The Martian Chronicles

Yes, everybody, my last name is Bradbury. Does that mean I’m related to Ray Bradbury? No.
Does that mean every English teacher I’ve ever had has asked me if I’m related to Ray Bradbury? Yes.
Does that mean I’m slightly biased when giving book reviews? Maybe…
All jokes aside, I thought this collection of stories was fantastic. Because my days this week have been so busy, I often ended up listening to the audiobook as I was winding down for bed, in some cases resulting in me setting a sleep timer (then resetting it because I’m too engrossed in the story and can’t fall asleep, then resetting it again, then resetting it again).
It was the perfect way to end my day and even resulted in me having odd dreams about my family show more escaping the doomed planet Earth in a tiny rocket.
(My dream self ran back to get my Bible -awww- and barely made it out in time. Then, as we are flying away, the terrible realization hits — I forgot my highlighters. Crying emoji for days.) I’d also like to note that for some reason my brother wasn’t there escaping the desolate hellscape with us, but I’m just gonna go ahead and presume he was already on Mars.
This is the power of books, people! show less

Madness lurks in the red soil of Mars, or at least it does for the interloper. At the brink of war, America launches several missions to the red planet. Instead of welcome, the crews who arrive in the colorful, arid native settlements find death and insanity. Even in their failure, the humans still manage to decimate the Martian population, infect it, really. Through Ray Bradbury’s eyes, the story of Martian colonization is more about humans, and particularly Americans, seeding the pure red landscape with avarice and hatred. Once the planet’s civilization is reshaped to look more human, Mars is hastily abandoned, the humans returning to an Earth in full-scale nuclear war. Mars is left to erode for decades, eventually becoming an show more escape destination for humans fleeing the war. When the refuges arrive they find hope in the ashes and ruins, declaring themselves Martians in the absence of any native presence. And the cycle begins again.

Bradbury’s [Martian Chronicles] are not the science fiction of today, intricately detailed and deeply imagined. It is a rather more psychologically and satirically hued fiction, examining the inner life more than scientific. Where Asimov or Dick would take more care to explain how some technologically advanced equipment works, Bradbury zeroes in on the characters emotions or the inevitable consequences ahead. The weakness is that the stories are a little dated for ignoring the science in the fiction. The strength is that the stories are more provocative.

For being [The Martian Chronicles], there is relatively little of the red planet natives in the stories. The very first crew to land is met by a murderously jealous Martian, who kills the spacemen to keep them away from his wife. Upon next contact, the space travelers are viewed as astral projections of a psychotic Martian mind, and locked in an asylum. The next crew is deceived and murdered by village of Martians who fear colonization. But by the time the fourth expedition arrives, the Martians are nearly extinct, the victims of a chicken pox outbreak. The only native people to appear in the subsequent stories are enigmatic and tragic figures.

Bradbury’s view of the world at the time he was writing, in the late 1940’s and early 1950’s, is what is primarily on display. That Aldous Huxley’s [Brave New World] and George Orwell’s [1984] were contemporaries with Bradbury’s stories collected here is indicative where these modern satirists believed the world was headed. For example, one of the best stories in the collection is Usher II, a story about a man who flees Earth because Bureau of Moral Climate banned anything “that suggests any creature of imagination.” The man builds a replica of Usher’s house and populates it with robots resembling the characters of Poe and Carroll and Hawthorne and Baum. When the Investigator of Moral Climate arrives, the fall of the second house of Usher buries him and many others who engineered Earth’s sterilization.

The moral of [The Martian Chronicles], as Bradbury constructs the tales, is that humans are destined to violate Gene Rodenberry’s Prime Directive in seeking out new worlds and civilizations only to strip them down and rebuild them so that they resemble what is familiar and comfortable. And maybe Bradbury was thinking more specifically about Americans, as the settlers in his stories are almost universally Americans, and ones bent on an aggressively consumer mentality. The one man who defies this attitude is Spender in And the Moon Be Still as Bright. Spender, part of the fourth expedition, abandons his crew to learn about the Martian culture. When he realizes what will become of the red planet when it is fully invaded by his species, he begins to kill them, hoping to put off the next expedition for decades. The crew’s captain hunts Spender down and the two men try to reason with one another. While the Captain is convinced that Spender is right, he kills Spender anyway, burying the man in a Martian tomb. Spender’s vision of what the planet would become is confirmed in the following tales, complete with hot dog stands and diners.

Bottom Line: Slightly dated but provocative stories about the need to reshape everything that is different to resemble what is familiar and comfortable.

4 bones!!!!! show less

So interesting to read this book now in the 3rd decade of the 21st C. This is a series of meditations on what it means to be a colonizer and the colonized. It is also a meditation on American disposable culture and the worldview that everything needs to be useful rather than simply exist for the sake of existing. It is a consideration of the human conceit that everything that is is for our consumption. Thus, it considers that black heart of sexism, racism, and anti-environmentalism and the fears of being left behind and dying alone. The stories contained herein are not always easy to read. But they are certainly worth reading - especially now after being forced to reckon with anti-black racism in the aftermath of George Floyd and the show more encroachment of humans on to the last vestiges of habitat for other life on Earth. An encroachment that likely produced the COVID pandemic. What are we doing to ourselves and to our planet? Using Mars as his canvas, Bradbury was asking these questions almost a century ago in the 1950s. It appears he was not that optimistic that humanity would come out on the other side unscathed.
I like this rating system by ashleytylerjohn of LibraryThing (https://www.librarything.com/profile/ashleytylerjohn) that I have also adopted:
(Note: 5 stars = rare and amazing, 4 = quite good book, 3 = a decent read, 2 = disappointing, 1 = awful, just awful.) show less

This book definitely deserves its place among classics of science fiction. In a collection of related short stories, Ray Bradbury tells the story of the human exploration and colonization of Mars. In many ways, the book is a sign of the times in which it was written: concerns about McCarthyism, censorship (one of the stories is obviously the seed for Fahrenheit 451), racism and nuclear war are foremost, along with a general pessimism about humanity as a whole. Other themes include loss, loneliness, and a creepy confrontation with what it means to be human.

