The Martian Chronicles (1950)

I give this five stars in my first encounter in my teens. Now that I've read a dozen or more books from this idiosyncratic, American, wild science fiction and mystery and Hollywood nostalgia author, I dig other books better. But, boy ... Boy. ( )

This book is perfect. Not even kidding.

Ray Bradbury's greatest writing strength lies in his short stories; no offense to Fahrenheit 451, but he is a master of the short form and that's where his best work lies. The Martian Chronicles is great because it combines the book and short story form ingeniously. It's essentially a series of short stories and vignettes that chronicle the history of mankind's contact with Mars, from the take-off of the first rocket to the arrival of the final one. Some stories are touching. Others terrifying. All are moving an gorgeous. Several are quite funny. It's just so good. I can't recommend this book enough.

Most everyone has read Bradbury's short story And There Will Come Soft Rains. It's arguably his most famous story and it appears in literature textbooks everywhere. Personally, I prefer All Summer in a Day, but it's still a great story. Turns out everyone is reading it out of context. The story packs a much bigger punch when read in the context of The Martian Chronicles. And yes, I still prefer All Summer in a Day, but The Martian Chronicles is stunning and breaks my heart in all the best ways, in the ways good books always do.

Ray Bradbury wrote most of these stories between 1948 and 1950, and over sixty years later, they still ring true. Sure, the science is total bogus. Mars does not have water or air, and while there may be martian bacteria discovered someday, they aren't humanoid, telepathic, and possessing golden eyes. But people are still people, and that's what really makes Bradbury's writing click. He gets to the heart of people, and makes something beautiful from what he's found. Humanity is universal. Part of Bradbury's point in writing science fiction is to explore exactly what makes us human in the most inhuman of environments. We're still human on Mars or Venus, and we're still human in 1950 and 2015.

This book is gorgeous. ( )

My father gave it to me. I loved every word. ( )

Ah, I should have read it when I was a kid. This is a collection of stories wrapped around the arrival of man on Mars. This is a classic! ( )

I entered into The Martian Chronicles warily, as I hadn't enjoyed Fahrenheit 451, and here I was again, reading Bradbury. To my utmost surprise, I loved this book.

The Martian Chronicles is novel-esque, because the linked short stories, some of them only a page long, joined together to weave a tale of the history of human exploration of and settlement on Mars.

It's a saddening story. Having damaged our earth beyond the hope of repair thanks to constant warfare and atomic disasters, mankind heads for the heavens on rockets launched from the interstellar exploration labs in Ohio. Astronauts and soldiers are the first to arrive, then construction engineers, who build earth-like towns all over the face of this planet. Disaster after disaster takes place. The human race is soon in decline, as the towns on Mars shrivel first to shanty towns and then to small assortments of derelict buildings, without infrastructure.

I believe that Bradbury, all the way back in the 1940s, when some of these stories were first printed in magazines, was an environmentalist and anti-nuclear energy proponent long before these positions became fashionable. The Martian Chronicles warn of the dangers of atomic energy, of using land unwisely, and of the ruinous tendencies of mankind to spoil the dwelling places we have, whether on Earth or on other planets.

Summary: a great book ahead of its time, a visionary novel. I find it especially interesting that less than a year ago, we had our first look at Earth from the surface of Mars - and who knows what's next for our relationship with the red planet in the sky. ( )