The Martian Chronicles

Siempre recomendaré este libro a cualquiera. Vine sin esperar absolutamente nada y encontré oro.

Forget the sci-fi label. This is magnificent, seductive storytelling that just happens to be set mostly on Mars. It’s beautiful, brilliant, startling. It drips with deliciously poetic imagery (and references great poets/poems). It raises profound questions, uses odd analogies, and features dark tragedy, comedy, big ideas, and interesting plots.

At times, the weird unreality reminded me of Jabberwocky: I understood, even when it shouldn’t quite make sense.

It comprises more than a dozen, almost self-contained, short stories that tell a broader, chronological story of human colonisation of Mars, and the consequences for individuals and societies of both species on both planets. (The practicalities of how humans settle so thoroughly on Mars, in huge numbers, in a short timeframe, are ludicrous, but irrelevant.) The broad warnings about the worst instincts of our race are still true and relevant. In addition, there is one, or sometimes two, short vignettes before each main chronicle.


Image: Panoramic version of cover art (Source.)

Ponder

Reality: How can you distinguish the extraordinary from the impossible; reality from hallucination, madness, or wishful thinking from the truth? How do you prove your sanity, your story, your existence? (Topical in a time of conspiracy theories.) If I met an alien, would I believe them or question myself?

Science and religion: What happens when science makes religion redundant?
“If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life?”
The moral is that:
“Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly.”

Telepathy: Creative ways to use it to project alternative realities.

Colonialism: Bradbury balances the excitement of exploration and fresh starts against the dangers of colonisation: infectious disease, deadly misunderstandings, and cultural imperialism/destruction. Renaming places after the invaders’ heroes is “A kind of imported blasphemy”, where you “bludgeon away all the strangeness”. The characters of colour are most sympathetic to their potential impact on Mars and Martians.
The possibility of return has practical and psychological consequences for individuals and the extent to which they "settle". What happens if the choice is suddenly about to disappear?

Missionaries: Religion and colonialism collide in missionary work.
“Shouldn’t we solve our own sins on Earth?”
Man always makes God in his own image, or rather, the image of those to be converted, so it needs to be tweaked on a new world. That offers the exciting prospect of discovering new sins on a new planet, but is the one Truth thereby diluted and invalidated? (See also my review of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, HERE.)

The main chronicles

I’ve omitted the short scene-setting pieces between the main ones, though they are exquisite in their own way.
The years are those in my copy (which omits Usher II), but in some editions, 31 years was added to each of them.

Ylla (February 1999)
A Martian couple live in a beautiful home, but are enduring a declining marriage on a declining planet. Her premonition of what’s to come alarms her husband.

The Earth Men (August 1999)
Humans arrive, expecting a triumphant welcome, but they’re passed from one uninterested person to another: “Maybe we could go out and come in again”. It felt like a Monty Python sketch, until the dark twist.

The Third Expedition (April 2000)
Mind games have dramatic consequences.

And the Moon Be Still as Bright (June 2001)
Tension arises when some of the fourth expedition trash cultural artefacts. Others are respectful of this new world and want to preserve it, and even go native - but at what cost?
"We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things."

The Green Morning (December 2001)
The power of one person to make a difference. (See The forest man of India.)

Night Meeting (August 2002)
A construction worker encounters a retired man who loves what’s different about Mars.
“If you can’t take Mars for what she is, you might as well go back to Earth.”
The man also says “even time is crazy up here”, foreshadowing the worker’s next encounter, where the boundaries of before and after, alive and dead, are unclear.

The Fire Balloons (November 2002)
The dilemmas of being a missionary on an alien world, and whether you can be alive, let alone have a soul, without a corporeal body.

