Here, Bradbury highlights the generational and cultural gap between the young Americans and the aging Hernando, who lives with his wife and works their land, recycling the automobile waste that travelers from north of the border leave behind. Hernando goes back to his rural routine, but suddenly stops to wonder: “What do they mean ‘the World’?” Hernando doesn’t react to the young man’s confession.

Right before they leave, the driver tells Hernando-who doesn’t know why all the cars are driving so fast or why these young Americans are so desperate-that the end of the world has finally arrived. When the last car stops by Hernando, he sees a group of young Americans crying for help: their car needs water to continue their way back home. They are heading home, that is, to join the fight in an upcoming atomic war. One day, Hernando glimpses a procession of hundreds of American tourists driving north to return to the US. The war, however, is experienced through the eyes of a Mexican peasant, Hernando, who lives next to a highway in northern Mexico. 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.

The illustrated man