I listened to the audiobook, which was recorded in the late 1970s and narrated by Ray Bradbury himself. After each story, he includes brief commentary about what inspired the story and show more what he thinks about the story 25-30 years later. I really enjoyed his commentary. show less

Loved it. What a wonderfully moving vision of humankind's issues with Manifest Destiny, of coming to grips with the industrial age, of inter-generational transitions between Martians and Humans, the old and young. Bleak and cautionary - but still an amazing that doesn't feel dated in the least.

Is this science fiction? Well, it is set on Mars and it involves rockets but it is closer to the fantasies of Lucian and Baron Munchhausen: the science is far from credible and the linked short stories are literary, dealing with society and psychology as it stood somewhere around 1950.

But it is a major achievement not only in content but in style. It is a 'fix-up' of stories written for magazines in the late 1940s with new material to give the whole coherence. The fact that Borges wrote an introduction to the Spanish translation should be no surprise.

The inconsistencies - exactly how many Martian races are there? - and absurdities - exactly how does all that material get transported to Mars and turned into Mid-Western small towns in show more such a short period of time? - do not matter at all. The dreamlike quality is what makes the book great.

The linked short story approach has great merit in ensuring that there is not some over-arching theme that would bring it into space opera territory but rather a series of fictional essays on alienation, the comical, dim, lost, kind and nasty aspects of our species and American society.

Rarely is the reader preached at, excepting perhaps on the understandable fear of nuclear war which is best expressed in the much anthologised "There Will Come Soft Rains" (one of only two stories set on earth).

A late entry for the British edition ("The Fire Balloons") deals with missionaries and stands alongside Blish's 'Case of Conscience' and Clarke's 'The Star' as classic treatments of the problems the religioous may find in dealing with alien cultures.

Interestingly (and pleasingly) Harper Voyager did not succumb to currently fashionable political correctness and excise the satire on the Southern good ole boys in 'Way Up In The Middle of the Air' (also set on Earth) with its use of the notorious N. word.

No one could accuse Bradbury of all people of being a racist but wokes are not always the brightest sparks, are they, and publishers are not generally known for their courage under fire. This story is perhaps the weakest because it is preachy and earth-bound but it is of its time.

We should remember that Bradbury considered his 'Fahrenheit 451' to be as relevant as criticism of the censorship forced on society by political correctness as it is of progress-fearful obscurantism. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin.

The book works best when it leaves the gravity of earth. The alien world Bradbury conjures is not real but it serves to steer our imagination towards self-reflection. It is fine writing by a decent man in an indecent world looking to another world to help us to try and understand ourselves.

Bradbury thus has a dystopian vision that is almost British. You can see here the seeds of his later stories of the crowd and conformity. Settlers are as callous towards the indigenous inhabitants as they were when opening the West but it is a callousness without malice, a dumb thoughtlessness.

Indeed, there is a countervailing theme of loneliness and loss in several moving stories so that our species seems doomed to act like lemmings for fear of being left alone. We determinedly settle and then equally determinedly fly back to our earthly doom out of some sort of unexplained patriotism.

Another theme is the loss of sanity in men caused by coming across the utterly other - whether identifying with it, seeking to change it or fearing it. Time and again, human emotion triumphs over reason.

The Martians themselves seem incapable of malice, operating on another plane of development, the vast majority doomed (like the Amerindians before them) by the pathogens brought by newcomers and the few survivors hiding away to be ignored, feared and misunderstood.

There is an essentially humanity in this book that paradoxically shows that humanity is not humanity's normal state and that what we like to think of humanity is better expressed by aliens - rarely has the alienation of the sensitive observer from our own species been better presented. show less

After voyaging to Mars with Kim Stanley Robinson I wasn't sure what to make of this sequence of absurdities. Surely even when these stories were written in the 1940-50s Bradbury didn't expect us to believe in his vision of a Mars with running water, blue skies, and Martians who follow all the same social cues. The stories in this collection are related and sequential, but often differ in tone and almost in genre as well - from almost silly to almost credible. What I did find consistent is the theme of encounter with the alien. Never does humanity meet with what it anticipates, and even when things go well it comes with surprises.

There is scarcely any science backing this science fiction, and I don't mean just in the Martian conditions. show more The characters themselves do not come across as science-minded. They are here to understand or ignore Martian culture at their peril; to seek glory or to revile those who do; to make Mars more like home so they don't feel so lost in space, or to find beauty in what is. This tension between becoming one with a foreign world or trying to subjugate it continues until the question becomes irrelevant. Bradbury was telling his fellow Americans that no empire lasts forever, and a little humility goes a long way. show less