The Martian Chronicles

A collection of stories about the Mars colonization. They're presented in a chronological order, from the first rocked launching to the post-apocalyptic life on earth. Some are good, a few really good.

The first stories are a bit comical and witty. They talk about how the first missions failed somewhat due to human eagerness to receive a heroes welcome when arriving in mars. No one there seemed to care.

to be continued

Originally posted at FanLit.
http://www.fantasyliterature.com/reviews/the-martian-chronicles/

The Martian Chronicles is a collection of Ray Bradbury???s stories about the human colonization of Mars which were previously published in the pulp magazines of the late 1940s. The stories are arranged in chronological order with the dates of the events at the beginning of each story. In the first edition of The Martian Chronicles, published in 1950, the events took place in a future 1999-2027, but a reprinted 1997 edition pushes all events forward to 2030-2057. Because it???s a story collection, The Martian Chronicles has an episodic feel which has been made more fluid by connecting the stories with short vignettes, similar to the structure of Bradbury???s collection The Illustrated Man.

In the first story, ???Rocket Summer,??? we visit a small town in Ohio while the first human exploratory spaceship takes off for Mars. Bradbury explains in the introduction to The Martian Chronicles that this small-town mid-America feel was influenced by Sherwood Anderson???s novel Winesburg, Ohio: A Group of Tales of Ohio Small-Town Life which Bradbury admired and hoped to emulate.

The next two stories, ???Ylla??? and ???The Summer Night,??? show us what the Martians are like. They???re humanoid in form with brown skin and round yellow eyes. Like humans, they live in houses and towns, eat and drink, sleep, age, read books, study science, desire love, become jealous and irritable, and commit murder. (I find it amusing that the Martians have the same kinds of depressing marriages we see in Bradbury???s stories set on Earth.) But the Martians are telepathic and the humans??? approach is causing them to quote our poetry, sing our songs, and adopt other aspects of human culture without understanding why.

The first spaceship was unsuccessful, so a second expedition was launched a few months later (it seems reasonable for Bradbury to expect that by 1999 we???d be able to get to Mars a lot faster than we actually can). In ???The Earth Men??? we learn the fate of this crew and we learn that Martians, just like Americans in 1950, have to live with bad psychiatry and insane asylums. Stephen Hoye, the narrator of Blackstone Audio???s 2009 version of The Martian Chronicles, was particularly brilliant with this story.

Next comes ???The Taxpayer??? in which an Ohio man is trying to get on the third expedition to Mars (the second one failed). This very short vignette tells us that things are going badly on Earth and that an atomic war is expected in about two years. ???The Third Expedition??? (originally published in Planet Stories as ???Mars is Heaven!???) describes what happens when the third doomed mission lands on Mars. This story doesn???t quite work with the chronology of The Martial Chronicles because it portrays astronauts from 2030 growing up in the small Midwestern towns of early 20th century America. It also ironically highlights the biggest problem with The Martian Chronicles when one of the astronauts asks ???Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way???? Clearly the astronaut doesn???t think that???s possible, but in these early stories, Bradbury???s Martian culture is just too much like ours. Even so, ???The Third Expedition??? is a clever little horror story and one of my favorites in the collection.

???And the Moon Be Still as Bright??? is the story of the fourth, finally successful, expedition to Mars. The Martians have mostly died of chickenpox ??? humans, in our blundering way, have inadvertently killed them off. Most of the men of the expedition don???t care, eager to begin exploration and colonization, but Captain Wilder and an archaeologist named Spender regret that humans have destroyed such a beautiful civilization, like they destroy everything else they touch. There???s a lot of social commentary about 1940s American culture in this story.

The next several stories are about the rapid spread of humanity on Mars. ???The Settlers??? and ???The Shore??? describe the type of people who came to Mars from Earth, ???The Green Morning??? follows a Johnny Appleseed type of character who plants trees to increase oxygen levels, and ???The Locusts??? and ???Interim??? describes how men and women made Mars look just like another Earth. In ???Night Meeting,??? we learn that ???even time is crazy up here??? when a colonist from Earth meets a Martian who seems to be in a different time-stream. This story also reminds us that civilizations both rise and fall and that perhaps it???s best that we don???t know the future of our own civilization.

I especially liked the next story, ???The Fire Balloons,??? in which a group of missionaries prepare to bring the Gospel to the Martians. They don???t know what the Martians will look like and must consider how a different culture, and even a different anatomy, might dictate the types of sin a society is prone to. (It seems unlikely that the missionaries don???t know what the Martians look like by now, but we must keep in mind that The Martian Chronicles is a story collection, not a novel with a continuous story.) When the missionaries meet the Martians, they have even more theological questions to deal with. ???The Fire Balloons,??? has a beautiful ending.

Male explorers and settlers have been the main characters so far but ???The Musicians,??? a story original to The Martian Chronicles, shows us what boys do for fun on Mars, ???The Wilderness??? features two women who are getting ready to emigrate from Earth, and ???The Old Ones??? focuses briefly on the elderly. Those first courageous men won???t be forgotten, though; in ???The Naming of Names??? we learn that they???ve been immortalized ??? many places on Mars have been named after them. These human names, and other industrial-sounding names, have replaced the nature-focused names used by the Martians.

In ???Usher II??? Bradbury returns to one of his favorite pet peeves ??? book burning. A man who has left Earth to get away from the ???moral climate??? police is angry that they???ve now shown up on Mars. To get back at them for outlawing Edgar Allen Poe???s work, he uses his fortune to build his own House of Usher and he invites them all to a party. This story is entertaining, but I???m not sure that Bradbury makes his case. After what happens, I think the moral climate police will feel they have even more grounds for banning Poe.

