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The Illustrated Man

The Illustrated Man is a 1951 collection of 18 science fiction short stories by American writer Ray Bradbury. A recurring theme throughout the stories is the conflict of the cold mechanics of technology and the psychology of people. It was nominated for the International Fantasy Award in 1952.

The unrelated stories are tied together by the frame story of "The Illustrated Man", a vagrant former member of a carnival freak show with an extensively tattooed body whom the unnamed narrator meets. The man's tattoos, allegedly created by a time-traveling woman, are individually animated, and each tells a different tale.

All but one of the stories had been published previously elsewhere, although Bradbury revised some of the texts for the book's publication.

The book was made into the 1969 film, The Illustrated Man, starring Rod Steiger and Claire Bloom. It presents adaptations of the stories "The Veldt", "The Long Rain" and "The Last Night of the World".

Some of the stories, including "The Veldt", "The Fox and the Forest" (as "To the Future"), "Marionettes, Inc.", and "Zero Hour" were also dramatized for the 1955–1957 radio series X Minus One. "The Veldt", "The Concrete Mixer", "The Long Rain", "Zero Hour", and "Marionettes Inc." were adapted for The Ray Bradbury Theater television series. "The Fox and the Forest" was adapted by Terry Nation for the 1965 BBC television series Out of the Unknown.

The Veldt
Parents in a futuristic society worry about their children's mental health when their new virtual reality nursery, which can produce any environment the children imagine, continually projects an African veldt, populated by lions feasting on carcasses. A child psychologist suggests that the automated house is not good for the children's development, nor the parents', and insists they disable the automation and take a vacation to become more self-sufficient.

The children are not pleased with this decision but later coolly agree to it. The children trap their parents in the nursery, where they become prey to the lions. They later have lunch on the veldt with the child psychologist. They then see the lions feasting but do not recognize what has happened.

Kaleidoscope
The crew of a space ship drift helplessly through space after their craft malfunctions. The story describes the final thoughts and conversations of the crew members as they face their death. The narrator bitterly reflects on his life and feels he has accomplished nothing worthwhile. His final thought is a wish that his life would at least be worth something to someone else. As he falls through Earth's atmosphere and is incinerated, he appears as a shooting star to a child in Illinois.

The Other Foot
Mars has been colonized solely by black people. When they learn that a rocket is coming from Earth with white travellers, they institute a Jim Crow system of racial segregation in retaliation for how the whites once treated them. When the rocket lands, the travelers tell them that the entire Earth has been destroyed by war, including all of the horrific mementos of racism (such as trees used for lynching black people), leaving few survivors. The black people take pity on the white travelers and accept them into their new society.

The Highway
A husband and wife living by a highway in rural Mexico live their simple, regimented lives while the highway fills with refugees of a nuclear war. They give assistance to some young travelers, who tell them that the nuclear war means the end of the world. After the travelers leave, the husband wonders what they meant by "the world," before returning to his work as normal.

The Man
Space explorers find a planet where the population is in a state of bliss. Upon investigation, they discover that an enigmatic visitor came to them, whom the spacemen come to believe is Jesus. One decides to spend his life rejoicing in the man's glory. Another uses the spaceship to try to catch up to the mysterious traveller, but at each planet he finds that "He" has just left after spreading his message. Other members of the crew remain on the planet to learn from the contented citizens, and are rewarded by the discovery that "He" is still on the planet.

The Long Rain
A group of astronauts is stranded on Venus, where it rains continually and heavily. The travelers make their way across the Venusian landscape to find a "sun dome", a shelter with a large artificial light source. The first sun dome they find has been destroyed by the native Venusians. Searching for another sun dome, the characters, one by one, are driven to madness and suicide by the unrelenting rhythm of the rain. At the end of the story, only one astronaut, his sanity in question, remains to find a functional sun dome.

The Rocket Man
Narrator Doug remembers his astronaut father coming home after a three-month space flight, one summer when Doug was 14. His father tried to interest himself in Earth life, but after a few days he felt the urge to return to space. He warned Doug not to become an astronaut, always torn between Earth and space and at risk of a million deaths. Doug's mother prepared a Thanksgiving dinner the night before his father's departure, even though she had long ago accepted that he would die in space and had detached herself emotionally. The next morning his father assured them that the mission would be his last. After word arrived that his father's rocket had fallen into the sun, Doug and his mother shunned the daylight.

The Fire Balloons
A group of priests travels to Mars to act as missionaries to the Martians. They discover that the natives are entities of pure energy. Since they lack corporeal form, they are unable to commit sin, and thus do not need redemption.

The Last Night of the World
A married couple awaken to the knowledge that the world is going to end that very evening. Nonetheless, they go through their normal routines, knowing and accepting the fact that there is no tomorrow.

