The Martian Chronicles

I had read only one book by Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451, and that one only a few years ago. But recently a good friend, who knows more about authors and books than I ever will, emailed me a link about Bradbury on the occasion of his birthday. That piece sent me on a quest to learn more about him and his writings, and I ran across a long Wikipedia article on him, chock full of interesting things I did not know, including this quote attributed to Bradbury: “First of all, I don't write science fiction. […] Science fiction is a depiction of the real. Fantasy is a depiction of the unreal. So Martian Chronicles is not science fiction, it's fantasy. It couldn't happen, you see?” That statement intrigued me. So, having read several of the ERB John Carter of Mars series, I decided it would be interesting to read Bradbury’s take on Mars, and it certainly was. Bradbury’s tales are shot through and through with what often is almost an in-your-face commentary on the human condition and human nature, and not a very complementary one, at that. And reading stories in 2021 that were composed in the late 1940s and published as a book in 1950 was a bit of an eerie experience, given that the opening story is set in a fictional January 2030—less than 9 years from now. In fact, the original edition has the action starting in 1999! Seeing how Bradbury imagined voyages to Mars and life on Mars so matter-of-factly 70 years ago, juxtaposed with what we know about the real challenges of interplanetary travel and the inhospitable conditions on the real Mars, made this an interestingly anachronistic kind of read. And although I certainly did not like or approve of the actions of many of the characters, I quite enjoyed the chronological ordering of the chapters and the fact that some of the early characters reappeared in subsequent stories. And I love the fact that reading on my Kindle app enables me to quickly search back to see where a character fist appeared!

Written as a number of short stories that build a coherent arc, The Martian Chronicles is the story of mankind's repeated attempts to colonize Mars. Before man, Mars is populated by a psychic race that is in some ways surprising similar to Earth's western civilizations, a suburban utopia of housewives, gardens, and jobs, but with more complex and ancient arts, histories, and literature. Earth's initially missions are all failures, but eventually the Martian race is wiped out and humans colonize the planet, destroying the old beauty that the Martians leave behind. When Earth begins to collapse in nuclear war, Mars is abandoned, left to a few stragglers and some new immigrants. The whole of the work is varied, and each chapter/short story is different: some expository, some humorous, some scientific, some bittersweet, some about Martians, some about humans. There is something haunting and memorable about the text, the last chapters specifically, and while The Martian Chronicles is not my favorite sci-fi work or even my favorite book about an alien race (that would be Asimov's The God's Themselves), it is classic Bradbury: surreal yet suburban, science-fiction but relevant, ironic, enjoyable, bittersweet, and all in all a good book. I recommend it.

It is hard to discuss or summarize The Martian Chronicles because of the amount of variety from chapter to chapter in the text. Each chapter reads like an independent short story and could even stand alone. However, as a whole the text does build a definitive arc, creating a final product that is greater than the sum of its parts. As a result of this build up, the last chapters are definitely the best of the bunch--they are the ones that will stick with the reader and carry the most impact. They are also the most depressing, surreal, and haunting of the bunch--haunting is a world that I'll use a lot because it really is the best descriptor of the final effect of this book. While early sections are funny and some later sections truly ironic and cynical, the book ends with the remnants of an abandoned planet, creating a story of remorse, memories, and, in the very end, the possibility of hope. The Martian ghost town is an image that sticks with you. It's magical, unreal, and, yes, haunting.

The Martian Chronicles is classic Bradbury in its relevance, however--while the book may end with an abandoned foreign planet, every event implies a lesson and every lesson can be carried over to our domestic culture on earth. Bradbury teaches cynicism, the ignorance and foolishness of humans, our weakness, our hubris (and with it our downfall), the fragility of all people on all planets, and, somehow, ultimately, the human/sentient ability to persevere. It may be about Mars, but this is a very human book. While taking the reader to a foreign landscape, Bradbury ultimately reminds him of his own backyard.

There is a lot of good sci-fi out there, and there are better (more original, more unique) examples of alien races, but Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is still worth reading. It's easy to get into and addicting, a very interesting concept, delightfully ironic, a little bit religious, very spiritual, bittersweet and hopeful. I enjoy this book and have read it a few times myself. I recommend it to others, although there is other sci-fi worth reading too. Pick this one up if the idea interests you or if you like Bradbury's other books.

I first read this in 8th grade (over 50 years ago), and it shocked me. To that point my science fiction reading was all spaceships, ray guns, bug-eyed evil aliens, and obvious 'good guys'. Bradbury writes true literature, and often has the voice of a poet. There is some talk of rockets, but no scenes occur on the rocket in space; they are mere means to get people from a known Earth, to the unknowns of another planet. No ray guns either, though the ancient Martians have interesting weapons. The ancient Martians are mirrors of us; both good and bad - but more what we wish we could be. There are a few true "good guys" and some "bad guys" as well, but most characters are just regular people who do their best. At its basic level, it is a story of humanity's good parts, bad parts, foibles, and strengths, and how people respond to the unknown and novel situations. My original copy of Chronicles has long since yellowed out and its pages have fallen apart. While this version annoyingly has advanced the dates well into the 21st century (decades later than Bradbury's original - Why? I don't find Jules Verne or unreadable because it happened over a century ago.), it doesn't drop out chapters and sections that carry offensive, racist, terms. Many modern versions of Chronicles have wrongly removed such chapters, fearing modern readers to be incapable of understanding why offensive language and ideas are important to display, because that is how we learn how indefensible such world views truly are. This book was written 75+ years ago, so don't expect any high tech discussions - no computers or androids, no warp speeds or all-seeing sensors. We now have rovers on Mars, and we know there are no magical crystal cities once populated by amazing Martians. We know we can't walk on the planet without spacesuits. But what we now know, in no way, detracts from the stories (understand that this is not a novel, but a collection of stories that run in chronological order) and their power to hold a mirror to humankind. At its best, science fiction explores humanity by placing it in situations well-beyond what we have on Earth. And Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is a great example of science fiction at its best.