Way in the Middle of the Air (June 2003)
Black Lives Matter! To escape racism and bonded labour, many of the African-Americans of a southern town depart for Mars:
“Between the blazing white banks for the town stores, among the tree silences, a black tide flowed.”
Their white masters are enraged, casually express racist ideas in racist terms, and try to force them to stay.
"Every day they got more rights... anti-lynchin' bills, and all kinds of rights. What more do they want? They make almost as good money as a white man."
The black people leave their few and meagre possessions behind, "placed like little abandoned shrines", as if they had suddenly taken up in the Rapture.
Bradbury's good intent is clear, but some of his descriptions rely on stereotypes that sound offkey today ("a round water-melon head").

Usher II (April 2005)
Subversive dystopian comedy that's also a tribute to Poe's Fall of the House of Usher. I reviewed it HERE.

The Martian (September 2005)
A middle-aged couple regret that they left the body of their dead son on Earth. It's a heartbreaking story of parental grief and the power of believing what one wants to believe.
“If you can’t have the reality a dream is just as good”. But is it?

The Off Season (November 2005)
Staking everything on the imminent influx of thousands of new settlers and jumping to conclusions about a Martian’s intent. Then they see a terrible sight in the sky that will change everything.


Image: Sam's Hot Dogs by Les Edwards (Source)

The Watchers (November 2005)
Bizarre. There’s nuclear war on Earth, the settlers get a message to “come home” - and they almost all do.. I wouldn’t!

The Silent Towns (December 2005)
Comedy (but based on unflattering gender stereotypes). If you were the only man in the world and I were the only girl… I might still prefer to be single.

The Long Years (April 2026)
The lengths people go to when surviving for years, cut off from others. Is Hathaway’s solution a sign of madness or a way of preserving a degree of sanity?

There Will Come Soft Rains (August 2026)
The title is from an anti-war poem by Sara Teasdale, here, written during WW1.
Bradbury writes an initially comic (computerised Heath Robinson) and very cinematographic scene that felt disorientingly different from the previous chronicles. But it arises from the horrific cinders of a nuclear explosion. An automated house continues its programmed routines of preparing meals, cleaning, watering the lawn, playing films, running baths, reading favourite poems - all for people who aren’t there. People whose shadows were captured on a wall, in a moment: mowing the lawn, picking flowers, tossing a ball.


Image: Shadows on the wall (Source)

It's worth browsing YouTube for the many short amateur animations this has inspired. Given that Bradbury wrote the story, afraid of nuclear war with the USSR, a Russian one was notable, and also for its imagery that might shock some Christians. Many of the others were too cutesy, and without enough humour or horror, imo. Oddly, only one of the half-dozen I watched included the most memorable image of all, but I didn't like its hybrid visuals: photos with cartoonish animation superimposed, intercut with real world video. That one is here.

The Million-Year Picnic (October 2026)
Hope for new Martians, a new Adam and Eve.


Quotes

Like Fahrenheit 451 (see my review HERE), rain, and fire recur in exquisite descriptions; wine is added to the mix here.

Beauty
•t“They had a house of crystal pillars… by the edge of an empty sea.”

•t“The old canals filled with emptiness and dreams.”

•t"The ship... came from the stars, and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space… It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan."

•tWouldn't you love to live in a "gentle house" or one with "whispering pillars of rain" that closes itself in “like a giant flower, with the passing of the light”?

•t“The stars… were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphorus membrane of a gelatinous sea-fish.”

•t“The wind blew at her and, like an image on cold water, she rippled, silk standing out from her frail body in tatters of blue rain.”

•t“The fire… fed upon Picassos and Matisses… like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.”

Analogies
•t“The flame birds waited, like a bed of coals, glowing on the cool smooth sands.”

•t“Up and down the green wine-canals, boats as delicate as bronze flowers drifted.”

•t“Sky was hot and still as warm deep sea-water.”

•t“A dead, dreaming world.”
“The dreaming dead city.”

•t“Spender filled the streets with his eyes and his mind.”

•t“He… listened to the peaceful wonder of the valley.”

Ideas
•t“Your insanity is beautifully complete.”

