This same story includes a Bradbury rarity: strange alien creatures appear with three yellow eyes and twelve fingers. But, alas, they are only dolls used as playthings by the kids. Yet children’s imaginary friends are not always harmless, as the parents eventually learn in “Zero Hour.” In a similar vein, “The Veldt”— a justly celebrated story that opens The Illustrated Man and was later adapted for radio and television—Bradbury builds his story around a virtual reality nursery with 3D screens on all its walls that enables children to bring their fantasies to life. But in this instance the difference between virtual reality and actual reality blurs to disastrous effect. Yes, there is moral there for readers in the age of the Internet and Grand Theft Auto, but it is not a lesson about technology itself; rather it tells us something about how people let it take over and debase their lives.
Although Bradbury is invariably pigeonholed as a science fiction writer, he often seems more at home in the mindspace of the horror genre. It is no coincidence that the protagonist in Fahrenheit 451, when faced with a decision of which book to memorize to save it against those who consign all stories to the flames, selects the tales of Edgar Allan Poe. In “The Exiles” from The Illustrated Man, a peculiar combination of gothic horror conventions with a veneer of science fiction, Poe even appears as a character. And in other works from this period, we also find Poe, Lovecraft and other horror-meisters either as influences or actual elements in the plot. Indeed, the overarching frame story of The Illustrated Man, with its unsettling account of a man whose tattoos come to life, is straight out of this same tradition.
Bradbury is attracted to the horror genre because it openly embraces the psychological elements usually given short shrift by the sci-fi literati. Science may be an objective external phenomenon, but the horrifying is, first and foremost, a mental state. And this author is always more interested in the subjective response than in the objective stimulus. On the other hand, Bradbury’s prose style, which emphasizes brightness, lucidity, the clarity of free play—what Matthew Arnold called “sweetness and light”—won’t allow him to linger in the macabre. He toys with the dark side only to give more definition to its opposite.
As a result, Bradbury hardly develops the eerie framing story of The Illustrated Man, which another author would have milked for every creepy detail. After the initial set-up, and some token gestures to link the tales together, he abandons attempts to connect the dots, or even mention our tattooed exile from civil society, except for a brief wrap-up at the end of the book. Instead, Bradbury uses the individual “cinematic tattoos” to probe his pet ideas, familiar themes that also figure in his other works of the era. The colonization of Mars, which forms the unifying concept behind The Martian Chronicles is almost as prominent in The Illustrated Man, and one could easily move several of the stories between these two volumes without disturbing the overall structure of the respective works. The concern with censorship and book-burning that animates Fahrenheit 451 also recurs in several stories here. In addition, we find the wistful, nostalgic tone—a Bradbury trademark—and his preoccupation with children and the most child-like of technologies: namely spaceships, human-like robots, and those fanciful bits of machinery that we now call consumer electronics.
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