The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

A tatto of dragon? Idk...

Title: The illustrated man

Author: Ray Bradbury

Editorial: Flamingo

Genre: Short Story, Science Fiction

Country of origin: United States

Pages: 294

Days to finish it: 10

Year of publication: 1951

Personal score: 4/5

Preview: Why someone leave the Earth? 

What strong feeling should someone have to want to leave the Earth? I mean, I know that everyone would leave if the Earth is no longer available to exist or live in, but imagine that you have the chance to get to know other worlds, would you leave it? What would happen with your family? Your job? Your belongings? Does it that matter? In my case, the only thing I could miss is my family. While I´m traveling through the stars my family will be aging in the Earth, probably I could never see them again. I’m not sure if I could leave my family, but the most probable thing is I could, what about you?

How did I get it?

First, I wanted to buy it in paperback, but then I found it in the Amazon store at half price, so I bought it. Actually I didn´t know that was a compilation…

A little bit of the author…

What can I say about Mr. Bradbury? Can I say he was one of the best science fiction writers? That his stories are still untouched until our times? That he´s amazing in few paragraphs? None of my words could describe how amazing he was (He wrote more than 500 short stories).

Review

I cannot review each short story that´s included in the book, but I can review my top five.

The highway: a man is working beside the highway, when a great war happens in the earth.

The man: a crew arrives into a planet, where a legendary man was before them.

Usher II: (previously read in Spanish) an eccentric millionaire decides to build a peculiar house of death in Mars.

The visitor: a man with hypnotic powers arrives to Mars and finds hopeless men.

Marionettes Inc: (My favorite one) in a near future it’ll exist a company that can create doubles of the persons, just like marionettes. An unexpected ending for the protagonist of the story. 

Opinion

I really think Bradbury was a great writer, because all his stories are so original, I mean, these stories were written in 1960, and all the stories that were written next, are just inspired in this. I don’t know where he gets all the inspiration or imagination. I wanna stay with my theory that he came from Mars or Jupiter.

There are a lot of stories, all of them were good, the thing is I preferred a lot ones than the others, and there were a couple I really did not completely understand. But the topics and the characters are very empathic and original, besides a couple of their main characters have similitude. 

My favorite story was Marionettes Inc for the sort of evil that has; it also had an unexpected ending. I think in this story both writings of Bradbury get mixed: the writter of crime and the writer of science fiction, and the result is an awesome story.

My purpose is still active, I want to read everything of Bradbury, at least the novels.

I wanna be an illustrated man, in all the possible ways.

Quotes

"So people fire me when my pictures move. Each illustration is a little story. If you watch them, in a few minutes they tell you a tale."

"From this outer edge of his life, looking back, there was only one remorse, and that was only that he wished to go on living. Did all dying people feel this way, as if they had never lived?"

"He had only dreams of things he had wanted to do, while the other ones had memories of things done and accomplished."

"Really, I don´t know why we bother. We build rockets, we go to all the trouble of crossing space, searching them, and this is what we get."

"How strange, how odd, to see yourself die."

"What would you do if you knew that this was the last night of the world?

"Sometimes I don’t believe in anyone or anything but me."

"The footsteps faltered. There was only the sound of the intruder´s breath on the still air."