- n  Screenshot from Lifeless Planetn, taken from: loadthegame.com

Does this feel familiar to you?
Rush of images ceaselessly flowing from The Third Expedition (April 2000/2031)...

This is a story of the unspoken, of wonder, awe, wanderlust, alterity, space conquest, colonization, homesickness, of the familiar and the unknown, of decay and rejuvenation.


⇁ My favourite short stories from the collection :

- Ylla
- The Earth Men
- The Third Expedition
- Night Meeting
- The Martian
- There Will Come Soft Rains
- The Million-Year Picnic


SPACE REVELRY :
Space Truckin' - Deep Purple
Life on Mars - David Bowie

Whether you read SF or not, Ray Bradbury writes beautifully. His style is dreamy and lyrical, satirical and funny, and at times creepy as hell.
This book is interconnected short stories, rather than a novel in the traditional sense. It describes the imagined human colonization of Mars. Some parts are extremely dated: all the men smoke cigars and shoot things; the women bake gingerbread. I guess cell phones and YouTube were beyond the realm of
possibility in 1950, too; Bradbury had people still using typewriters and listening to the radio.
This quaintness doesn't detract from the work's value today, however. I have been haunted since junior high school by "There Will come Soft Rains", near the end of the collection, which describes an automated house that goes on cheerfully making breakfast and vacuuming the carpets, even though the family who lived there, and their entire city, have been obliterated in a nuclear war.
I'm 44 now, and it still makes me shiver.

I also liked an earlier story in which all the black people in a small Southern town get tired of waiting for civil rights (remember, this was 1950) and simply build their own rocket ships and leave! For that time, Bradbury was making a strong statement, and sadly we still have not ended racism today.

I would particularly recommend this book to anyone getting started in the SF genre. The inside front cover of my copy says 14 and up. I'd say that younger kids might not pick up on the political statements, but it would be a great starting point for some interesting discussions, comparing Bradbury's vision of the 21st century with how things have actually turned out.

There once were a people whose children played in the sunshine, on a magnificent place, they laughed and sang....then the first rocket ship came...They laughed not as much some even cried now, but always resumed their merriment , still another rocket ship landed soon after, the children became uneasy... then the third rocket appeared the children went silent... a fourth ship followed and found no more people. So these brilliant beings vanished with the wind into the blue mountains some said, or in the bright raw deserts, maybe the long lonely canals they hide, floating on boats through the endless violet waterways crisscrossing the planet. The strangers began building their own cities, destroying the dead ones , the ancient structures collapsing to the ground, dusty things to be seen by the invaders, but wistfully beautiful, however any new civilization brought to this world can never escape the old hates, war troubles on Earth. The ghosts of the natives are never forgotten though, all the spoilers feel the haunting presence of them, and deep in their hearts the conquerors, tens of millions of miles away from home, believe this... they do not belong here, looking up at the unreal twin moons drifting by . Nonetheless this is paradise, free for the taking a fortune can be made and so many hundreds of thousands arrive, the air is thin yet the harvest is good for those brave enough to come. The wicked numerous for certain, indeed, establish quickly, the know- how long learned like on the former Blue Planet,
works everywhere, prosperity commences ... Ray Bradbury's classic... elegantly sad tales of life on Mars, his predictions haven't been accurate, we've yet to land on the Red Planet but someday this will occur for better or worse , that is for historians to write about, for me the poetic, melancholic, quite nostalgic narrative is more important, the author was a master in his unearthly prose; capturing also the essence of our own third planet or hopefully this will not be true, time the final judge.

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

The Martian Chronicles is the only book I've read where the main character is not one person, but a whole civilization. It's hard to tell what the story is about because it's literally about everything. Bradbury gives us answers to the main questions of life, quite satisfying answers. Bradbury is a visionary.

Ratings:-

“We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”
― Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles



For the last couple years I've been dipping into some of my favorite books as a kid. Re-reading Bradbury's Martian Chronicles as an adult, like earlier reads of The Illustrated Man and Dandelion Wine, was totally worth it. Each read of Bradbury elevates him in my mind.