This book is a classic for a reason. Though Bradbury admits that The Martian Chronicles is nothing but short stories written and pieced together over decades, the story still works incredibly well when read as a series of vignettes, deep dives into particular characters, places and events.

Some of the characters change the faces of Earth and Mars, some are minor players just trying to do their part and others are lowly individuals scrounging for survival, but their disparate opinions and viewpoints do help to carve out a complete world that I think only manages to fall apart once or twice.

The tone, the dark humor and the sheer creativity on display here would honestly be enough to elicit a five star review, but the central stretch of the book where it suddenly becomes a Fahrenheit 451 crossover novel, along with the overuse of preachy monologues in the final chapter do crack my immersion enough to lower the book's value in my eyes.

However, I would still recommend it. It's thought-provoking and terrifying, and even though Bradbury's mythical depiction of Mars looks nothing like what we now know Mars to be, the picture of a planet he has paints here will forever remain on my list of favorite literary settings.

I think I first read The Martian Chronicles in junior high. Around then, I’d read anything by Bradbury I could get my hands on. I was always rather grateful he’s so prolific. And I remember really liking The Martian Chronicles, but when I picked up a copy a couple of months ago I found I didn’t really remember anything concrete about it. Just that I liked it.

On rereading it, I’ve found I still really like it, though probably not for the same reasons I did back when I was twelve or so. It’s a book ultimately concerned with the ambivalent nature of man -- a deep-seated greediness married to a gentler, more altruistic side -- and the cyclical nature of change. It traces the settlement of Mars by humans, which results in the accidental genocide of the native Martians via chickenpox and the humans’ attempts to change Mars into a place more comfortable to them. They plant trees to increase the oxygen level in the planet’s atmosphere (a move which, though not directly addressed in the book, strikes me as the sort of thing that would have disastrous downstream consequences) and build towns that look just like the ones they left. Some even build hot dog stands. But when atomic war breaks out on Earth, the settlers go rushing back*, leaving a few isolated, lonely souls behind and Mars virtually uninhabited. The book ends with small clutches of escapees from Earth** touching down illicitly to start a new life there. They declare themselves Martians, and the cycle seems to start over again.

That’s about as close to a plot as the book has. I think it’s technically considered a novel, but really it’s a collection of inter-related short stories. There are a handful of characters that make multiple appearances -- most notably, members of the Fourth Expedition to Mars, the first to survive landing there in no small part due to the fact that one of the previous three expeditions wiped out the Martians with chicken pox -- but this is not a character-driven book. Really, Bradbury’s focus seems to be on capturing the way life on Mars shifts as the humans take over the planet. And the flexibility of the book’s structure allows him to do that with a wider, more varied lens than he would’ve had if he’d tried to do it using a more traditionally novel-like framework. By making each chapter a discrete episode in an era, he’s able to explore many different reactions to Mars and many different ways of living there.

The structure of the book, actually, is one of the few things I did remember about the book from the way back junior high times. And I’ve always been intrigued by it. It makes sense with Bradbury -- he’s a master of the short story. Through the interconnected short stories, The Martian Chronicles is able to give you a sense of what it would be like to live there at any point in the long process of settling, and gives you an understanding of the long process itself.

The other thing that sticks with me is the tone. In story after story, Bradbury writes in simple, almost quaint language, but does so in a way that communicates to the reader his trepidation and distaste with the frontier mindset of the settlers. In each individual story, it’s a quiet, subtle thing, like a warning he’s sending out that he doesn’t really believe will be heeded. A subtext lurking in the background. But over the course of the 27 stories, you get the message loud and clear. But the tone, I think, is at its strongest and most powerful in “The Musicians”:

Behind him would race six others, and the first boy there would be the Musician, playing the white xylophone bones beneath the black flake covering. A great skull would roll to view, like a snowball; they shouted! Ribs, like spider legs, plangent as a dull harp, and then the black flakes of mortality blowing all about them in their scuffling dance; the boys pushed and heaved and fell in the leaves, in the death that had turned the dead to flakes and dryness, into a game played by boys whose stomachs gurgled with orange pop.

That sense of innocent, thoughtless disrespect for the lives of people and civilizations that came before resonates through Bradbury’s writing in story after story. Sometimes, like in “The Musicians”, this is the focus of the story. But as often as not, it isn’t, it just lurks in the background, coloring how the stories fit together.

This was about the only thing I found unbelievable about the book. I found it improbable that people would flee a safe planet to one in the throes of nuclear war rather than the other way around. I also wonder how feasible that is -- I mean, if s**’s blowing up all over, where are those rockets supposed to land again? But one gaping plot hole in a book this good I can overlook.

**This last story, “The Million-Year Picnic,” kept reminding me of that episode of the Twilight Zone where a pair of families escape an impending world war by building rockets and striking out for a peaceful, livable planet in the dead of night. Of course in the episode, that peaceful, livable planet is....EARTH! So it’s inverted, I guess, here. But still, same sense of tension and the same basic plot points.