Let’s get this straight from the start: you don’t read Bradbury to learn about future of science and technology. These aspects of his books are perfunctory and as true-to-life as the Cheshire Cat's smile. In Bradbury's tale “Zero Hour” from The Illustrated Man , first published in 1947, the reader encounters homes with vacuum elevators, food-delivery tubes, chromium cars, and electro-magnet dusting machines, among other inventions that never were. They are merely stage props, adding color to the real action, which (as so often with Bradbury) is psychological and emotive in nature.
The dusting machine could run on microwave rather than magnets. It wouldn't make any difference. The cars could be made out of palladium instead of chromium, who cares? But the human angle in this story, so typical of Bradbury’s work, builds on the subtle divide between the impressionable minds of youngsters, with their rich imaginative life, and the staid, skeptical outlook of adults. Ah, now we are in Bradbury territory.
You want predictions about the future? Well, Bradbury’s most accurate forecast in The Illustrated Man may have simply been the title character’s full array of tattoos. Who would have guessed, back in the 1940s, that radical top-to- toe body art would be so popular in the new millennium? A few piercings, and the Illustrated Man would be at home in your trendiest modern-day nightclub, and ready for his own reality show on MTV. We may have made few steps toward colonizing Mars, but we are tattooing like there is no tomorrow.
In all seriousness . . . hmmm, perhaps with this author it is better to say all non-seriousness . . . Bradbury’s fascination with the make-believe life of youngsters is very much a commentary on his own approach to his craft. Ray Bradbury is the child who never grew up, the Peter Pan of sci-fi. The theme of youthful fantasy recurs in the concluding story of The Illustrated Man , “The Rocket,” in which a poor junkyard owner buys a model of a spaceship, and with clever use of movie screens, mirrors and other equipment is able to convince his children that he is taking them on a trip to Mars and back. In fact, the rocket never leaves the ground, but for this author, the power of imagination is a levitating force far more potent than the meager hyperspace drives and thrust shifters of his sci-fi peers.
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 might have included under the rubric of “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.
But, as I cautioned at the outset, the gadgetry here is hardly the main point. For this writer, the flashy techno-gimmicks of his tales are often embraced a gateway to the child in all of us, a way of recapturing wonder in an age that has too little of it. Inevitably there is a also cost in these stories, and many of his most pointed tales depict the sad fate of those who are slaves to technology. And that is a theme that is even more relevant today than when these stories were first published.
You could never accuse Bradbury of such an indiscretion. 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. But you don’t need a driver’s license to traverse the galaxy in your imagination. And for that, Ray Bradbury is the first person you would want behind the wheel.