The Exiles
Numerous works of literature are banned and burned on Earth. The deceased authors of these books live in a kind of afterlife on Mars. Though dead, they are still vulnerable in the sense that when all of an author's works are destroyed, the author vanishes permanently. The authors learn that people are coming from Earth, and they stage their retribution. Their efforts are foiled when the astronauts burn the last remaining books, annihilating the entire colony.

No Particular Night or Morning
Two friends in a spaceship, Clemens and Hitchcock, discuss the emptiness and cold of space. The slightly eccentric Hitchcock embraces solipsism, and repeatedly insists that nothing in space is real and there is no night or morning. He refuses to believe anything about reality without sufficient evidence and soon becomes skeptical of everything he cannot directly experience. He says that he does not believe in stars, because they are too far away. Clemens learns that Hitchcock has left the ship. Hitchcock continues to mumble to himself as he dies of exposure to the void of space.

The Fox and the Forest
A couple living in a war-ravaged future society on the brink of collapse uses time travel to escape to 1938 Mexico. They and others before them have used the technology to enjoy life before chemical, nuclear, and biological warfare ruined everything. Unfortunately, the authorities have also traveled back in time to return the exiles to the future.

The Visitor
Mars is used as isolation for people with deadly illnesses. One day, the planet is visited by a young man named Leonard Mark of 18 who has the ability to perform telepathy. The exiles, including a man named Saul, on the planet are thrilled with his ability and a violent fight breaks out over who will get to spend the most time with their visitor and enjoy the illusionary paradises he can transmit. In the struggle, the young man is killed and the escape he provided is lost forever.

The Concrete Mixer
A reluctant Martian man is forced to join the army as they prepare to invade Earth. When they arrive, they are welcomed by a world at peace, full of people who are curious rather than aggressive. The protagonist meets a movie director, and it becomes clear that the people of Earth have planned to exploit the Martians for financial gain. He tries to escape to Mars, but is run over by a car and killed.

Marionettes, Inc.
An unhappily married man, Braling, buys a realistic robot who looks exactly like him, Braling Two, from Marionettes, Inc. Braling Two acts as a surrogate so that Braling does not have to deal with his wife, who trapped him into marriage by getting pregnant and threatening to turn him in for rape if he leaves her. While Braling's friend considers getting his own robot doppelgänger, he discovers that his wife already has replaced herself with one. Braling Two falls in love with Braling's wife. Arguing that he is better at providing for her than Braling, Braling Two locks the real man in the crate in which the robot was delivered.

The City
A rocket expedition from Earth lands on an uncharted planet and finds a seemingly empty city. As the humans begin to explore, they realize that the city is not as empty as it seems. The city was waiting for the arrival of humans, designed by a long dead civilization to take revenge upon humanity; the civilization was destroyed by human biological weapons before recorded history. Once the city captures and kills the human astronauts, the humans' corpses are used as automatons to take a final act of revenge — a biological attack on the Earth.

Zero Hour
In the near future, young children are persuaded to help a seemingly imaginary friend named Drill to play a game called Invasion. When one of the mothers realizes that children far away from her town play the exact same game, and her own daughter says casually that the adults will have to die, she starts to worry. Eventually Drill turns out to be a real alien with many more coming after him, and they find the hiding parents with the help of their own daughter.

The Rocket
Fiorello Bodoni, a poor junkyard owner, has saved $3,000 to fulfill his dream to send one member of his family into outer space. The family cannot choose who will go, fearing those left behind will resent the one chosen. Bodoni instead uses the money to build a replica rocket containing a virtual reality theater that simulates a voyage through space.

Other versions
The British edition, first published in 1952 by Hart-Davis omits "The Rocket Man", "The Fire Balloons", "The Exiles" and "The Concrete Mixer", and adds "Usher II" from The Martian Chronicles and "The Playground".

Editions published by Avon Books in 1997 and William Morrow in 2001 omit "The Fire Balloons" and add "The Illustrated Man" to the end of the book.

 * "Usher II": Literary expert William Stendahl has retreated to Mars to escape the book-burning dictates of the Moral Climate Monitors. On Mars he has built his image of the perfect haunted mansion, replicating the building from Edgar Allan Poe's short story "The Fall of the House of Usher", complete with mechanical creatures, creepy soundtracks and the extermination of all life in the surrounding area. When the Moral Climate Monitors come to visit, each of them is killed in a manner reminiscent of a different Poe story, culminating in the immurement of the lead inspector. When all of Stendahl's persecutors are dead, the house sinks into the lake.

 * "The Playground": When Charles Underhill was a boy, he was tormented by neighborhood bullies. When his son begins playing in a local playground, he becomes deeply disturbed when he sees a bully from his youth.

