Name: The Martian Chronicles
Rating: 4.059670781893004 (243 reviews)

Ray Bradbury

Leonard Nimoy

There Will Come Soft Rains, and Usher II

The Martian Chronicles

Shelby Doherty

A science fiction classic about the colonization of Mars.

Tim Pendry

Is this science fiction? Well, it is set on Mars and it involves rockets but it is closer to the fantasies of Lucian and Baron Munchhausen: the science is far from credible and the linked short stories are literary, dealing with society and psychology as it stood somewhere around 1950. But it is a major achievement not only in content but in style. It is a 'fix-up' of stories written for magazines in the late 1940s with new material to give the whole coherence. The fact that Borges wrote an introduction to the Spanish translation should be no surprise. The inconsistencies - exactly how many Martian races are there? - and absurdities - exactly how does all that material get transported to Mars and turned into Mid-Western small towns in such a short period of time? - do not matter at all. The dreamlike quality is what makes the book great. The linked short story approach has great merit in ensuring that there is not some over-arching theme that would bring it into space opera territory but rather a series of fictional essays on alienation, the comical, dim, lost, kind and nasty aspects of our species and American society. Rarely is the reader preached at, excepting perhaps on the understandable fear of nuclear war which is best expressed in the much anthologised "There Will Come Soft Rains" (one of only two stories set on earth). A late entry for the British edition ("The Fire Balloons") deals with missionaries and stands alongside Blish's 'Case of Conscience' and Clarke's 'The Star' as classic treatments of the problems the religioous may find in dealing with alien cultures. Interestingly (and pleasingly) Harper Voyager did not succumb to currently fashionable political correctness and excise the satire on the Southern good ole boys in 'Way Up In The Middle of the Air' (also set on Earth) with its use of the notorious N. word. No one could accuse Bradbury of all people of being a racist but wokes are not always the brightest sparks, are they, and publishers are not generally known for their courage under fire. This story is perhaps the weakest because it is preachy and earth-bound but it is of its time. We should remember that Bradbury considered his 'Fahrenheit 451' to be as relevant as criticism of the censorship forced on society by political correctness as it is of progress-fearful obscurantism. They are, in fact, two sides of the same coin. The book works best when it leaves the gravity of earth. The alien world Bradbury conjures is not real but it serves to steer our imagination towards self-reflection. It is fine writing by a decent man in an indecent world looking to another world to help us to try and understand ourselves. Bradbury thus has a dystopian vision that is almost British. You can see here the seeds of his later stories of the crowd and conformity. Settlers are as callous towards the indigenous inhabitants as they were when opening the West but it is a callousness without malice, a dumb thoughtlessness. Indeed, there is a countervailing theme of loneliness and loss in several moving stories so that our species seems doomed to act like lemmings for fear of being left alone. We determinedly settle and then equally determinedly fly back to our earthly doom out of some sort of unexplained patriotism. Another theme is the loss of sanity in men caused by coming across the utterly other - whether identifying with it, seeking to change it or fearing it. Time and again, human emotion triumphs over reason. The Martians themselves seem incapable of malice, operating on another plane of development, the vast majority doomed (like the Amerindians before them) by the pathogens brought by newcomers and the few survivors hiding away to be ignored, feared and misunderstood. There is an essentially humanity in this book that paradoxically shows that humanity is not humanity's normal state and that what we like to think of humanity is better expressed by aliens - rarely has the alienation of the sensitive observer from our own species been better presented.

For use in schools and libraries only. The tranquility of Mars is disrupted by the earthmen who have come to conquer space, colonize the planet, and escape a doomed Earth.

Dani

Starts well. Nice and interesting. Then it grows to a bunch of chapters each telling a different story with no apparent connection. Sure, chronological order, but whats the hole point of the book? I see it just as a portrait of the american mentality of imposing their ideas and lifestyle whenever they can. The connection to Fahrenheit 451 was pleasing, though.

A gorgeous collection of stories of Man, the Destroyer. 

Michael Klepacki

Sarah Sammis

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury is "half-cousin to a novel" and "a book of stories pretending to be a novel" (Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction by Jonathan R. Eller and William F. Touponce, 2004, p. 111). Those description fit most of Bradbury's books, the one major exception being Farenheit 451 (1953).

