Editor’s note: Radio 4’s latest Dangerous Visions season returns with Iain Glen as The Illustrated Man in a dramatisation of Ray Bradbury's iconic short story collection. Written in 1951, these short stories are noted as one of the defining works of 20th century Science Fiction and are adapted now for Radio 4 by Brian Sibley. In the dramatization a young traveller encounters a vagrant on the road who claims his tattoos come to life after dark and have the powers of prophecy. Here, Sion Smith, Editor of Skin Deep Magazine talks about how the novel inspired him.
Ray Bradbury's iconic book featuring a man with prophetic tattoos, adapted by Brian Sibley
SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES?
The Illustrated Man was part of an elite group of books that we genuinely looked forward to getting involved with at school. Along with The Day of the Triffids and The War of the Worlds, it was off syllabus but our teacher that year was determined to broaden our horizons beyond Shakespeare—and she did it with such a passion that I hope she will be mightily pleased that I, if not others, have continued to keep this flame alive.
In 1981, I was 14 and it was not a period in time when tattoos were even remotely pop-culture orientated, but the backstory to Bradbury’s tale is absolutely captivating. What 14-year-old boy would not have his eyes swept wide open by the tale of a vagrant who had been tattooed with magical images by a time-travelling witch?
That the book had been out in the populace for thirty years already makes it all the more special.
Some years later, I found a VHS copy of Jack Smight's 1969 movie adaptation on a market stall. Held up at the front-end by Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom, it's a strange film and up until that day, I had never seen it. It was captivating for all the wrong reasons—it certainly wasn't how I remembered the book that was for sure, so I back-tracked to the novel again and found that a subsequent reading was actually far superior to the first.
Since then, I've read The Illustrated Man many times, and not only as I've had cause to work with the book due to my job. You can never be sure with Ray Bradbury as to what his intentions were with his stories. As something of a ‘fussy’ fan of Bradbury, I get the impression that he was simply writing stories he liked, and if you liked them too, that was great. If not, that was also fine because there would be something different along shortly.
I believe 2014 makes it 63 years on the shelf but still, The Illustrated Man never gets old. If you were to press me as to why, I would say it was because it consists of contrastingly different short stories held together with a premise thinner than a spider’s silk that just so happens to be stronger than steel. The book is not really even about a tattooed man—that's nothing but a mask to see it safely into the carnival to make its speech.
What the book is really about is human behaviour. And for that reason alone, The Illustrated Man becomes truly timeless in a way many books wish they could also be and yet, fail miserably.
Sion Smith is Editor of Skin Deep Magazine
