But then when a youth meets the man and looks into his tattoos, we are transported not into a universe of fantasy but into a series of three rather tightly reasoned s-f stories. Doctor Strange fans know where they stand. And so this is a world of magic, of charms and spells. We start with fantasy: A strange lady has covered the body of a man with 'skin illustrations' which picture the future and the past. Instead of slipping goblins into nuclear reactors, it slips logic into an illogical universe. What finally brings the movie down is its inadequate attention to the expectations of the audience. Which brings us by a laborious route to 'The Illustrated Man.' It has its weaknesses - of acting, of character - but they are not fatal.

But slipping fantasy into a s-f story was a crime of roughly the same proportions as slipping the real murderer into the last chapter of a whodunit. If you threw logic out the window to begin with (as Tolkien did, and Bradbury sometimes), you had a free hand. If you established him in a realistic universe and suddenly sprung a goblin on him, he had the right to feel put upon. What this argument was really about, I guess, was the expectation of the reader. Of course, anything could happen in s-f, too, but you had to explain how. The crucial difference was that s-f pretended to realism, while in fantasy literally anything could happen and you never knew when a door knob might open a blue eye and wink at you. My side contended that science fiction was fantasy, but that fantasy was not science fiction (are you following this?).

The illustrated man the man