Illustrating the Man

Ray Bradbury

(1920 - 2012)

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“If El Greco had painted miniatures in his prime, no bigger than your hand, infinitely detailed, with all his sulphurous colour, elongation, and anatomy, perhaps he might have used this man’s body for his art. The colours burned in three dimensions. They were windows looking in upon fiery reality. Here, gathered on one wall, were all the finest scenes in the universe; the man was a walking treasure gallery…The first Illustration quivered and came to life.”

The Illustrated Man (1952)

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It’s always dangerous to draw up shortlists of the great and the good, especially in the world of the arts. Such lists are invariably contentious, often defined more by who’s not there than who is.  A good example is the process which once labelled Arthur C. Clarke, Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein as “The Big Three.” As such indexes go it’s a good start but where is everybody else? Perhaps most notably where is the writer once described as “the arch poet of science fiction.”  The answer is that Ray Bradbury was busy writing about the colonisation of Mars (and much more besides) in a way that none of “The Big Three” would ever better.

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There was always a rich dichotomy at play in the heart of Ray’s stories. He wrote about the future in a voice which belonged to a simpler less technological age. Even when he was describing life in outer space, Ray’s stories always seemed to be about small-town middle-America in the 1950s. And undeniably that was part of the charm.

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As a writer Ray was most at home exploring the margins between science fiction and fantasy. Such edgelands comprise a shifting ambiguous terrain, the background to his dramas a literary autumn in which seasons are often changing as the world tilts on its axis.  These strange equinoxes made many of his stories hard to define, giving them a resonance which remains, to this day, both memorable and quirky. Rich fodder for Halloween enthusiasts, and connoisseurs of the macabre. For those happy to let a little of Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic melancholia into their souls.  

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A Sound of Thunder is less about time travel than it is about the life and death of the most notorious of the thunder lizards. Ray brought Tyrannosaurus Rex to awe-inspiring life, raising it from the pages of a book without the benefit of visual trickery and expensive special effects. And he did it long before Michael Crichton and Steven Spielberg resurrected the beast’s DNA simply so it could run amok, with entirely predictable results, in a theme park.

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With skills honed as a short story writer, Ray did it all in a few lines. It’s difficult to beat this for sheer creative verve:

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“It came on great oiled, resilient, striding legs. It towered thirty feet above half of the trees, a great evil god, folding its delicate watchmaker’s claws close to its oily reptilian chest. Each lower leg was a piston, a thousand pounds of white bone, sunk in thick ropes of muscle, sheathed over in a gleam of pebbled skin like the mail of a terrible warrior. Each thigh was a ton of meat, ivory and steel mesh. And from the great breathing cage of the upper body those two delicate arms dangled out front, arms with hands which might pick up and examine men like toys, while the snake neck coiled.” 

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Only in one of Ray’s stories could a character by the name of Mr Ylla attempt to ward off an unwelcome emissary from Earth with “an evil weapon, a long yellowish tube ending in a bellows and a trigger…From it hordes of golden bees could be flung out with a high shriek. Golden, horrid bees that stung, poisoned, and fell lifeless, like seeds on the sand.”

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In the same collection of short stories, Ray staked his claim to one of the best openings in fantasy literature: 

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“They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.”

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If a writer can be measured by the degree to which they have influenced other creative minds then Bradbury deserves a shortlist all to himself. There are, for example, clear echoes of The Illustrated Man in J.G. Ballard’s The Crystal World (1966):

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“By day fantastic birds flew through the petrified  forest, and jewelled crocodiles glittered like heraldic salamanders on the banks of the crystalline river. By night the illuminated man raced among the trees, his arms like golden cartwheels, his head like a spectral crown…”

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Questions about the human settlement of Mars are often phrased in the wrong tense. Thanks to Ray, it’s not a question of “when will humans get to Mars” but “when will we go back?” In a sense, we’ve never left. Humans have been on Mars since the first copy of The Silver Locusts rolled off a printing press in 1950.

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Because of Ray, my shoes will always carry faint traces of Martian soil. Just as my favourite drink on a hot summer’s day will always be Dandelion Wine, as I walk through orchards rich with The Golden Apples of the Sun.  And my favourite time of the year will always be autumn, when each Fall the seller of lightning rods will appear in town “just ahead of the storm,” heralding the imminent arrival of Cooger and Dark’s Pandemonium Shadow Show. The Dark Carnival we all hope we will be brave enough to visit. 

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Something Wicked This Way Comes? Most certainly. But also something uniquely different and wonderful. Something only Ray Bradbury could have given us.