The Illustrated Man

A collection of 18 science fiction short stories framed by the conceit of a tattooed carnival worker whose tattoos animate as separate tales. Key story 'The Veldt': a family's fully-automated 'Happylife Home' does everything for them — cooks, cleans, raises the children. The children become so dependent on their VR nursery (an African veldt with live lions) that when their parents threaten to shut it off, they lock them inside the simulation and let the lions kill them. A prescient 1951 portrait of technology replacing parental roles until the machine becomes the family — and humans become expendable.

Ray Bradbury is one of those rare individuals whose writing has changed the way people think. His more than five hundred published works -- short stories, novels, plays, screenplays, television scripts, and verse -- exemplify the American imagination at its most creative.

Once read, his words are never forgotten. His best-known and most beloved books, *The Martian Chronicles*, *The Illustrated …