A review by ftrebelo
The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury

3.0

Any collection of short stories has highs and lows, and this collection is no exception. I really liked the framing idea: following the tattooed illustrations on the Illustrated Man and all starting with the (implicit) question "what if". (I even would have liked the Illustrated Man's story to be a bit more developed). A lot of the stories took place on Mars, a few were a bit macabre for my taste, while others were achingly beautiful.

Some of my favorites included The Other Food (what if there was a colony on African Americans who escaped Jim Crow and then a rocket with white men landed?), The Man (what if you landed on a planet just after Jesus Christ had left?), and The Day Before the World Ends (what if the world was going to end tomorrow and everyone knew it?). But in my opinion, the two best were both about the relationship between fathers and their children: The Rocket Man (what if your father was addicted to space travel, and would go off into space three months at a time? how would you and your mother deal with that?) and The Rocket (what if you could only afford one ticket to go to space - who in your family would get to go?).