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One of the best collections of Ray Bradbury's short stories. A diverse mix, linked with his ingenious device of the illustrated man. Expect Bradbury's uniquely characteristic style and brilliantly imagined pieces. A man who consistently thinks outside the box.

The Illustrated Man - Ray Bradbury  Because I was young, and my brain wasn't too crowded, the stories were indelibly branded on my brain. I'm almost afraid to revisit The Veldt, lest it disappoint. This was assigned reading in fifth or sixth grade, and the stories are deeply embedded in my brain.
 
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Bradbury is primarily known as a science fiction writer. It’s odd because he doesn’t write science fiction. In fact, he’s crap at science, but that doesn’t matter because he isn’t interested in telling stories about how technological changes affect society. From that perspective he’s a grumpy old man who doesn’t approve of anything after, say, 1940, since which time everything has gone to hell in a handbasket. He isn’t a futurist certainly, he can’t imagine anything to come being of the slightest use or pleasure. The only good time was his childhood: he’s a huge fan of sitting out on porches on summer evenings drinking lemonade. Recorded music is nice, but really, it’s all just books and homemade pie.
I’m guessing that he set so many stories on Mars out of sheer laziness: it’s really just an empty sound stage he can use for whatever story he has in mind. What he writes is philosophy, with a gimmick that would sell it. He asks the big questions: Why are we here? What does it all mean? Why are men* such fools? What does God mean in the context of a universe with many worlds?
Re-reading what I’ve written so far, it seems like I don’t appreciate Bradbury, but I do. He’s a poet with a fine appreciation for a time and place that he evokes beautifully: the sights, the sounds, the tastes. And The Veldt made a huge impression on me, such that I remembered it vividly more than 30 years later. The rest of the collection, it turns out, I was no more than slightly familiar with; I couldn’t remember how any of them ended, for example.
 

*And I do mean men. He doesn’t bother with women much they can be wives and mothers but they don’t do anything else, even when he posits a future without the need for housework, he can’t conceive of women using that time for anything else, not work, not art, not even charity. He does give one wife of the future a job, but that’s war-work, not something she’d like to do for any reason whatsoever.

Library copy

I liked about half of the stories and did not like the other half. So I would give this collection 2.5 stars. Although I am not a regular reader of science fiction, I did read The Martian Chronicles on recommendations from Goodreads review(s), and liked it immensely (I gave it 5 stars). Some of the stories in The Martian Chronicles seemed to be timeless, even though they were written in the late 1940s. In contrast a number of these stories written around the same time period seemed to be either dated, and/or I did not find them to be all that interesting. Both of those observations are admittedly subjective, and certainly Ray Bradbury is a great author.

There was one short story, The Exiles, that had 3 things that interested me:
1.tIn this story written in 1949, the year 2020 is referred to! “…War begets war. Destruction begets destruction. On Earth, a century ago, in the year 2020 they outlawed our books”).
2.tIn this story, books are burned by the authorities. Much like in Fahrenheit 451 that was published one year after this collection.
3.tIn the same story, a captain of the ship who is on his way to Mars pulls out books from his vault in which he tells his crew members Martians are killing some of them on the rocket using techniques derived from these books. Names of the books and authors are mentioned. I just found it interesting…sort of a Who’s Who of the macabre and spooky and scary. Here is the passage:
From the captain: “Twenty nights I was stabbed, butchered, a screaming bat pinned to a surgical mat, a thing rotting underground in a black box; bad, wicked dreams. 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. of the 19th and 20th century of the supernatural.”

Smith bent to read the dusty titles:
“Tales of Mystery and Imagination by Edgar Allan Poe; Dracula by Bram Stoker; Frankenstein by Mary Shelley; The Turn of the Screw by Henry James; The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving; Rappacini’s Daughter by Nathaniel Hawthorne; An Occurrence at Owl Creek by Ambrose Bierce; Alice in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll; The Willows by Algernon Blackwood; The Wizard of Oz by L. Frank Baum; The Weird Shadow Over Innsmouth by H.P. Lovecraft. And more! Books by Walter de la Mare, Wakefield, Harvey, Wells, Asquith, Huxley—all forbidden authors. All burned in the same year that Halloween was outlawed and Christmas was banned!”

The Illustrated Man is presented as a prologue to the collection and is a short story at the beginning and end of the collection. He unwittingly had tattoos drawn on parts of his body by a witch and he is roaming the earth to seek her out, I guess to destroy her, because she has destroyed his life. He meets some people, they like him, but then they stare at his illustrated body covered with intricate drawing that turn into little movies of a sort and they see themselves in the movies being hurt and/or killed, so they tell the Illustrated Man to get the hell away from them. The 18 stories in this collection are on his body.

Of the 18 short stories, the ones that I gave 2.5 stars or higher (half of them) were:
•tThe Veldt, 3 stars
•tKaleidoscope, 4 stars
•tThe Other Foot, 3 stars
•tThe Highway, 2.5 stars
•tThe Visitor, 2.5 stars
•tMarionettes, Inc, 4 stars
•tThe City, 4 stars
•tZero Hour, 4 stars
•tThe Rocket, 3 stars

The paperback version of this book, first published in 1952, as of 1972 had gone through 26 printings.

Reviews (from among many!):
https://www.sfsite.com/07b/man13.htm
From blog sites:
•thttp://www.conceptualfiction.com/illu... (I did not know this: It is worth remembering that this author, whose life spanned the period from the introduction of the Model T Ford to the most modern and streamlined hybrid vehicles, never learned to drive a car. He is a proud technophobe who also scorns computers, the Internet and ATMs.
•thttp://speculiction.blogspot.com/2014...
•thttps://robbinslibrary.wordpress.com/...