As an adult, I see the stories in bigger terms. Less about big "s" Space or Mars or martians, and more about race, colonialism, environmentalism, war, loneliness, isolation, family, death. It feels more relevant today than it did when I read it 30-years ago, and more relevant perhaps than it did when it was originally published (some stories over 70-years ago). Obviously, a lot of this is because of my experiences during the last 30 years, and some of these stories were VERY relevant when first published. I'm thinking of "Way in the Middle of the Air", published in 1950. Bradbury's take on race and racism was sharp and clean. The story carried a punch.

Anyway, Bradbury is/was a literary light and treasure.

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

In the light of the remarkable Mars landing and photographs in February 2021:

The Martian Chronicles tells the story of humanity’s repeated attempts to colonize the red planet. I listened to this book, and my version features an introduction by Bradbury, wherein we hear that Bradbury met Aldous Huxley, who read this book and insisted Bradbury was a poet. That makes sense to me, especially if you consider passages such as this:

“There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? 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 dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck-tonight you could almost taste time.”

This book is less conventional novel than a series of lyrical vignettes stitched together to give us a sense of why a variety of Earth people might have wanted to go to Mars. The need to escape endless war, racism, environmental destruction. To Go Back to the Garden and begin again.

The thing is, we are who we are, to a certain extent. Can we ever change? I was in therapy once and the guy asked me (the unhappy one): So imagine moving from the midwest to, say, Santa Fe, what would be different for you, how could you be happy there? I saw his point. Over time, in a new place, in a new relationship, I would probably be the same old me, unless I worked very hard to be different. I have changed, thankfully, in some ways. But can human beings as a species really fundamentally do that? Can we eschew capitalism and rapacious materialism and embrace the arts and care about each other and save the planet? It really looks doubtful.

This book is shelved as science fiction, because Mars and space travel, I guess, but calling it speculative fiction would be closer to it. As in his autobiographical book Dandelion Wine, there is a streak of nostalgic despair in Bradbury, a hankering to go back to the days of his Waukegan, Illinois boyhood. He understands the hopefulness in some of his characters’ desires to go back to the times when some people seemed to appreciate the arts, when machines were feared more than revered. One can see how this 1950 book was embraced by the late sixties counter-culture movements.

“Rocket summer. The words passed among the people in the open, airing houses. Rocket summer. The warm desert air changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work. The skis and sleds suddenly useless. The snow, falling from the cold sky upon the town, turned to a hot rain before it touched the ground. Rocket summer. People leaned from their dripping porches and watched the reddening sky.”

“They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal.”

Bradbury says this book was written after reading Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, and was initially a kind of attempt to recast that small town feel on Mars. And it’s there, in the focus on every day characters, in the sad nostalgia and sense of loss.

But what actually happens, in Bradbury’s move to Mars?

“The rockets came like locusts, swarming and settling in blooms of rosy smoke. And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night.”

There’s a kind of admiration of Mankind in this passage, a kind of hopefulness in man’s determination, but there’s also a kind of dystopian despair. Rather than making a New World in the way of communes and cooperation, there’s a sense in which we would destroy Mars in the same way we destroyed Earth. When I first read this fifty years ago I thought this book was sweet, fanciful, both a romantic call to Tune In and Drop Out of conventional society and a dark warning of the Apocalypse. But today it reads to me like a sad elegy.

A magnificent experience wherein we discover that the inhabitants of the fourth planet in the Milky Way are identical in the trifles of the everyday as the resident in the 3rd planet. Then some collective idea pops out of nowhere--a fine symbol of apocalypse and annihilation--& scares the living shit outta everyone.

I know I haven't read much sci-fi in the past, but I know that to top this one will be VERY tough.

"Martian Chronicles" surpasses, in some ways, that which Bradbury tried, and admits to imitating with this collection of short stories (the crazy masterpiece, "Winesburg, Ohio" by Sherwood Anderson). The fear that permeates in these pages-- a horror novel more than a sci-fi one (well, early sci-fi is mostly always horrific)-- is un-peggable, untraceable, and just completely... yep, Martian. It is eerie at a supreme level... truly heightened emotions in this 50's version of our future. The Chronicles turn Voltairesque, then it all becomes a western as fixed and terrible as anything by Cormac McCarthy full of guns and violence, then takes a Tarantino turn of events, robots and--

It's all one powerful and unique oxymoron. Bradbury writes just the perfectly extra adjective in many of his sentences. Maybe one extra more than needed. Et voila-- amazingness! It's tidily overindulgent and superfluously concise...