•t"There was a smell of Time... like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dripping down on hollow box-lids, and rain... Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room… Tonight you could almost touch time."

•t“Who wants to see the Future?... A man can face the Past.”

Homage?

I was reminded of this book by Becky Chambers' To Be Taught, If Fortunate, which I reviewed HERE.

"We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things."

The Martian Chronicles, a perfect example of what I'd call a 'quintessential Bradbury' - fragmentary, at times disjointed, occasionally crossing the line into the realm of surreal, full of his trademark nostalgia and sadness, this account of the failed American Dream approach to the exploration of the ultimate frontier never stops fascinating me and drawing me in with its inexplicable charm.

(Side note: as a person of Slavic descent, I reserve the right to run-on long-winded sentences in the best tradition of Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky of which my literature-teacher mother clearly approves).

It is such a multifaceted tale! It is a condemnation of the dear to the human heart way of 'exploration' and colonization - that is, coming to a place new to us and attempting to turn it into a carbon copy of 'home', of the place where we come from, of the place that gives us comfort - and all else be damned. It is an ode to the beauty of the strange and un-understood alienness. It is a criticism of the American Dream which was written in the heyday of this 'Dream'. It is a thinly veiled cautionary tale about the perils of science when misapplied. It is all of the above and none of the above, with everything masterfully interwoven to create a unique unforgettable reading experience.

'Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?' The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. 'But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.'

The story, for those who somehow are not familiar with it, is simple. In the far future of 1999, rocket ships from Earth start coming to Mars. The Martians - the enigmatic, serene, telepathic race - sense the disturbances. Eventually they die off, and the colonization in the American Dream style begins, until the nuclear war on Earth interferes. But the narrative is not quite this linear. It is made of separate, rather stand-alone short stories that often read as interludes, some straightforward, some surreal, but all of them quite haunting, memorable, and thought-provoking.

Bradbury is (was, actually - I still can't believe he's dead) a master of writing peaceful, nostalgic sadness that feels upliftingly purifying. His writing is poetic and lyrical, often dreamlike, with almost a musical quality to it. He often straddles the line between cautionary and moralistic, but mostly succeeds at not crossing over to the unpleasantly preachy side. He is exceptionally good at writing amazing short fiction - since this is what this book essentially is, a collection of interlinked short stories. He manages to create a memorable, beautifully flowing, sophisticated story without a steadily progressing plot, without a main or even a major character, without even a consistent setting.

"Night are night for every year and every year, for no reason at all, the woman comes out and looks at the sky, her hands up, for a long moment, looking at the green burning of Earth, not knowing why she looks, and then she goes back and throws a stick on the fire, and the wind comes up and the dead sea goes on being dead."

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Now, as an aside, I heard this book described as 'not really a science fiction book but a speculative fiction book' quite a few times, almost apologetically, as though science fiction is something to be ashamed of. I understand that this book is essentially a crossover phenomenon which appeals to sci-fi fans and 'general public' alike, and describing it as something else besides sci-fi can help generate a wider audience and a broader appeal.

But hey, I realized that I don't want to be the person falling into this trap - the trap of dismissing sci-fi as something that is not literary enough, something of interior quality, something to be apologetic about. Bradbury, Le Guin, Miéville, Lem (insert your own favorite acclaimed sci-fi author here) are NOT great writers that...ahem...just happen to write sci-fi but maybe not quite really. They are excellent sci-fi writers, and that's how I recommend their books, even at the threat of losing potential audience. After all, Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles was not only one of the first books that I checked out of the 'adult' library, but also the book which cemented my love for science fiction, first fueled by Poul Anderson's Call Me Joe.

The Martian Chronicles is an excellent book, the one that I will continue to re-read every few years or so. It deserves ALL the stars.

"The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water."