 * "The Illustrated Man": An overweight carnival worker is given a second chance as a Tattooed Man, and visits a strange woman who applies skin illustrations over his entire body. She covers two special areas, claiming they will show the future. The first is an illustration of the man strangling his wife. Shortly after this comes to pass, the carnival workers run the man down, beat him, and look at the second area. It shows an illustration of the beating in which they are engaged.

Reception
Boucher and McComas gave The Illustrated Man a mixed review, faulting the framing story as "markedly ineffective" and the story selection for being "less than wisely chosen". However, they found the better stories "provide a feast [from] the finest traditions in imaginative fiction" and later named it among the year's top books. Villiers Gerson, reviewing the volume for Astounding Science Fiction, praised it as "a book which demonstrates that its author is one of the most literate and spellbinding writers in science fiction today". In The New York Times, Gerson also praised the book for its "three-dimensional people with whom it is easy to sympathize, to hate, and to admire".

1969 film
A film adaptation of The Illustrated Man was released in 1969. It was directed by Jack Smight and starred Rod Steiger, Claire Bloom, and others, including Don Dubbins. The script was by producer Howard B. Kreitsek. The film contains adaptations of "The Veldt", "The Long Rain", and "The Last Night of the World" and expands the prologue and epilogue with intermittent scenes and flashbacks of how the illustrations came to be. A short documentary, Tattooed Steiger, details the process the filmmakers used to cover Steiger's body in mock tattoos and shows actors and filmmakers preparing for the movie.

Influence on To the Dark Side of the Moon, 2010
A theater adaptation of "Kaleidoscope", with influence from music by Pink Floyd was used to produce To the Dark Side of the Moon, in reference to the Pink Floyd album by the same name. This adaptation was produced by Stern-Theater, a Swiss-based theater company. The script was written by Daniel Rohr and was first shown at the Theater Rigiblick in Zürich, Switzerland on February 6, 2010. The music includes creative use of a string quartet and a piano.

BBC Radio, 2014
A radio adaptation was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 on 14 June 2014 as part of the Dangerous Visions series adapted by Brian Sibley, directed by Gemma Jenkins and starring Iain Glen as "The Illustrated Man" and Jamie Parker as "The Youth". The stories adapted for this production were "Marionettes, Inc.", "Zero Hour" and "Kaleidoscope".

Film in development
Since 2009, director Zack Snyder has been attached to direct, at least in part, a film adaptation of three stories from The Illustrated Man: "The Illustrated Man", "Veldt", and "Concrete Mixer", with screenwriter Alex Tse writing the screenplay.

The Whispers television series
The Whispers is an American television series based on the short story "Zero Hour".

The Bradbury Tattoos (rock opera, 2018)
A new rock opera titled The Bradbury Tattoos was scheduled to premiere in Cincinnati, Ohio, on July 13 and July 22, 2018, in collaboration with concert:nova, a contemporary classical ensemble composed of musicians from the Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra. Written by composer Zac Greenberg and librettist Michael Burnham, the opera is adapted from four stories in The Illustrated Man -- "Kaleidoscope," "Zero Hour," "The Highway" and "The Last Night of the World." The production is funded by the National Endowment for the Arts.

References in popular culture

 * The 1999 novel The Illustrated Mum by Jacqueline Wilson is a reference to The Illustrated Man by title.
 * Elton John's hit song, "Rocket Man", was inspired by the Bradbury story.
 * The band Pearls Before Swine released a song named after and inspired by "The Rocket Man".
 * In the 2007 film Blades of Glory, Will Ferrell's character claims to be referred to as "The Illustrated Man".
 * Numerous references to The Illustrated Man are made throughout an episode of Criminal Minds (episode 20, season 5, entitled "A Thousand Words") that deals with a serial killer whose body is covered in tattoos.
 * In 2012, shortly before author Ray Bradbury's death, Canadian musician deadmau5 produced a song titled "The Veldt", including lyrics by Chris James based upon the short story. The music video, released after Bradbury's death, is dedicated to him.
 * Post-rock band Deadhorse refer their 2010 album release We Can Create Our Own World to be directly influenced by the book.
 * Noah Taylor's character can be seen reading the book in Cameron Crowe's film Almost Famous while on a tour bus.
 * The Illustrated Man himself appears in The Simpsons "Treehouse of Horror XXIV" episode in the couch gag with his author, Ray Bradbury.
 * In an episode of The Sopranos (Season 2, Episode 11), Dick Barone refers to a man covered in tattoos as "The Illustrated Man."
 * "Kaleidoscope" seems to have inspired the ending of Dark Star with the ships crew drifting apart to their various fates including joining a meteor shower and hitting the planet they'd bombed.
 * American melodic death metal band Light This City released two songs on their 2008 album Stormchaser inspired by Ray Bradbury stories. The song "Firehaven" was inspired by "The Long Rain" and the song "Wake Me at Sunset" was inspired by "The Rocket Man."
 * The Quentin Tarantino movie Once Upon a Time in Hollywood includes a radio trailer for the film version of The Illustrated Man playing in the background.
 * In the Black Mirror episode "Beyond the Sea", this book is seen near the computer of a spacecraft.
 * In the 2019 Argentine film The Blonde One (Un Rubio) directed by Marco Berger, the character Gabriel reads The Illustrated Man while lying on his bed.

