The Exiles

:"For the 1961 film "The Exiles" by Kent MacKenzie, see The Exiles (1961 film)"."The Exiles" is a science fiction short story by author Ray Bradbury. This story was originally published in 1950 by Fantasy Fiction, Inc. Originally collected in "The Illustrated Man", it was later included in the collections "R is for Rocket" and "A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories" (2005).

Plot summary

The crew of a rocket ship headed for the planet Mars is dying and plagued by nightmarish visions and dreams. Meanwhile, the people living on Mars -- prominent authors such as Charles Dickens, Edgar Allan Poe, William Shakespeare, and Ambrose Bierce -- are also dying, fading from existence as the people of Earth burn their books, outlawed a century ago for their superstitious themes. The last copies that survived, brought with him by the captain acting on an unknown hunch, are all that stand in the way of the destruction of the literary race of Martian people. The astronauts then burn the books, killing off the last of the authors and their creations.

The witches from Shakespeare's "Macbeth" appear early in 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".