Status Updates From The Illustrated Man (Harper...

Just read the fourth story, "The Highway". During a rainstorm, a Mexican man named Hernando watches thousands of tourists fleeing Mexico and going back to America. When the final car arrives, he waters their radiator and learns from the driver that a nuclear war has started that will end the world. Then the car flees as well and Hernando goes on with his work. That sounds horrible!

He not appreciative enough 3

Just read the third story, "The Other Foot". The black colonizers on Mars learn that a white man is coming by rocket. Willie Johnson, whose parents were lynched, proposes a Jim Crow system against the whites, until he learns that a nuclear war has destroyed the planet and killed almost everybody. The sympathetic black folk welcome the white folk onto their planet. Great story!

The framing story's narrator watches the Illustrated Man turn in the moonlight. What is he gonna see next?

Finished "Kaleidoscope"! Sure enough, somebody does see Hollis burning in the atmosphere: a little boy in Illinois, who mistakes Hollis for a falling star. His mother tells him to make a wish. Overall, great story! And one that has inspired me to never go to space. Maybe this can happen to Elon and his billionaire buddies!

Hollis feels jealous of a fellow astronaut who's dying happily after living a fulfilling life, while Hollis's life was crap. After making peace with a rival and listening to another astronaut's joy at being taken by a beautiful meteor cluster, Hollis wishes he could do something to make up for his empty life, but there's nobody there. He wonders if anybody will see him when he burns in Earth's atmosphere.

As the men argue with each other and go crazy, Hollis has a fantasy where he kills a screaming astronaut by punching through his helmet. After that, his hand is severed by a passing meteor, and Hollis has to seal the leak in his suit and tighten it to make a tourniquet. Shit's really going down now.