title: The Illustrated Man


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User:Saracarl

Sara Carlstead Brumfield

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Pages I've worked on:

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Welcome to the 'pedia Sara! I like what you have done to the place. ---User:maveric149

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: User:Saracarl


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List of political theorists

A political theorist is someone who engages in constructing or evaluating political theory, including political philosophy. Theorists may be academics or independent scholars. Here the most notable political theorists are categorized by their -ism or school of thought, with a remaining category ("Other") for those theorists who do not fit into any of the major traditions.

Anarchist

 * Mikhail Bakunin
 * Murray Bookchin
 * Noam Chomsky
 * William Godwin
 * Emma Goldman
 * Peter Kropotkin
 * Pierre-Joseph Proudhon
 * James C. Scott
 * John Zerzan
 * Howard Zinn

Classical liberal

 * Raymond Aron
 * Frédéric Bastiat
 * Isaiah Berlin
 * Benjamin Franklin
 * Francis Fukuyama
 * Hugo Grotius
 * Friedrich Hayek
 * Immanuel Kant
 * John Locke
 * James Madison
 * John Milton
 * Montesquieu
 * Karl Popper
 * Samuel von Pufendorf
 * Joseph Schumpeter
 * Adam Smith
 * Alexis de Tocqueville

Conservative

 * Edmund Burke
 * James Burnham
 * Samuel Taylor Coleridge
 * Juan Donoso Cortés
 * Julius Evola
 * Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
 * Johann Gottfried von Herder
 * Russell Kirk
 * Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn
 * Gustave Le Bon
 * Joseph de Maistre
 * Harvey Mansfield
 * Charles Maurras
 * Adam Müller
 * Michael Oakeshott
 * Wilhelm Röpke
 * Carl Schmitt
 * Roger Scruton
 * Oswald Spengler
 * Leo Strauss
 * Eric Voegelin

Feminist

 * Wendy Brown
 * Raya Dunayevskaya
 * Nancy Fraser
 * Betty Friedan
 * Chantal Mouffe
 * Martha Nussbaum
 * Mary Wollstonecraft

Libertarian

 * David D. Friedman
 * Hans-Hermann Hoppe
 * Rose Wilder Lane
 * Robert Nozick
 * Ayn Rand
 * Murray Rothbard
 * Lysander Spooner
 * Max Stirner

Marxist

 * Theodor Adorno
 * Tariq Ali
 * Louis Althusser
 * Cornelius Castoriadis
 * Friedrich Engels
 * Frantz Fanon
 * Antonio Gramsci
 * Che Guevara
 * Ho Chi Minh
 * C.L.R. James
 * Kim Il Sung
 * Ernesto Laclau
 * Vladimir Lenin
 * György Lukács
 * Rosa Luxemburg
 * Herbert Marcuse
 * Karl Marx
 * Antonio Negri
 * Leon Trotsky

Religious

 * Muhammad Asad
 * Muammar Gaddafi
 * René Guénon
 * Muhammad Iqbal
 * Alasdair MacIntyre
 * Prabhat Ranjan Sarkar
 * Vinayak Damodar Savarkar
 * Charles Taylor
 * Simone Weil

Social liberal

 * Kenneth Arrow
 * Jeremy Bentham
 * Robert Dahl
 * Amy Gutmann
 * Will Kymlicka
 * John Stuart Mill
 * John Rawls
 * Michael Walzer

Other

 * Gabriel Almond
 * Hannah Arendt
 * Aristotle
 * Chanakya
 * Cicero
 * Confucius
 * Dobrica Ćosić
 * Ronald Dworkin
 * David Easton
 * Erich Fromm
 * Jürgen Habermas
 * Theodor Herzl
 * Thomas Hobbes
 * Leszek Kołakowski
 * Ali Latifiyan
 * Niccolò Machiavelli
 * Mencius
 * Thomas More
 * Thomas Paine
 * Plato
 * Robert D. Putnam
 * Jean-Jacques Rousseau

title: List of political theorists


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Mead

Mead, also called hydromel (particularly when low in alcohol content), is an alcoholic beverage made by fermenting honey mixed with water, and sometimes with added ingredients such as fruits, spices, grains, or hops. The alcoholic content ranges from about 3.5% ABV to more than 20%. Possibly the most ancient alcoholic drink, the defining characteristic of mead is that the majority of the beverage's fermentable sugar is derived from honey. It may be still, carbonated, or naturally sparkling, and despite a common misconception that mead is exclusively sweet, it can also be dry or semi-sweet.

