbury paints with emotion and metaphor. He builds more empathy with characters in a few short words than other authors do in an entire novel, and his descriptions return us to a time when we were young, and simple objects filled us with awe and wonder.There is something here for everyone. Read them for yourself. Read them for your children. This short book is a celebration of the art of storytelling.
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Summary: Poignant Tales of Yesterday¿s Future
Review: This group of highly imaginative tales, written in 1948-51, do nothing if not illustrate that 1) it's extremely difficult to predict the future and 2) no matter how much we struggle against it, we probably are doomed to reflect our own times and cultural environment. Over half a century after Ray Bradbury wrote these entertaining stories, we have a lot of answers to questions about the (then) future thanks to hindsight. Bradbury's characters still smoke like chimneys, they still use clunky mid-20th century machines for the most part---lugging electrical equipment and card tables across the light years in their bronze spaceships. There's only the vaguest hint of a computer ("The City") and then of the giant, controlling variety. Above all, there is no vision of the infinitely varied America of today---the space explorers in these stories are nearly all white Anglosaxons who speak and behave as white people did in the early 1950s. The cultural oppositions and arguments in the stories are those of mid-century America. While it is true that Bradbury writes of human nature it is also true that the nature he describes is as we saw it half a century ago. However, Bradbury covers a wide range of topics: child psychology; machine vs. man; imagination and emotion vs. cold science; religion; time travel, and race relations. Some of the stories are unbelievably poignant. In fact, I would say that poignancy---the ability to bring out that quality without being sappy or twee---is Bradbury's strongest suit. If you don't like science fiction, this book probably isn't for you, but it certainly has made its mark on American culture, with 47 printings through 1990. One story, "The Exiles", probably laid the basis for his later "Fahrenheit 451". Bradbury wrote many stories which featured the "wrap-around-comfort, totally mechanized houses" that appear in several works in this volume. How many Hollywood movies of the last 15 years owe a debt to "The Fox and the Forest", a story of people escaping through time from a bad future to a quieter or more prosperous present ? THE ILLUSTRATED MAN is a minor American classic in a perennially shortchanged genre, science fiction. The dated technology and cultural styles may seem primitive today, but even they add a dimension of telling us about the times in which they were written as well as about the future as they saw it then.
Rating:
Summary: Bradbury is an absolute master of the short story
Review: 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.
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