THE ILLUSTRATED MAN

A few years ago, I had borrowed The Illustrated man at our local media library. I read it entirely and loved it immensely.

Shortly thereafter, I found out that that edition was abridged. It contained, if I recall well, 6 short stories, out of the total 18.

As a completist, I don't like abridged novels, not any more than having a painting cut into pieces...

Therefore, I ordered the proper, full version and I just finished reading it - which took me some months, actually - because I was reading several other books, alternating between subjects and genres.

My overall impression is that it is less cohesive than Bradbury's Martian chronicles.

Indeed, it looks like a collection of short stories that didn't have enough in common to go into a specific book, so these 18 stories were placed into one novel, between a prologue and an epilogue, depicting the meeting between a narrator and the illustrated man whose tattoos reshape themselves into various people's stories - the short stories of the collection.

The narrator observes the scenes that we read in these 18 different stories, set in various time frames and places : mostly on Earth, sometimes somewhere in space, or on Mars - much like the Martian Chronicles.

What binds these short stories together is Ray's study of human nature and psyche. His study of human behavior and history- the real one is transcribed into fictions of past and future, or rather, possible future.

His vision, his imagination is often gloomy, pessimistic possible future, because as you saw, this book was published in 1951, shortly after WW2. It's impossible to imagine a hugely positive future, without negative aspects, and indeed these short stories depict both pessimistic, but also some more hopeful and optimistic views - in a more or less balanced measure.

I have enjoyed most of these stories, in varying degrees, but I wish that Ray had a more poetic and fluid composition - his sentences are sometimes too long and too winded. He uses long sentences with far too many commas, and that can be distracting at moments.

I won’t go into the details of each story in this first review. I’ll probably tell you about them another time – or just let you discover for yourselves, or read many of the more professional reviews available on the net.

In the meanwhile, here’s the list of the original, unabridged (and un-altered) stories:

• Prologue: The Illustrated Man

• The Veldt • Kaleidoscope • The Other Foot • The Highway • The Man • The Long Rain • The Rocket Man • The Fire Balloons • The Last Night of the World • The Exiles • No Particular Night or Morning • The Fox and the Forest • The Visitor • The Concrete Mixer • Marionettes, Inc. • The City • Zero Hour • The Rocket • Epilogue

Some of these speculative short fictions are a bit dated, but others could have been written yesterday. And there isn't a bad one among them. I only regret that I didn't read this collection sooner.