The short story collections of Ray Bradbury best capture his most powerful themes, and The Illustrated Man in particular bestows a wide variety and depth of meaning. For instance, int "The Long Rain" Human will and courage are put to the test, and the value of each is wieghed. A rocket crew crashed and stranded on Venus, a planet stricken with perpetual rain leave their broken ship to seek the shelter of the fabled Sun Dome, a shining beacon to marooned travelers and lost parties, a great building in which synthetic sun shines giving warmth and respite from the bleak planet without. "The Long Rain" puts forth the question of strength and endurance in an isolated struggle for one's life. " The rain continued. It was an Hard Rai

In "Kaleidoscope" Bradbury uses the complete emptiness of space to isolate men from their machines and devices to show them as they are naked and alone. A rocket ship is struck by a devastating meteor and ripped open like a tin can, spewing space suit clad men into the void of space toward a bittersweet death. "...instead of men there were only voices- all kinds of voices, disembodied and impassioned, in varying degrees of terror and resignation."( illustrated) "Now as if they had discovered the horror, two of the men began to scream. In a nightmare Hollis saw one of them float by, very near, screaming and screaming... he would go on screaming for a million miles... Hollis reached out, it was best this way... He smashed the man's glass mask with an iron fist. The screaming stopped." (Illustrated) Once again Human will is put to the test, not by circumstance, but by oneself. But also a great hatred in the hearts of the men is revealed with the ship and pretense violently ripped away.

"I'm afraid you don't understand. I think- I'm in love with her."

No matter what planet he sets his stories on , or how far into the future he projects, the past is always present in Bradbury's works.(contemporary) One of the finest examples of this allusion to the past, is found in The Martian Chronicles where the colonization of Mars is compared to and made parallel to the colonization of the America's.(contemporary) The most striking similarity is that When the fourth expedition lands, they find that all the Martians have died of Chicken Pox, a disease that humans inadvertently brought with them. "Chicken pox, God, chicken pox, think of it! A race builds itself for millions of years, refines itself, erects cities like those out there, does everything to give itself respect and beauty and then it dies."( Martian)

Bradbury was able, in the Sea of Tranquillity at the very sight of Man's first successful Landing on Mars, to use that setting, and all its wonder to emphasize the very real and very recent evils of unbounded colonialism, the brash and careless destruction of things we know little about and people we've killed before we've even spoken. "As for Ethics, they are elemental in Bradbury's fiction... They appear not in obvious nuggets, like raisins in a raisin cake, but blended among the basic ingredients." (Science Fiction Writers)

Braling Two had out grown his tool box prison, and found he rath

Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1630
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page double spaced)