For the film, see The Exiles (1961 film)

The Exiles (1961 film)

The Exiles is a film by Kent MacKenzie chronicling a day in the life of a group of twenty-something Native Americans who left reservation life in the 1950s to live in the district of Bunker Hill, Los Angeles, California...

.

"The Exiles" is a science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 short story

Short story

A short story is a work of fiction that is usually written in prose, often in narrative format. This format tends to be more pointed than longer works of fiction, such as novellas and novels. Short story definitions based on length differ somewhat, even among professional writers, in part because...

 by Ray Bradbury

Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man , Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th...

. It was originally published as "The Mad Wizards of Mars" in Maclean's

Maclean's

Maclean's is a Canadian weekly news magazine, reporting on Canadian issues such as politics, pop culture, and current events.-History:Founded in 1905 by Toronto journalist/entrepreneur Lt.-Col. John Bayne Maclean, a 43-year-old trade magazine publisher who purchased an advertising agency's in-house...

on 15 September 1949 and was reprinted the following year by Fantasy Fiction, Inc. First collected in The Illustrated Man

The Illustrated Man

The Illustrated Man is a 1951 book of eighteen science fiction short stories by Ray Bradbury that explores the nature of mankind. While none of the stories has a plot or character connection with the next, a recurring theme is the conflict of the cold mechanics of technology and the psychology of...

(1951), it was later included in the collections R is for Rocket

R is for Rocket

R is for Rocket is a short story collection by Ray Bradbury, compiled for Young Adult library sections. It contains fifteen stories from earlier Bradbury collections, and two previously uncollected stories.-Contents:* "R Is for Rocket"...

(1962), Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales

Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales is a collection of short stories by Ray Bradbury. Bradbury wrote an introduction to the collection where he speaks about some of the inspirations, influences and among other things, the comedy duo Laurel and Hardy.-Table of...

(2003) and A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005).

Plot summary

The crew of a rocket ship headed for the planet Mars

Mars

Mars is the fourth planet from the Sun in the Solar System. The planet is named after the Roman god of war, Mars. It is often described as the "Red Planet", as the iron oxide prevalent on its surface gives it a reddish appearance...

 is dying and plagued by nightmarish visions and dreams. Meanwhile, the inhabitants of Mars — supernaturalist authors such as Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author, poet, editor and literary critic, considered part of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the earliest American practitioners of the short story and is considered the inventor of the detective...

, Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Blackwood

Algernon Henry Blackwood, CBE was an English short story writer and novelist, one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. He was also a journalist and a broadcasting narrator. S. T...

 and Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Bierce

Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce was an American editorialist, journalist, short story writer, fabulist and satirist...

 — are also dying, fading from existence as the people of Earth

Earth

Earth is the third planet from the Sun, and the densest and fifth-largest of the eight planets in the Solar System. It is also the largest of the Solar System's four terrestrial planets...

 burn the last of their books, outlawed a century ago for their superstitious themes. Charles Dickens

Charles Dickens

Charles John Huffam Dickens was an English novelist, generally considered the greatest of the Victorian period. Dickens enjoyed a wider popularity and fame than had any previous author during his lifetime, and he remains popular, having been responsible for some of English literature's most iconic...

 and William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare

William Shakespeare was an English poet and playwright, widely regarded as the greatest writer in the English language and the world's pre-eminent dramatist. He is often called England's national poet and the "Bard of Avon"...

 are there too, although Dickens bitterly resents his "ghettoization" among genre writers. The last copies of books that survived, brought by the Captain acting on an unknown hunch, are all that stand in the way of the destruction of these literary remnants on Mars. Upon landing, the astronauts burn the books, thus finally exterminating the authors and their creations.

The three witches from Shakespeare's Macbeth

Macbeth

The Tragedy of Macbeth is a play by William Shakespeare about a regicide and its aftermath. It is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy and is believed to have been written sometime between 1603 and 1607...

appear at the beginning of the story. They 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

Something Wicked This Way Comes (novel)

Something Wicked This Way Comes is a 1962 novel by Ray Bradbury. It is about two 13-year-old boys, Jim Nightshade and William Halloway, who have a harrowing experience with a nightmarish traveling carnival that comes to their Midwestern town one October. The carnival's leader is the mysterious "Mr...

.

Adaptations

"The Exiles" was adapted to the Eclipse

Eclipse Comics

Eclipse Comics was an American comic book publisher, one of several independent publishers during the 1980s and early 1990s. In 1978, it published the first graphic novel intended for the newly created comic book specialty store market...

 comic book

Comic book

A comic book or comicbook is a magazine made up of comics, narrative artwork in the form of separate panels that represent individual scenes, often accompanied by dialog as well as including...

 Alien Encounters

Alien Encounters

Alien Encounters is a science fiction anthology comic book published by FantaCo Enterprises and then Eclipse Comics. The comic debuted with FantaCo in 1981, and in 1985 was revived by Eclipse, where it ran for fourteen issues until 1987.Eclipse began publishing the title soon after the...

 #10 (December, 1986) by Tom Sutton

Tom Sutton

Tom Sutton was an American comic book artist who sometimes used the pseudonyms Sean Todd and Dementia...

.

Reception

The eminent author

Author

An author is broadly defined as "the person who originates or gives existence to anything" and that authorship determines responsibility for what is created. Narrowly defined, an author is the originator of any written work.-Legal significance:...

 and literary critic Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal

Gore Vidal is an American author, playwright, essayist, screenwriter, and political activist. His third novel, The City and the Pillar , outraged mainstream critics as one of the first major American novels to feature unambiguous homosexuality...

admired Bradbury and this story in particular, calling it "a good short story" and saying that it represented Bradbury "at his best".