10 Minutes About "The Illustrated Man"

I first read The Illustrated Man when I was maybe 12, and my Uncle Steve loaned it to me. I had the feeling that the book was taboo, and wasn't sure that my uncle (who was about 20 years older than me) should have loaned it to me.

That concern was doubled by the actual book, which at 12 freaked me out. Those stories were so scary that they stuck in my head for years and years and years: madmen on Venus and puppets locking people in boxes and stuff like that.

I think I re-read the book again maybe in college, but I can't really remember. Now I'm listening to it on audio, and it's been, so far, somewhat of a letdown.

It was written in 1951, and like a lot of scifi written in the 1950s and into the 1960s, it has a completely different tone, if tone is the right word. A lot of the stories I've read from back then -- from Theodore Sturgeon, Bradbury, and even Phillip K. Dick -- are hamhanded, with rather obvious, Twilight-Zonish twists.





So far, I've gotten through the first 4 1/2 stories. Of them, only  two stand up so far.The Veldt  is okay: a straightforward, somewhat predictable but still creepy story of two little spoiled kids in a rich family who have a room that's basically a holodeck from Star Trek; they program it to be set on Africa, with lions, with rather predictable results. That's not much of a spoiler; you can see the ending coming from about ten million miles away but it's done well.

Kaleidoscope still manages to be excellent, although less creepy to 48-year-old me than 12-year-old me; it's the story of a bunch of guys whose rocket blows up, and they all drift off in separate ways into space, talking over their radios about what it all means to them. It's sad and amazing and even with a hokey ending still a great story.

But The Other Foot, about what happens when the first white man lands on Mars after it was colonized 20 years earlier by blacks, is drivelish "Magical Negro" type of writing, essentially wish-fulfillment for white people who would like to think that black people might forget about all the ill treatment and just shake hands. And The Highway, about a man who lives by a highway and sees a bunch of people fleeing the "atom war" that has ended the world, just feels pointless.

There are still fourteen stories left; tonight I left off halfway through The Man, about astronauts landing on another planet where, apparently, Jesus has just come and gone. It's not very good either but I've got hopes for the next 2/3 of the book that it will live up to what I remembered.