A Terrific, Terrible Wonder!

Un libro increíble, y lo recomiendo muchísimo. Lo más sorprendente de todo, aunque la prosa, el estilo y las historias sean fascinantes, en mi opinión, es que este libro haya sido publicado hace más de setenta años y continúe cautivando tanto con una ciencia ficción ligera, sí, pero increíblemente envolvente y visual! Cuando lo leía,en muchas ocaciones recordaba las olas del mar. Nada que ver! Quizá haya sido la suavidad y el vaivén de su plática. Podría continuar reseñándolo, pero...y para qué? Léetelo si puedes.Bravo! Misión cumplida!

For years The Martian Chronicles is a book that has intrigued me. I've gone back and forth on 'read it, don't read it'. I always thought martians and outer space, it's not my preferred reading. But it's Bradbury. I've read two of his other books (Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes) and have enjoyed both of them. (The movie versions of the books are pretty good too). Reading reviews on GR I came across something on Bradbury (Thanks Ron!) and pretty much said 'I have to read it now'.

The Martian Chronicles was really not what I expected. Yes, its martians and outer space, but its so much more. A series of short stories, brought together to become what we know as the Chronicles. It's fascinating to see how Bradbury created this in 1950 but quite a bit of what he says is so true of this time on Earth and people. I laughed so hard at the story of Walter Gripp - alone on Mars, lonley, looking for another soul on planet and calls numbers in the phone book until anyone answers. When he finally finds Genevieve and she is needy, whiny, clingy....that he flees her, preferring to be alone again on Mars.

I listened to this one via audio and it was amazing. Scott Brick did the narration and he just adds so much to the story. Right from the beginning he sucked me into this world where I was immersed in the story, forgetting what was around me and what I was doing (not good, I generally listen to audios in the kitchen while making dinner). I highly suggest a listen to this one, even if you have read the book.

I look forward to more Bradbury, even revisiting those I've already read.

I just finished reading an old interview with Ray Bradbury, where he mentioned, several times, that he did not consider himself a writer of science fiction, nor did he consider his work to be science fiction. He claimed he thought of himself as a fantasy writer, and, after closing the cover of The Martian Chronicles, I agree.

For those of you out there who read the likes of Isaac Asimov or Frank Herbert and believe that writers such as these typify the genre of science fiction, you will understand Bradbury's thinking. True science fiction writers are a technical lot, writers who are not the least bit casual about details. In science fiction, it's all about the details.

When you read a Bradbury novel, it's not about the details. Bradbury asks you, instead, to suspend your disbelief. Hang your disbelief next to your hat by the door (for this is, after all, a book written in 1950 and, even though it extends far out in to the future, one still hangs his hat by the door). This book is incredibly dated, with people on Mars still drinking malted milkshakes in 2037, and it is as implausible and imprecise as a novel can be. Even sloppy in its errors at times.

But, back to Bradbury's protest. He is not a science fiction writer. He is a fantasy writer. And, he had an amazing imagination. I read this book in about five days, and during that time, I suffered through two consecutive nights of silver/blue Martians who invaded my sleep. I spent about three nights forcing my family to listen to this story's plot, and I cried like a baby right smack dab in the middle of the book, when the Episcopalians come to save the Martians from sin, and instead they finally, truly find God.

Bradbury doesn't shy away from any material here. This is a valid and inspiring exploration of almost every topic that counts. In many ways it is still an incredibly modern and deeply disturbing read. Several of these scenes will stay with me until my end, which hopefully won't take place on Mars.

What a remarkable book. 5 stars for me.

Sin palabras, una grandiosa antología que nos lleva a Marte en un grandioso y hasta ruinoso viaje en cohete con forma de libro. Bradbury es uno de mis autores predilectos, y no haber leído este clásico me atormentaba un poco. Por fortuna, tuve el empuje a través de mi grupo "Lectores de la Cripta" para iniciarlo y la emoción ganó por goleada. Este libro queda entre mis favoritos. La prosa de Bradbury es sencillamente única, me vinculó de una manera intensa hacia un género que no suelo frecuentar, y del cual no me pienso distanciar mucho más. Sin duda alguna, mi relato favorito fue "Usher II", que combina las terroríficas historias de Poe de una forma mágica.