Mead that also contains spices is called , and mead that contains fruit is called melomel. The term honey wine is sometimes used as a synonym for mead, although wine is typically defined to be the product of fermented grapes or certain other fruits, and some cultures have honey wines that are distinct from mead. The honey wine of Hungary, for example, is the fermentation of honey-sweetened pomace of grapes or other fruits.

Mead was produced in ancient times throughout Europe, Africa, and Asia, and has played an important role in the mythology of some peoples. In Norse mythology, for example, the Mead of Poetry, crafted from the blood of Kvasir, would turn anyone who drank it into a poet or scholar.

History
Mead is a drink widely considered to have been discovered prior to the advent of both agriculture and ceramic pottery in the Neolithic, due to the prevalence of naturally occurring fermentation and the distribution of eusocial honey-producing insects worldwide; as a result, it is hard to pinpoint the exact historical origin of mead given the possibility of multiple discovery or potential knowledge transfer between early humans prior to recorded history. With the eventual rise of ceramic pottery and increasing use of fermentation in food processing to preserve surplus agricultural crops, evidence of mead begins to show up in the archaeological record more clearly, with pottery vessels from northern China dating from at least 7000 BCE discovered containing chemical signatures consistent with the presence of honey, rice, and organic compounds associated with fermentation.

The earliest surviving written record of mead is possibly the soma mentioned in the hymns of the Rigveda, one of the sacred books of the historical Vedic religion and (later) Hinduism dated around 1700–1100 BCE. The Rigveda predates the Indo-Iranian separation, dated to roughly 2000 BCE, so this mention may originate from the Western Steppe or Eastern Europe. The Abri, a northern subgroup of the Taulantii, were known to the ancient Greek writers for their technique of preparing mead from honey. During the Golden Age of ancient Greece, mead was said to be the preferred drink. Aristotle (384–322 BCE) discussed mead made in Illiria in his Meteorologica and elsewhere, while Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE) called mead militites in his Naturalis Historia and differentiated wine sweetened with honey or "honey-wine" from mead. The Hispanic-Roman naturalist Columella gave a recipe for mead in De re rustica, about 60 CE.

"Take rainwater kept for several years, and mix a sextarius of this water with a [Roman] pound of honey. For a weaker mead, mix a sextarius of water with nine ounces of honey. The whole is exposed to the sun for 40 days and then left on a shelf near the fire. If you have no rain water, then boil spring water."

Ancient Greek writer Pytheas described a grain and honey drink similar to mead that he encountered while travelling in Thule. According to James Henry Ramsay this was an earlier version of Welsh metheglin. When 12-year-old Prince Charles II visited Wales in 1642 Welsh metheglin was served at the feast as a symbol of Welsh presence in the emerging British identity in the years between the Union of the Crowns in 1603 and the creation of the Kingdom of Great Britain in 1707.

There is a poem attributed to the Welsh bard Taliesin, who lived around 550 CE, called the Kanu y med or "Song of Mead" (Cân y medd). The legendary drinking, feasting, and boasting of warriors in the mead hall is echoed in the mead hall Din Eidyn (modern-day Edinburgh) as depicted in the poem Y Gododdin, attributed to the poet Aneirin who would have been a contemporary of Taliesin. In the Old English epic poem Beowulf, the Danish warriors drank mead. In both Insular Celtic and Germanic poetry, mead was the primary heroic or divine drink, see Mead of poetry.

Mead (Old Irish mid) was a popular drink in medieval Ireland. Beekeeping was brought around the 5th century, traditionally attributed to Modomnoc, and mead came with it. A banquet hall on the Hill of Tara was known as Tech Mid Chuarda ("house of the circling of mead"). Mead was often infused with hazelnuts. Many other legends of saints mention mead, as does that of the Children of Lir.

Later, taxation and regulations governing the ingredients of alcoholic beverages led to commercial mead becoming a more obscure beverage until recently. Some monasteries kept up the traditions of mead-making as a by-product of beekeeping, especially in areas where grapes could not be grown.

Etymology
The English mead – "fermented honey drink" – derives from the Old English meodu or medu, and Proto-Indo-European language, *médʰu. Its cognates include Old Norse mjǫðr, Proto-Slavic medъ, Middle Dutch mede, and Old High German metu, Sanskrit madhu and the ancient Irish queen Medb, among others. The Chinese word for honey, mì (蜜) was borrowed from the extinct Indo-European Tocharian word mit – also a cognate with the English word mead.