Uno de esos clásicos que se tienen que leer. Y no porque se le haya puesto esa etiqueta si no por la importancia y actualidad del mensaje 70 años después de escribirlo.
Crónicas marcianas es una recopilación de relatos de cómo la Humanidad coloniza Marte, llevando su modo de vida allá por donde vaya y devastando todo a su paso. Una crítica a nuestra sociedad dura pero necesaria.
Y lo mejor de todo es que demuestra que se puede hablar sobre la colonización de Marte en apenas 200 páginas, y no como la trilogía interminable de mi colega Kim Stanley Robinson, de la cual todavía no me he recuperado. Un punto para Ray Bradbury.

A wonderful collection of interconnected stories, from humorous to terrifying.

I read in the introduction that upon Bradbury's re-reading of the Chronicles, he made the realization that they were a homage to ancient Egypt. If so, it is an ancient Egypt visited by what now reads as a nostalgic version of post-war America: downtown merchants, gas stations along two lane highways, and even the first hot dog stand on Mars! All this among spherical blue Martians, majestic sand ships, etc.

While humorous moments, especially ironic ones, are common, Bradbury also tackles the topics of genocide, censorship ("Usher II") and war with his standard vehemence.

I was looking for a fantastical read for the outset of fall; "The Martian Chronicles" didn't disappoint!

Wow. Just wow.



If you expect aliens with space ships and interstellar war with heroic maneuvres and terrible explosions (in short, a "loud" story), go read something else. If, however, you're looking for an erudite examination of the human mind and spirit, look no further. Obviously, there is a reason Bradbury is heralded as one of the best (short story) writers of all time.

This collection tells of Mars. How humans first manage expeditions to the Red Planet. What they encounter there, how humans eventually settle on the planet (or swarm it, more accurately), the natives on the planet, what their abilities are, what happens to many of them and, ultimately, what happens to Earth.
It's a great cycle of life and death and rebirth.

But it's more than that. Bradbury used it to closely examine and showcase human ingenuity, racism, colonialism, ignorance for other cultures, the dangers of relying on science alone with no regard or love for art (he phrased it akin to the difference between survival and living) and much more.
The author's own creativity shows, amongst other things, in the difference between the life forms on Mars and what his Martians could do / looked like.

In between, we're treated to some famous and wonderful lines by Byron, we get glimpses at the ideas that sparked Bradbury's most famous novel (published a few years later), witness that Bradbury didn't really care about the socio-political status quo and had a mind (and pen) as sharp as a whip and used them too!

Obviously, Bradbury was a writer AND a reader so we're also getting an hommage to Poe on top of a wonderful tall tale that served as Bradbury's version of the Johnny Appleseed myth. Like I said: erudite.

The book contains 26 or 27 stories (depending on your edition) and they not only all vary greatly in length but also showcase the full range of human experiences: some are hilarious (no, I hadn't expected that; the funniest, for me, was The Silent Towns), full of mostly dark humour, too, which was an added bonus for me, some are infuriating or shockingly sad. They tell of exploration, curiosity, leaving the old to start fresh in the new, war, cultural/philosophical/emotional conflicts, of hopes and dreams and the nightmares that can result from that.
I loved that while they are all standalone, they formed a great narrative about this strange and yet fascinating place and how humans respond to it.

The stories are all fantastic and I loved this little book from the first moment on.

Note, Nov. 2, 3017: I edited this just now to correct a minor typo.

Though the 16 stories that comprise this collection are fitted into a super-imposed chronological framework, and are joined by some short units of bridging material, they were originally composed as stand-alones, not part of any larger unity. Bradbury was primarily a writer of short fiction, the main medium for his characteristic supernatural and science fiction in the era when he started writing; this book simply collects most of the stories he composed in the 1940s set on, or related to, Mars. Several of them have totally conflicting or contradictory premises and features, and they vary wildly in tone and effect. (They're uneven in quality as well, as noted below.) But that said, there are certain recurrent themes that bind them. Bradbury envisioned Mars colonization as a kind of re-enactment of the settling of the American frontier, a new New World with the same pitfalls and the same potential promise. He also was haunted, as were most post-World War II SF writers working in the long shadow of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, by the threat of nuclear war, and that concern is reflected in a number of the stories.

