The Illustrated Man

The Illustrated Man should really be re-titled as " 15+ stories about men who go to space in rockets".

The pure density of these types of stories was unbelievable, so much so that most of them feel dated at least to some extent. It's unfortunate that Bradbury didn't lean harder into the prologue and epilogue of the book, which attempt to tie all the stories together. They were excellent, a great concept to include in a collection of short stories.

The stories themselves were generally pretty good. The floor in terms of quality was pretty high, but there wasn't a clear landslide masterpiece in here. I particularly enjoyed the stories Kaleidoscope, The Rocket Man, and The Man. Bradbury's style of writing is well suited to the short story format. He is able to create a lot of atmosphere and feeling in a very short word count, even given a pretty dull premise. I do think that some of the stories show some serious signs of age not just in terms of the technology described, but also because of the perspective. Bradbury comes off like a crotchety old man sometimes.

I'm interested in diving into some of this other collections. There are simply so many of them. I'm curious to see if the quality of writing holds up over the sheer volume of his work.