???The Martian??? is a terrific horror story which shows us what becomes of one telepathic Martian when humans, full of painful memories and wanting to start over, arrive on his planet. This is one of the best stories in The Martian Chronicles.

The next few stories, ???The Luggage Store,??? ???The Off Season,??? and ???The Watchers,??? tell of the nuclear war on Earth that was predicted in earlier stories. It can be heard on the radio and seen from Mars and soon the colonists get an urgent message: ???Come home.??? And so they go back to Earth.

???The Silent Towns??? tells the story of Walter and Genevieve, living hundreds of miles apart, who assume they???re the last humans left on Mars. This story is entertaining, but highlights the rampant sexism so often found in the science fiction written for pulp magazines. Where does Walter decide is the most likely place to find a woman? The beauty shop. (Genevieve, what the heck are you doing in a beauty shop on a deserted planet?) Then, after driving for hundreds of miles to find her, Walter rejects and runs away from the last woman on Mars because she???s overweight. Really.

Bradbury is back to doing what he does best with the next two stories. ???The Long Years??? tells of Hathaway, one of the crew of the Fourth Expedition, who stayed on Mars with his family when the rest of the colonists left. When Captain Wilder, his former commander, returns to Mars after exploring other planets in the solar system, he finds Hathaway and wonders how his wife and kids stayed young while Hathaway kept aging normally.

???There Will Come Soft Rains??? returns us to Earth where the atomic war has wiped out most of the people. An automated house (common in Bradbury???s stories) still stands in California, going about its daily routines as if the family who lived there is still alive. This story was inspired by Sara Teasdale???s post-apocalyptic poem ???There Will Come Soft Rains??? in which we see nature taking back the Earth after humanity is destroyed. This imagery in this excellent story is chilling and unforgettable. Unforgettable.

After all of the destruction that humans brought upon themselves (we nearly obliterated the population of two planets), the last story, ???The Million-Year Picnic,??? offers a bit of hope as two families escape the devastated Earth and plan to start over. To ensure that humans don???t make the same mistakes we made before, they burn books, maps, files and anything else that contains the sorts of ideas that may have led to our destruction. (A little ironic, I think. Apparently, Bradbury thought it was noble to burn some of our literature.)

Whenever I read Bradbury, I???m struck by his lofty visions, in the early 20th century, for future technological developments and space exploration. He envisioned a degree of achievement by the 21st century that we???re not even close to yet. However, at the same time, it seems that he didn???t foresee how much American social culture would change even during his lifetime. Thus, in most of his stories set in the future we find the juxtaposition of robots and rockets with the same sexism and racism experienced in 1950. Fortunately, the nuclear world war that he and many SF writers imagined has also not happened. Perhaps we can give Bradbury some of the credit for warning us so vividly.

The Martian Chronicles is some of Ray Bradbury???s most-loved work and foundational reading for science fiction fans. If you???ve never read it, or haven???t read it recently, I encourage you to try Blackstone Audio???s version.

Leaving behind a world on the brink of destruction, man came to the red planet and found the Martians waiting, dreamlike. Seeking the promise of a new beginning, man brought with him his oldest fears and his deepest desires. Man conquered Mars and in that instant, Mars conquered him. The strange new world with its ancient, dying race and vast, red-gold deserts cast a spell on him, settled into his dreams, and changed him forever. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster enthralls, delights, and challenges us with his vision, starkly and stunningly exposing our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.

Executive Summary: My first by Mr. Bradbury, but won't be my last. Then again since I'll be reviewing [b:Something Wicked This Way Comes 248596 Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town, #2) Ray Bradbury https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1409596011s/248596.jpg 1183550] for SFFAudio later this month..that was probably going to happen anyways. :-DAudio book: Mark Boyett's voice reminds me a bit of Rod Serling, which as I get into a bit below seemed a perfect fit. I know there are multiple versions of the audiobook. I'm not sure how easy they are to get a hold of, but this one seems like a good option.Full ReviewI've never read anything by Mr. Bradbury before. I'm not really well read in the “classics”. There is too much modern stuff I want to read, and in general I prefer fantasy to Sci-Fi. But when Brilliance Audio was releasing some of his better known works on Audio CD (although the production itself was done by Audible) last year, I jumped at the chance to finally give him a try.I've been in a bit of a reading funk this year, and was trying to figure out what to read AFTER this book to get me out of it. Since it was short though, I wanted to listen to it sooner rather than later, write up my review then move onto something else.Apparently I just needed to listen to this. Apart from one story (Way in the Middle of the Air) which made me really uncomfortable and showed it's age. It appears to have been eliminated from several of the more recent editions of this book, and I wish I had skipped it as it really adds very little to this collection.Everything else was enjoyable. A bit depressing, but enjoyable. Mr. Bradbury paints a bleak picture of a future that thankfully never came. This isn't hard sci-fi by any means, but more like dystopian space opera.I would have never thought something bleak would lighten my mood, but the stories were that good, and the prose are excellent. They reminded me a lot of the Twilight Zone, although I know these stories predate that show. I think The Silent Towns could easily have been an episode of the show, as could several others.I think my favorite of the collection is Usher II. I can't pretend to get all the references apart from Poe and Lovecraft, but his tale of revenge for censorship is quite good. I'll have to check out the Poe story [b:The Fall of the House of Usher 175516 The Fall of the House of Usher Edgar Allan Poe https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1387708966s/175516.jpg 15570703] that seems to have influenced it.Overall this is an excellent collection of stories, and if like me you haven't read it/anything by Mr. Bradbury, this seems like as good a place as any to start.