Banned Books Week: Ray Bradbury’s “The Exiles”

In recognition of the American Library Association’s Banned Books Week, which runs from September 27th to October 4th, 2008, we’ll be reading “The Exiles” (1950), a short story written by Ray Bradbury. The piece is “set on a Mars that has served as a refuge for the authors and characters of literature and myth to save themselves from the modern age (2120) on Earth, where their books have been banned and burned.”

According to The Center for Ray Bradbury Studies, the story was originally published as “The Mad Wizards of Mars” in Maclean’s magazine in September 1949. With slight revisions by Bradbury
over the years, the story has been published as “The Exiles” in
The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction (1950) and numerous collections and anthologies, including The Illustrated Man (1951),
R is for Rocket (1962), and Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003).