In “The Man,” a captain and his lieutenant’s faith are put to the test by the arrival of a mysterious man who travels from planet to planet, healing the sick and comforting the poor. “The Highway” also focuses on a minority group: a husband and wife south of the border whose quiet life is disrupted by tourists fleeing nuclear war. Astronauts tumble helplessly through space, connected only by long-distance radio, in “Kaleidoscope.” In “The Other Foot,” black colonists on Mars must decide whether to accept white refugees from Earth. In “The Veldt,” children raised by a virtual reality nursery turn on their parents after being denied their favorite simulation: an African savannah filled with lions. Bradbury tends to focalize his stories through the perspective of a single character, though the reliability of his narrators shifts from chapter to chapter. All the stories are told in the past tense. The Prologue, Epilogue, and one other story, “The Rocket Man,” are written in first-person voice, but the rest are written in third person. This acts as a framing device for the work. The collection is named after one of its characters, the Illustrated Man, a carnival worker whose supernatural tattoos represent each of the 18 stories.
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