The Exiles (Bradbury story)

"The Exiles"
Short story by Ray Bradbury
Original title	The Mad Wizards of Mars
Country	United States
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction
Publication
Published in	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
Media type	Print

"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).

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. This crew is plagued by nightmarish visions and dreams, for which the cause is later revealed - the captain is carrying away from Earth the last copies of the forbidden books that survived Earth's extermination. The crew arrive and find the inhabitants of Mars are also dying. The inhabitants appear to be Lovecraft, Poe, Blackwood, Bierce, and they are fading from existence because the people of Earth have burned nearly all their books. Charles Dickens and William Shakespeare are there too, although the pompous Dickens bitterly resents his "ghettoization" among mere fantasy and supernatural writers. Seeking to forever banish the 'supernatural' plague before they re-colonise Mars, the rocket-ship's crew burn the last books of these authors. Thus they apparently finally consign to oblivion the 'Martian versions' of their authors.

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".

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.

External links

• The Exiles title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database