Fermentation process
Meads will often ferment well at the same temperatures at which wine is fermented, and the yeast used in mead making is often identical to that used in wine making (particularly those used in the preparation of white wines). Many home mead makers choose to use wine yeasts to make their meads.

By measuring the specific gravity of the mead once before fermentation and throughout the fermentation process using a hydrometer or refractometer, mead makers can determine the proportion of alcohol by volume that will appear in the final product. This also serves to troubleshoot a "stuck" batch, one where the fermentation process has been halted prematurely by dormant or dried yeast.

With many different styles of mead possible, there are many different processes employed, although many producers will use techniques recognizable from wine-making. One such example is to rack the product into a second container, once fermentation slows down significantly. These are known as a primary and a secondary fermentation, respectively. Some larger commercial fermenters are designed to allow both primary and secondary fermentation to happen inside the same vessel. Racking is done for two reasons: it lets the mead sit away from the remains of the yeast cells (lees) that have died during the fermentation process. Second, this lets the mead have time to clear. Cloudiness can be caused by either yeast or suspended protein molecules. There is also the possibility that the pectin from any fruit that is used could have set which gives the mead a cloudy look. The cloudiness can be cleared up by either "cold breaking", which is leaving the mead in a cold environment overnight, or using a fining material, such as sparkolloid, bentonite, egg white, or isinglass. If the mead-maker wishes to backsweeten the product (add supplementary sweetener) or prevent it from oxidizing, potassium metabisulfite and potassium sorbate are added. After the mead clears, it is bottled and distributed.

Primary fermentation usually takes 28 to 56 days, after which the must is placed in a secondary fermentation vessel for 6 to 9 months of aging. Durations of primary and secondary fermentation producing satisfactory mead may vary considerably according to numerous factors, such as floral origin of the honey and its natural sugar and microorganism contents, must water percentage, pH, additives used, and strain of yeast, among others. Although supplementation of the must with non-nitrogen based salts, or vitamins has been tested to improve mead qualities, no evidence suggests that adding micronutrients reduced fermentation time or improved quality. Cell immobilization methods, however, proved effective for enhancing mead quality.

Varieties
Mead can have a wide range of flavors depending on the source of the honey, additives (also known as "adjuncts" or "gruit") including fruit and spices, the yeast employed during fermentation, and the aging procedure. Some producers have erroneously marketed white wine sweetened and flavored with honey after fermentation as mead, sometimes spelling it "meade." Some producers ferment a blend of honey and other sugars, such as white refined sugar, again, mislabeling the product as mead. This is closer in style to a hypocras. Blended varieties of mead may be known by the style represented; for instance, a mead made with cinnamon and apples may be referred to as either a cinnamon metheglin or an apple cyser. A mead that also contains spices (such as cloves, cinnamon or nutmeg), or herbs (such as meadowsweet, hops, or even lavender or chamomile), is called a metheglin.

A mead that contains fruit (such as raspberry, blackberry or strawberry) is called a melomel, which was also used as a means of food preservation, keeping summer produce for the winter. A mead that is fermented with grape juice is called a pyment.

Mulled mead is a popular drink at Christmas time, where mead is flavored with spices (and sometimes various fruits) and warmed, traditionally by having a hot poker plunged into it.

Some meads retain some measure of the sweetness of the original honey, and some may even be considered as dessert wines. Drier meads are also available, and some producers offer sparkling meads.

Historically, meads were fermented with wild yeasts and bacteria (as noted in the recipe quoted above) residing on the skins of the fruit or within the honey itself. Wild yeasts can produce inconsistent results. Yeast companies have isolated strains of yeast that produce consistently appealing products. Brewers, winemakers, and mead makers commonly use them for fermentation, including yeast strains identified specifically for mead fermentation. These are strains that have been selected because of their characteristic of preserving delicate honey flavors and aromas.

Mead can also be distilled to a brandy or liqueur strength, in which case it is sometimes referred to as a whiskey. A version called "honey jack" can be made by partly freezing a quantity of mead and straining the ice out of the liquid (a process known as freeze distillation), in the same way that applejack is made from cider.

Regional variants
In Finland, a sweet mead called sima is connected with the Finnish Vappu festival (although in modern practice, brown sugar is often used in place of honey ). During secondary fermentation, added-raisins augment the amount of sugar available to the yeast and indicate readiness for consumption, rising to the top of the bottle when sufficiently depleted. Sima is commonly served with both the pulp and rind of a lemon.

