“The Martian Chronicles”, by Ray Bradbury

 

182 pages, Bantam Pathfinder, ISBN-13: 978-0553278224

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a modern-day SciFi classic that records the human colonization of the red planet after Earth has been devastated by nuclear war. First published in 1950, the book features short stories written in the late 40s and other vignettes written to weave all the interconnecting tales together. But my first exposure to these stories was in 1980 with NBC three-episode, four-hour miniseries of the same name that starred Rock Hudson, Darren McGavin, Bernadette Peters, Roddy McDowall, Fritz Weaver, Barry Morse and Maria Schell (don’t worry; I had to Google all those names, too). Many years later, needing something to read during Study Hall (what, like I was going to do homework?), I found this in the library and decided, “what the hell?” I find it interesting that, from 1950, Bradbury imagined that, by the early 21^st Century, Mankind would have had the ability to travel to and colonize our closest celestial neighbor; all of us living now can only curse the fact that these tales are not, in fact, our new reality. Anyway, while The Martian Chronicles is not a conventional linear story or even episodic epic; rather, it is a series of stories loosely linked together to form a kind of scattershot tale told from many differing viewpoints:

• Rocket Summer (January 1999/2030)
• Ylla (February 1999/2030)
• The Summer Night (August 1999/2030)
• The Earth Men (August 1999/2030)
• The Taxpayer (March 2000/2031)
• The Third Expedition (April 2000/2031)
• …And the Moon Be Still as Bright (June 2001/2032)
• The Settlers (August 2001/2032)
• The Green Morning (December 2001/2032)
• The Locusts (February 2002/2033)
• Night Meeting (August 2002/2033)
• The Shore (October 2002/2033)
• The Fire Balloons (November 2002/2033)
• Interim (February 2003/2034)
• The Musicians (April 2003/2034)
• The Wilderness (May 2003/2034)
• Way in the Middle of the Air (June 2003/2034)
• The Naming of Names (2004-05/2035-36)
• Usher II (April 2005/2036)
• The Old Ones (August 2005/2036)
• The Martian (September 2005/2036)
• The Luggage Store (November 2005/2036)
• The Off Season (November 2005/2036)
• The Watchers (November 2005/2036)
• The Silent Towns (December 2005/2036)
• The Long Years (April 2026/2057)
• There Will Come Soft Rains (August 4, 2026/2057)
• The Million-Year Picnic (October 2026/2057)

As a chronicle of human ingenuity and adaptability, The Martian Chronicles is a hopeful yet cautionary tale of human survivability in that most trying of conditions: an alien world. Some of the stories are standard mid-20^th Century SciFi, but many others are a kind of mix of fantasy and weird fiction out of pulp magazines of the early to mid-50s. All are delicious feasts for the imagination. The only overarching story arc is of the long term event of colonization and decline told in a nostalgic and ethereal quality, much like a later-day fairy-tale; indeed, the Martians themselves are rather like the fairies you read about in ancient and medieval tales. Bradbury wrote these tales with an almost poetic quality, the poetry running like a burbling stream against the hard realities of the worlds and their challenges, and his tales have withstood the test of time, even though the human species has yet to fulfill his dreams of interstellar colonization