Some reviewers, both on and off of Goodreads, have faulted Bradbury for a drastic lack of scientific accuracy in his portrayal of Mars, which he pictures as much more hospitable to humanoid life than it actually is. (His ascription to his Martians of psi powers --the possibility of which, to say the least, is undemonstrated-- also doesn't please hard SF purists.) To a degree, those criticisms miss the point, however: Bradbury isn't trying to write scientifically accurate, hard SF, and failing at it; rather, he's writing from the standpoint of the genre's "soft" tradition (of which he was always an exponent, even in the days when the U.S. pulp SF ghetto was rigidly dominated by the hard school). He simply posited the kind of Mars he wanted for the kind of stories he wanted to tell, knowing full well that it was fictional and invented; if we take his "Mars" on those terms, the stories work as he intended.

Criticism has also been directed at these stories on the grounds of an alleged anti-American agenda. His space explorers/colonists are all Americans; they invade and occupy Mars, inadvertently bringing disease germs that virtually annihilate the native Martians, who are portrayed in "Ylla" as an aesthetic, artistic race. "Way in the Middle of the Air" is openly critical of white racism in the segregated U.S. South of the 1940s. And several of the stories posit a nuclear war on Earth, with the penultimate story, "There Will Come Soft Rains," graphically portraying the wanton total destruction of life and negation of human science and achievement that such a war would entail. These features, however, do not add up to or prove a root-and-branch essential hostility to America and its values. (Bradbury is actually a product of a small-town America that he often evokes with an affectionate nostalgia that's obviously genuine.) The parallel between the fate of Bradbury's Martians and our Indians is real and historically grounded; you can't re-tell American frontier history without facing it --and at least here, the Martians die only of unintentionally-borne disease; they aren't victims of deliberate genocide. (It could also be questioned whether the portrayal of Martian attitudes is intended as glowingly positive --Yll, as his wife recognizes, is a cold-blooded xenophobe and murderer.) But the promise of the frontier as a place of new beginnings, new possibilities and a second chance is also evoked here; one could view that as a positive take on the meaning of the American experience. Criticism of the treatment by some Americans of blacks (who are also Americans) isn't in itself anti-American; it echoes the sentiment of the song "My Country, 'Tis of Thee," where it says, "God mend thine every flaw." And to view nuclear war as immoral idiocy is not a position of disloyalty to America or American principles, unless we assume that mass genocide and mass suicide have always been intrinsic American ideals (they haven't). "Usher II" expresses a libertarian cultural attitude that's arguably quintessentially American; and "The Million-Year Picnic" brings a family of American nuclear war survivors to Mars as agents of a new beginning, where they finally have a chance "get it right."

There are certainly merited criticisms that can be made of several of these stories. The only one with any religious message, "Fire Balloons," is simply a wooden preaching of the "gospel" according to Gnosticism: "salvation" through evolving away from icky physicality. (The apostles Paul and John, judging from their letters, would have puked over it. :-)) The conclusion (not the climax) of "Mars Is Heaven!" is supposed to be dramatically effective, but doesn't make sense in the context. IMO, the poorest story in the group is "The Silent Towns," which showcases the sexism of Bradbury's generation at its worst; it has no message, except ridicule of overweight females and an attempt to generate "humor" at their expense.

Overall, though, I liked this collection; obviously, some stories are better than others, but I thought that most worked artistically. For me, Bradbury's style is a plus; it's lyrical and evocative, and full of appeals to all of the senses. My favorites in the group are "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "Way in the Middle of the Air," which I think are masterpieces. (Either would have been better selections for the Science Fiction Hall of Fame, IMO, than "Mars Is Heaven!").

Începutul a fost pentru mine puțin cam greu. Doar după aceea a fost perfect. Recomand.