An Ethiopian mead variant tej (ጠጅ, ) is usually home-made and flavored with the powdered leaves and bark of gesho, a hop-like bittering agent which is a species of buckthorn. A sweeter, less-alcoholic version (honey-water) called berz, aged for a shorter time, is also made.

In Kenya a mead variant called Muratina is usually home-made which is used during a number of different important religious and social events.

Mead in Poland and Ireland has been part of culinary tradition for over a thousand years.

In the United States, mead is enjoying a resurgence, starting with small home meaderies and now with a number of small commercial meaderies. As mead becomes more widely available, it is seeing increased attention and exposure from the news media. This resurgence can also been seen around the world in the UK and Australia particularly with session (lower alcohol styles) sometimes called hydromel and Mead-Beer Hybrids also known as Braggots.

Mead variants

 * Acerglyn: A mead made with honey and maple syrup.
 * Bais: A native mead from the Mandaya and Manobo people of eastern Mindanao in the Philippines. It is made from honey and water fermented for at least five days to a month or more.
 * Balché: A native Mexican version of mead.
 * Bilbemel: A melomel mead made with blueberries, blueberry juice, or sometimes used for a varietal mead that uses blueberry blossom honey.
 * Black mead: A name was sometimes given to the blend of honey and blackcurrants.
 * Blue mead: A type of mead where fungal spores are added during the first fermentation, lending a blue tint to the final product.
 * Bochet: A mead where the honey is caramelized or burned separately before adding the water. Yields toffee, caramel, chocolate, and toasted marshmallow flavors.
 * Bochetomel: A bochet-style mead that also contains fruit such as elderberries, black raspberries and blackberries.
 * Braggot: Also called bragot, bracket(t) and bragget. Welsh origin (bragawd). A mead made from malt in addition to honey. Hops are an optional ingredient. Contrary to the modern definition, historic braggot was most often a back sweetened spiced ale.
 * Byais: A native mead of the Mansaka people of the Philippines made by fermenting galanga roots with honey.
 * Capsicumel: A mead flavored with chili peppers; the peppers may be hot or mild.
 * Chouchenn: A kind of mead made in Brittany.
 * Cyser: A melomel mead made from home honey and apples. If most of the fermentable sugar comes from honey, you get a cyser. If most of the fermentable sugar comes from apples, you get a honey cider.
 * Czwórniak (TSG) : A Polish mead, made using three units of water for each unit of honey.
 * Dandaghare: A mead from Nepal, that combines honey with Himalayan herbs and spices. It has been produced since 1972 in the city of Pokhara.
 * Dwójniak (TSG) : A Polish mead, made using equal amounts of water and honey.
 * Gverc or medovina: Croatian mead prepared in Samobor and many other places. The word "gverc" or "gvirc' is from the German "Gewürze" and refers to various spices added to mead.
 * Hydromel: Name derived from the Greek hydromeli, i.e. literally "water-honey" (see also melikraton and hydromelon). It is also the French name for mead. (See also and compare with the Italian idromele and Spanish hidromiel and aguamiel, the Catalan hidromel and aiguamel, Galician augamel, and Portuguese hidromel). It is also used as a name for light or low-alcohol mead.
 * Kabarawan: An extinct alcoholic drink from the Visayas Islands of the Philippines made with honey and the pounded bark of the Neolitsea villosa
 * Medica/medovica: Slovenian, Croatian and Slovak variety of mead.
 * Medovina: Czech, Croatian, Serbian, Montenegrin, Bulgarian, Bosnian and Slovak for mead. Commercially available in the Czech Republic, Slovakia and presumably other Central and Eastern-European countries.
 * Medovukha: Eastern Slavic variant (honey-based fermented drink).
 * Melomel: A type of mead that also contains fruit.
 * Metheglin: Metheglin is traditional mead with herbs or spices added. Some of the most common metheglins are ginger, tea, orange peel, nutmeg, coriander, cinnamon, cloves or vanilla. Its name indicates that many metheglins were originally employed as folk medicines. The Welsh word for mead is medd, and the word "metheglin" derives from meddyglyn, a compound of meddyg, "healing" + llyn, "liquor".
 * Midus: Lithuanian for mead, made of natural bee honey and berry juice. Infused with carnation blossoms, acorns, poplar buds, juniper berries, and other herbs. Generally, between 8% and 17% alcohol, it is also distilled to produce mead nectar or mead balsam, with some of the varieties having as much as 75% of alcohol.
 * Mõdu: An Estonian traditional fermented drink with a taste of honey and an alcohol content of 4.0%
 * Morat: a blend of honey and mulberries.
 * Mulsum: Mulsum is not a true mead, but is unfermented honey blended with a high-alcohol wine.
 * Mungitch: A party drink made in Western Australia, by Indigenous Noongar using flowers from the moodjar tree(Nuytsia floribunda) are traditionally used to make a sweet mead-like beverage during birak (the first summer in the Indigenous Noongar calendar) the moodjar tree is a very sacred tree to the Noongar peoples.
