Book review! Two rather famous Ray Bradbury books

That's right, I read every now and then. Actually I do it quite a lot ever since I became friends with a guy that has lived here for a long time and has a collection of hundreds of books. Years ago I converted to Kindle because it was easier and moving from place to place or even worse, country to country, with a bunch of books is pretty difficult to do. I am one of those people that is fine with a Kindle but would really rather have an actual book so now that I have access to a library of sorts, that is a really good thing in my mind.

Before my friend went back to USA for a couple of weeks he left me with a couple of Bradbury books and they were right up my alley, so to speak.

I'm not really clear as to how that spike on her head got started but that's part of her look now. She know that when I put stuff near her that she is going to be posing with it so she doesn't really care. She does expect to be rewarded for photo shoots though, so I gave her a small treaty-pie.

Let's start with The Illustrated Man: This book is an anthology of stories, most of which are sci-fi oriented and have a overall feeling of dread to them. I enjoy this sort of stuff because it is just kind of fun to get straight to terrible news for the characters that are involved. There is no connection between the various stories and most of them are 20 pages or less. I have to be in the right mood to enjoy this sort of thing but this worked out nicely for me on the roof of my building near the pool where 20 pages is probably the same amount of time that I can safely spend in the sun before I need to get the hell out of there.

Even if you have never read anything by Bradbury, you will notice right away that he is fascinated with rockets and space travel and it is kind of fun to see what the notions of space travel would appear to be like for someone that was writing most of his stuff before space travel actually became possible. Bradbury was born in 1920 and the moon landing didn't happen until the 60's so his notions of how space travel would work when he mentions "rockets" all the time is rather optimistic on his part seeing as how we actually CAN go to mars but only with unmanned missions with rovers. The way he presents it is something that doesn't take that much time at all and can be accomplished by a person with a rocket that they built in their backyard. If someone actually did have a rocket that could get out of the atmosphere there is quite a lot more to getting to mars than just pointing in the somewhat correct direction.

Not all of the stories are about space travel though. Some of them are just about dread. I say this possibly incorrectly but you just get a feeling that something really bad is going to happen quite soon and this was another one of Bradbury's specialties as one of his most famous books is Something Wicked this was Comes which was turned into a rather shite movie in the 80's that I do not recommend you watch. This book and therefore the stories in Illustrated Man that are not space-travel oriented could be considered fantasy or even horror and they are quite entertaining.

I think that this book would be a good introduction to someone that hasn't read much Bradbury or even better, hasn't read any of it. This would be a good "teaser" to see if someone likes his style and if you do then you are in for a treat because he has a ton of great books. One of those great books is the other one I read in the past two weeks.

While this is a science fiction novel, I don't think that a person needs to be interested in that genre to enjoy this book. It isn't all technical and nerdy because it is written from the perspective of someone that couldn't possibly know about the immense complexity of space travel. Travel to Mars is presented as being quite simple and happens all the time. We go though several stages of our action on Mars from the expeditionary groups that fail in various ways, to colonization, to the downfall of the society.

Originally authored in 1950 there is no chance that Bradbury or really anyone could have any concept of space travel's complexities so the way that this part of it is presented is entertaining in itself. This book is NOT REALLY a continual story and is referred to as a "fix-up" novel in that for the most part these were a collection of short stories that were edited in an attempt to turn it into one complete story where the various characters are related to one another. Someone would need to have read the original short stories to know how much they were edited but I'll just take their word on it that originally, these stories were not interconnected but they (or Bradbury) did a very good job of turning this into a near 250 page page-turner of a novel. I found myself opting to read a bit more rather than turn on the TV or look at my phone and when that happens, you know that I am dealing with a great book.

This isn't just a story about far-fetched colonies on Mars, it goes so much deeper than that to take a look at the human condition and the dangers of technology, hatred, and loss that contributes to the downfall of any society, even the one that we are living in today.

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I highly recommend either of these books to almost anyone but if you have never read Bradbury, I would say check out The Illustrated Man first, see if you like it, and if you do, move on to the other one. Almost every library in North America is going to have at least one copy of this available so there is not reason to spend any money on it, Bradbury was very wealthy and famous and even got his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. He certainly doesn't need any cash now seeing as how he isn't alive anymore.