The Martian Chronicles

CW: Racism, Racial Slurs, Animal Harm

I truly don't know what to say. This book is unlike anything else I have ever read and, outside of a few obvious elements, feels incredibly modern and relevant. So much so that I genuinely struggle to understand that it was first published in 1950.

A collection of various connected stories about human beings visiting and living in the Red Planet that follow on from one another in an increasing timeline that describes the beginning and end of exploration and settling on Mars. These are told on Bradbury's unique blend of genres to create expressive, emotive, baffling, and heart-wrenching scenes.

When I first read Dandelion Wine, I knew I adored Bradbury's imagination and magically poetic prose, and would show more have to read everything I could get my hands on. Unfortunately, Dandelion Wine was a LOT and left me very ambivalent about that book, if not Bradbury's writing, so I took a long break and came back with this. I could not have chosen a more perfect book to come back to!

I really am struggling to articulate how or why these stories are so good and have left a profound impression on me. It is certainly somewhat to do with the chimeral, alchemical oddity that is the way Bradbury writes and surreality of the concepts and conceit he pays with. This isn't a science fiction short story anthology. Not really. Science fiction is one element, but horror, especially gothic horror, tragedy, drama, melodrama, military, absurdism, political commentary, come together with so much more in an occult blend that doesn't necessarily scare, but assaults the mental senses from every possible angle like an iron maiden filled with silverfish . Of course, all those elements and genres often come together in many other works, but there is just something so unsettling and otherworldly about the way Bradbury does it.

It would be easy to reference things like The Twilight Zone or Black Mirror, but just because it's bizarre and sci-fi related doesn't mean it does a thing to describe what this is like. I know several of the stories were adapted for shows like this, but I'm trying to imagine a way of turning Bradbury's writing into film and I can't do it. I know there are various adaptations and I'm sure some must be decent, but Bradbury is an author who is talented at narrative for sure, but he really shines in the lyrical, dreamlike, exacting unreality of his turns of phrases.

I am increasingly finding it difficult to believe that Ray Bradbury was a human being born on this planet when and living the life his biographers and Wikipedia page claim. Only a space wizard from another galaxy and dimension, hurled back through time and space to our world would think and write like this. This book was a cry for help, but, much like Tommy Cooper, when he most needed our help we just gave him a round of applause.

This is truly weird, wonderful, and every other positive and strange adjective between here and Mars. I absolutely need to seek out the complete edition with The Other Martian Tales and get back to Bradbury once I have a few other things off my TBR shortlist.

I want to say more, but I can't because if I do I will never stop. This is without a doubt one to the most uniquely exquisite books I have ever had the pleasure of reading. show less

Bradbury is himself firm that he doesn't write science-fiction. Nominally about Mars, The Martian Chronicles are really about Ohio. In the first few stories, Bradbury sketches an ancient and alien civilization of golden masks, canals flowing with lavender wine, phoenix flowers, and subtle telepathic arts. Then the entire Martian race is wiped out by the Chicken Pox, and boomtown Americans spread across the terra nullis of Mars, filling the ancient ruins with noise and trash, before a nuclear war on Earth ends the human race. Melancholy and moving, these stories hold up as mood pieces of nostalgia for a simpler time at the dawn of the Space Age, but I wouldn't shelve them among the classics.

Although I have read some independent short stories by Bradbury, this is my first collection. Although they are all set on Mars, they are not a continuous story. Once I realized I should not be trying to find any continuity between the stories, I relaxed and just enjoyed them individually.

The initial story, Rocket Summer, was very interesting in the unexpected way the Martians dealt with the coming of the Americans. Much as I would expect we would deal with aliens alighting on our own shores. A little like looking into a mirror. I particularly liked "And the Moon Be Still as Bright", as well. I found myself understanding Spender, who finds himself at odds with his own people and goes to very extreme means to attempt to save Mars from show more the damage he knows will follow. "Usher II" is another captivating story, with the threads of Poe references that run through it and the very recognizable voice of Bradbury regarding both censorship and the delight of revenge.

My favorite chronicle, however, is "There Will Come Soft Rains." The title comes from the Sara Teasdale poem quoted below:

There will come soft rains and the smell of the ground,
And swallows circling with their shimmering sound;

And frogs in the pools singing at night,
And wild plum trees in tremulous white,

Robins will wear their feathery fire
Whistling their whims on a low fence-wire;

And not one will know of the war, not one
Will care at last when it is done.

Not one would mind, neither bird nor tree
If mankind perished utterly;

And Spring herself, when she woke at dawn,
Would scarcely know that we were gone.

This poem has always been a personally meaningful one for me, it begins so softly and quietly and then reveals itself to be a commentary on all that is horrible and violent and destructive of mankind. It says so much so succinctly, and both Teasdale, in her poem, and Bradbury, in his collection of stories, are making the same point about man's foolishness and transience. The story and the poem seem to be of one piece to me. As for Bradbury and his style, I especially loved some of the imagery in the story, like the cleaning mice robots coming out of the walls to clean the house that is devoid of life.

Despite the fact that most of these stories are far from upbeat or joyous, they are also not entirely devoid of hope or promise. In the end mankind is hanging by a thread, but he is hanging. The question will be has he learned enough to do anything different on Mars than he did on Earth. Bradbury seemed to think the jury was out on that one...and if you look around you, it would seem it still is. show less

Civilizations are born, they live, and then they die. Empires are raised, and then, in due time they are razed. From tall and glorious to a ruined and smoldering heap, these man-made inventions seem to all meet the same fate at some point. In-fighting, war, greed, hubris... all seem to be the usual symptoms and the pronouncement of death is nigh.

Bradbury shows us in this wonderfully dark and revealing collection of vignettes the repercussions of planet-leaping and technologically drunk humans and their deadly dance with war. Beautifully written in his usual poetic prose, it was a joy immersing myself in this brilliant book.

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

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