In 'The Martian Chronicles', humanity discovers an ancient civilization on the verge of ruin. Before the advent of space flight, Ray Bradbury had humankind cultivating planets.

In connected, chronological stories, a true grand master once again enthralls, delights, and challenges us with his vision and heart-starkly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, weakness, folly, and poignant humanity in a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.

Bradbury' s 'The Martian Chronicles' is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time' s passage. The Mars he imagines in these masterful chronicles is a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America' s most beloved authors. Each wave different, and each wave stronger. Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves.

Blaise Selby From the Publisher:īook Description Paperback. Bradbury is a master fantasist and The Martian Chronicles are an unforgettable work of art. Yet the collection ends with hope for renewal, as a colonist family turns away from the demise of the Earth towards a new future on Mars. But in most of these stories, Bradbury holds up a mirror to humanity that reflects a shameful treatment of 'the other,' yielding, time after time, a harvest of loneliness and isolation. In 'The Silent Towns,' the last man on Mars hears the phone ring and ends up on a comical blind date. Colonists appear, most with ideas no more lofty than starting a hot-dog stand, and with no respect for the culture they've displaced.īradbury's quiet exploration of a future that looks so much like the past is sprinkled with lighter material. The Martians guard their mysteries well, but they are decimated by the diseases that arrive with the rockets. Starting in the far-flung future of 1999, expedition after expedition leaves Earth to investigate Mars. But longing for this comfortable past proves dangerous in every way to Bradbury's characters-the golden-eyed Martians as well as the humans. Written in the 1940s, the chronicles drip with nostalgic atmosphere-shady porches with tinkling pitchers of lemonade, grandfather clocks, chintz-covered sofas.

From 'Rocket Summer' to 'The Million-Year Picnic,' Ray Bradbury's stories of the colonization of Mars form an eerie mesh of past and future.

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