What if you landed on a far world the day after Christ had just left to go elsewhere? Or what if He were still there, waiting? Hence, The Man. What if is the operative term for many of these stories. All Space, Time, and the heartbeats of seven men are trapped in the words which, when spoken, set them free. And when the last human meteor fires down the sky, there’s not a dry eye in the house. How do you cram a million miles of interplanetary flight onto a stage forty feet wide and twenty deep before an audience of ninety-nine? You just do it. Watching the kids act the dark territory of Kaleidoscope on a bright summer afternoon in San Fernando Valley decided me to write and stage my own version. Shakespeare’s bare stage still stays as prime example. Just actors in school or in someone’s garage or storefront speaking the lines and sensing the passion. Students across country performed the story in class, to teach me once again that theater doesn’t need sets, lights, costumes, or sound. The result was a story that was reprinted in countless anthologies and appeared and reappeared in high school and college auditoriums. I decided one morning forty-six years ago to explode a rocket and toss my astronauts out into a wilderness of Space to see what would happen. Surprise, as I have often said, is everything. A writer’s work is to coax the stuff out and see how it plays. We theorize about what goes on in the brain, but it is mostly undiscovered country. In most cases I don’t even know the metaphors lay waiting to be printed off my retina.

In story after story, The Illustrated Man hid metaphors aching to explode. What then is my choreography to outwit Death?

So far, I say, and finish my beer and go up to my typewriter to finish a story.

At three in the morning, I write, I write, I write! Yes, says Laurent, still smiling and innocent, 'what do you do at three in the morning?' We do not want that.Īh, I say and take his elbow gently. So we dance, we dance so as not to be dead. I work from ten to twelve hours, sometimes fourteen, he says, and then at midnight I go dancing, dancing, dancing until four or five in the morning and go to bed and sleep until ten and then up, up and to work by eleven and another ten or twelve or sometimes fifteen hours of work.Įasily, he says. My waiter friend, Laurent, working at the Brasserie Champs du Mars near the Eiffel Tower, one night while serving me Une Grande Beer, explained his life. To Henry Kuttner with my grateful thanks for his help and encouragement on this book Contentsĭancing, So As Not to Be Dead: An Introduction by Ray BradburyĪbout the Publisher Dancing, So As Not to Be Dead An Introduction by Ray Bradbury

The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury