The Exiles (Bradbury story)
- Maclean's
- The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction
- The Illustrated Man
- R is for Rocket
- Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales
- A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories
- A Pleasure to Burn
"The Exiles" is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury. It was originally published as "The Mad Wizards of Mars" in Maclean's on September 15, 1949 and was reprinted, in revised form, the following year by The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. First collected in The Illustrated Man (1951), it was later included in the collections R Is for Rocket (1962), Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003), A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005) and A Pleasure to Burn (2010, under the "Mad Wizards" title and presumably with the Maclean's text). It was also published in "The Eureka Years: Boucher and McComas's Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction" (Bantam Books, 1982)(ISBN 0553206737).
Plot summary
Circa the year 2020, the planet Earth contrived to ban and outlaw the books of supernaturalist authors such as H.P. Lovecraft, Edgar Allan Poe, Algernon Blackwood and Ambrose Bierce. A century later in the year 2120, the dying crew of an interplanetary rocket-ship is headed for the planet Mars. The crew is plagued by needle-sharp pains and nightmarish visions and dreams, caused by the incantations and magical fires of the martian Exiles -- the banned authors Shakespeare, Blackwood, Bierce, Lovecraft and Poe, and their literary characters -- who are fearfully aware of the approaching rocket. The Exiles are already fading from existence because the people of Earth have burned nearly all their books. The Exiles soon learn that the rocket captain is carrying away from Earth the very last copies of the forbidden books that survived the conflagration. In desperation, Poe and Bierce attempt to entreat Charles Dickens to negotiate with the rocket crew once it arrives, but the pompous Dickens bitterly resents his inclusion among mere fantasy and supernatural writers, and rejects Poe's request. The rocket crew does arrive, but finds only a few flickering signs that Mars might have been inhabited by the Exiles. Seeking to forever banish the 'supernatural' plague before they colonize Mars, the rocket ship's crew burn the books that the captain has brought with him, thus consigning the Exiles to oblivion.
Adaptations
"The Exiles" was adapted to the Eclipse comic book Alien Encounters No. 10 (December 1986) by Tom Sutton.
Reception
Author and literary critic Gore Vidal admired Bradbury and this story in particular, calling it "a good short story" and saying that it represented Bradbury "at his best".[1]
Related stories
Bradbury also wrote of similar futures where books were banned, with references to Poe and other authors, in the short stories "Pillar of Fire" and "Usher II" (1950), and the novel Fahrenheit 451.
The Three Witches from Shakespeare's Macbeth appear at the beginning of the story. Similar characters reappear in another of Bradbury's short stories, "The Concrete Mixer," also dealing with Mars, and they provided the title of Bradbury's novel, Something Wicked This Way Comes.
Despite its Martian setting the 1950 version of this Mars tale is set in the year 2167 (later adjusted to 2120, as various story timelines became better aligned). It is thus not a formal part of Bradbury's famous collection The Martian Chronicles which ends in the year 2057.
References
- ^ Vidal, Gore (1977), "The Wizard of the 'Wizard'", New York Review of Books, Vol. 24, No. 15; September 29, 1977.
External links
- The Exiles title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
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- The Martian Chronicles (1950)
- Fahrenheit 451 (1953)
- Dandelion Wine (1957)
- Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962)
- The Halloween Tree (1972)
- Death Is a Lonely Business (1985)
- A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990)
- Green Shadows, White Whale (1992)
- From the Dust Returned (2001)
- Let's All Kill Constance (2002)
- Farewell Summer (2006)
- "Hollerbochen's Dilemma" (1938)
- "The Scythe" (1943)
- "I, Rocket" (1944)
- "The Lake" (1944)
- "Frost and Fire" (1946)
- "The Million Year Picnic" (1946)
- "The Small Assassin" (1946)
- "I See You Never" (1947)
- "Fever Dream" (1948)
- "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" (1948)
- "The Long Years" (1948)
- "Mars Is Heaven!" (1948)
- "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" (1949)
- "The Exiles" (1949)
- "Marionettes, Inc." (1949)
- "The Long Rain" (1950)
- "The Rocket" (1950)
- "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950)
- "The Veldt" (1950)
- "Ylla" (1950)
- "Embroidery" (1951)
- "The Fog Horn" (1951)
- "Here There Be Tygers" (1951)
- "The Pedestrian" (1951)
- "The April Witch" (1952)
- "A Sound of Thunder" (1952)
- "The Wilderness" (1952)
- "The Flying Machine" (1953)
- "The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind" (1953)
- "The Meadow" (1953)
- "The Murderer" (1953)
- "Sun and Shadow" (1953)
- "All Summer in a Day" (1954)
- "The Dragon" (1955)
- "The Aqueduct" (1979)
- "Banshee" (1984)
- "The Toynbee Convector" (1984)
- "Is That You, Herb?" (2003)
- Dark Carnival (1947)
- The Illustrated Man (1951)
- The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953)
- The October Country (1955)
- A Medicine for Melancholy (1959)
- The Day It Rained Forever (1959)
- The Small Assassin (1962)
- R Is for Rocket (1962)
- The Machineries of Joy (1964)
- The Vintage Bradbury (1965)
- S Is for Space (1966)
- Twice 22 (1966)
- I Sing the Body Electric! (1969)
- Ray Bradbury (1975)
- Long After Midnight (1976)
- The Fog Horn & Other Stories (1979)
- The Last Circus and the Electrocution (1980)
- The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980)
- The Fog Horn and Other Stories (1980)
- Dinosaur Tales (1983)
- A Memory of Murder (1984)
- The Toynbee Convector (1988)
- Classic Stories 1 (1990)
- Classic Stories 2 (1990)
- The Parrot Who Met Papa (1991)
- Selected from Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed (1991)
- Quicker Than the Eye (1996)
- Driving Blind (1997)
- Ray Bradbury Collected Short Stories (2001)
- One More for the Road (2002)
- Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003)
- The Cat's Pajamas: Stories (2004)
- A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005)
- The Dragon Who Ate His Tail (2007)
- Summer Morning, Summer Night (2007)
- A Pleasure to Burn (2010)
- The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury (2011, 2014)
- The Meadow (1947)
- The Flying Machine: A One-Act Play for Three Men (1953)
- The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays (1972)
- Pillar of Fire and Other Plays (1975)
- The Martian Chronicles (1986)
- The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1986)
- Fahrenheit 451 (1986)
- Dandelion Wine (1988)
- The Veldt (1988)
- It Came from Outer Space (1953)
- Moby Dick (1956 screenplay)
- "I Sing the Body Electric" (1962)
- The Autumn People (1965)
- Tomorrow Midnight (1966)
- Fahrenheit 451 (1966)
- The Picasso Summer (1969)
- The Illustrated Man (1969)
- The Martian Chronicles (1980 miniseries)
- The Electric Grandmother (1982)
- Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983)
- Bradbury 13 (radio series, 1983–84)
- Fahrenheit 451 (1984)
- "The Burning Man" (1985)
- The Veldt (1987)
- The Ray Bradbury Theater (TV series, 1985–86, 1988-1992)
- The Halloween Tree (1993)
- Dandelion Wine (1997)
- The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998)
- A Sound of Thunder (2005)
- Ray Bradbury's Chrysalis (2008)
- The Whispers (2015)
- Fahrenheit 451 (2018)
- Futuria Fantasia (1939–1940)
- The Mummies of Guanajuato (1978)
- Zen in the Art of Writing (1990)
- It Came from Outer Space (2003 book)
- Bettina F. Bradbury (daughter)
- Spaceship Earth
- Bradbury Landing
- Ray Bradbury Award
- Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury
- Dandelion crater
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