 * Myod: Traditional Russian mead, historically available in three major varieties:
 * aged mead: a mixture of honey and water or berry juices, subject to a very slow (12–50 years) anaerobic fermentation in airtight vessels in a process similar to the traditional balsamic vinegar, creating a rich, complex and high-priced product.
 * boiled mead: a drink closer to beer, brewed from boiled wort of diluted honey and herbs, very similar to modern medovukha.
 * drinking mead: a kind of honey wine made from diluted honey by traditional fermentation.
 * Nectars: Typically fermented to below 6% ABV, they often incorporate other flavours such as fruits, herbs and spices.
 * Omphacomel: A mead recipe that blends honey with verjuice; could therefore be considered a variety of pyment (q.v.). From the Greek omphakomeli, literally "unripe-grape-honey".
 * Oxymel: Another historical mead recipe, blending honey with wine vinegar. From the Greek ὀξύμελι oxymeli, literally "vinegar-honey" (also oxymelikraton).
 * Pitarrilla: Mayan drink made from a fermented mixture of wild honey, balché-tree bark and fresh water.
 * Półtorak (TSG) : A Polish great mead, made using two units of honey for each unit of water.
 * Pyment: a melomel made from the fermentation of a blend of grapes and honey. If most of the fermentable sugars come from honey, it is considered a pyment. If most of the fermentable sugars come from grapes, it is considered a honeyed wine. In previous centuries piment was synonymous with Hippocras, a grape wine with honey added post-fermentation.
 * Quick mead: A type of mead recipe that is meant to age quickly, for immediate consumption. Because of the techniques used in its creation, short mead shares some qualities found in cider (or even light ale): primarily that it is effervescent, and often has a cidery taste. It can also be champagne-like.
 * Red mead: A form of mead made with redcurrants.
 * Rhodomel: made from honey, water and flowers. From the Greek ῥοδόμελι rhodomeli, literally "rose-honey". Rose hips, rose petals or rose attar are most commonly used today, yet historical meads are were commonly made with other flowers, such as heather, elderflowers, hibiscus or dandelion.
 * Rubamel: A specific type of melomel made with raspberries.
 * Sack mead: This refers to a mead that is made with more honey than is typically used. The finished product contains a higher-than-average ethanol concentration (meads at or above 14% ABV are generally considered to be of sack strength) and often retains a high specific gravity and elevated levels of sweetness, although dry sack meads (which have no residual sweetness) can be produced.  According to one theory, the name derives from the fortified dessert wine sherry (which is sometimes sweetened after fermentation) that, in England, once bore the nickname "sack". In Another theory is that the term is a phonetic reduction of "sake" the name of a Japanese beverage that was introduced to the West by Spanish and Portuguese traders.  However, this mead is quite sweet and Shakespeare referenced "sack" in Henry the V, "If sack and sugar be a fault, God help the wicked!", as well as 18th-century cookbooks that reference "sack mead" by authors unlikely to have known nor tasted "sake".
 * Short mead: A mead made with less honey than usual and intended for immediate consumption.
 * Show mead: A term that has come to mean "plain" mead: that which has honey and water as a base, with no fruits, spices, or extra flavorings. Because honey alone often does not provide enough nourishment for the yeast to carry on its life cycle, a mead that is devoid of fruit, etc. sometimes requires a special yeast nutrient and other enzymes to produce an acceptable finished product. In most competitions, including all those that subscribe to the BJCP style guidelines, as well as the International Mead Fest, the term "traditional mead" refers to this variety (because mead is historically a variable product, these guidelines are a recent expedient, designed to provide a common language for competition judging; style guidelines per se do not apply to commercial or historical examples of this or any other type of mead).
 * Sima: a quick-fermented low-alcoholic Finnish variety, seasoned with lemon and associated with the festival of vappu.
 * Tapluchʼi: a Georgian name for mead, especially made of honey but it is also a collective name for any kind of drinkable inebriants.
 * Tej/mes: an Ethiopian and Eritrean mead, fermented with wild yeasts and the addition of gesho.
 * Traditional mead: synonymous with "show mead," meaning it contains only honey, water, and yeast.
 * Trójniak (TSG) : A Polish mead, made using two units of water for each unit of honey.
 * Včelovina: Slovak alternative name for mead.
 * White mead: A mead that is colored white with herbs, fruit or, sometimes, egg whites.
 * Muratina/Kaluvu: A native mead made from the Kikuyu, Embu and Kamba people of Kenya. It is made by fermenting honey, water and Kigelia.

title: Mead