There’s a story in The Illustrated Man called “The Highway,” where Bradbury tells a tale about the beginning of an atomic war in the US. Bradbury also engages with the political and cultural challenges of migration: specifically, the crossing of the U.S.–Mexico border, which has since received much attention with the dawn of the so-called Trump Era. Readers today will find in The Illustrated Man a fresh perspective that illuminates global issues like artificial intelligence and climate change. Even in his lesser-known works-such as the 1951 sci-fi collection, The Illustrated Man, Bradbury tackles a surprising array of issues that feel as if they were ripped from today’s headlines. And yet, the themes he explored in those books-mass media and censorship, colonization and environmental change-are more relevant than ever. We haven’t yet seen books and reading made illegal (as in his 1953 Fahrenheit 451), just as we haven’t yet discovered another planet ready for American colonizers (as in his 1950 The Martian Chronicles). Ray Bradbury didn’t get everything about the future right. One of the roles of science fiction is to provide readers with a glimpse of how the future could be.
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