The Martian Chronicles has the distinction of being Bradbury's first published book. It is comprised of some previously short stories strong together with other stories to form a coherent future history of the colonization of Mars (or Tyrr as the natives call it).

The timeline goes from January 1999 through October 2026. Along with the rockets to Mars from Earth, there is also the fall of the Tyrrian people to earth borne diseases much as the European small pox was so devistating to the native American groups.

Most of the stories take place on Mars but there are a few glimpses of life (and death) on Earth interspersed with the events on Mars. "The Off Season" (originally published in 1948) reads like the starting point for Steven Brust's Cowboy Feng's Space Bar and Grille (1990) except here it's a hot dog stand and an atomic war. Later on, "There Will Come Soft Rains" (another of the previously published short stories) made me think immediately of Wall-E (Pixar, 2008) except that the robots are all built into a house that has somehow survived the atomic blast in Los Angeles.

Ray Bradbury stories and novels are part of the American psyche. They are taught in schools and have been adapted or referenced so many times it's no wonder that one can see Bradbury's influences in any number of other works.

Erik Wallace

Reread this in Jan./Feb. of 2013. Being an X-1 and Dimension X fan it was interesting to read the stories that were adapted from this book that I've heard radio versions of. For OTR fans this book contains: Mars Is Heaven, Ylla, There Will Come Soft Rains, And The Moon Be Still As Bright and more.

Michael Springer

This is a very cool collection of short stories, because they are all centered around a theme (life on Mars), but there is quite a range of story types in here. Some are horrific, some are funny, and the majority of them are very fun.

The tranquility of Mars is disrupted by humans who want to conquer space, colonize the planet, and escape a doomed Earth.

Gillian Rose

I've mentioned it before but I struggle with older sci-fi. Still, I had hoped Bradbury would change that. It was pretty good but I got confused a lot. I'm glad I finally read this book but was expecting more.

Erwin Lemuel Oliva

Martians and poetry

Bradbury's Martian Chronicles is a bold attempt at reimagining life in another planet. But our humanity remained. 

You will not find stories of green Martians here, nor will you see anything that resembles it.

This is a collection of stories and poetry with Mars as backdrop. After all, we do behave differently when we are in an alien

Never has science fiction been so rewarding. 

Adam Scharf

Kirsten Simkiss

This is probably more like a 2.5 star read for me. It's not a bad book, but it's not something I'm likely to ever reread. I'm actually a pretty big fan of some of Bradbury's works, but this just didn't do it for me. Being published in the 1940s, it's understandably dated and the ideas about the realities of Mars are obviously way off, but the concepts of moving to another earth-like planet are interesting enough. Still, it's not something I enjoyed reading.

The stories, overall, are joined by a loose timeline apparently only spanning 20 years of humanity on Mars and the effects they must have had on the planet. Those effects, of course, are to lay waste to everything good that the Martians had built. It's definitely a discussion regarding the destructive nature of capitalistic humanity and how we treat our world around us. There were things that seemed to stay relevant in this day and age, but also things that were far from accurate about our day and age.

The weakest part about this series of short stories were the characters. Only a few are recurring ones, and by the end you have to be reminded of them in order to fully remember who they were. The Captain and Spender are referenced most, but honestly they seem to have had no lasting impact on the society, leaving humanity to rampage through Mars. I actually liked the short chapters regarding the changes on earth and the people leaving the best of all the works.

In the end, this just wasn't the book for me. I found it to be an odd timeline full of unrealistic and uninteresting characters and equally frustrating dialogue. To some, this might be your cup of tea, but it just wasn't something I liked reading. I particularly disliked the story "Way in the Middle of the Air" because of it's obviously dated racism. I'm told that's been left out of more recent editions, likely due to the constant use of racial slurs and stereotyping. Additionally, of all the stories, it shows that Bradbury thought the culture of humanity wouldn't change as much as it clearly has. In that story, the culture was still very much of a segregated world and women's rights were clearly far less than that of men throughout the book. While I get that it was written before any of these changes really occurred, I wish Bradbury had made more of an attempt to predict a different future from his present times, even if it was way off.

Todd Luallen

A collection of stories about Mars written between 1947 and 1952. Much of what Bradbury writes showcases the sentiment of the typical American after two world wars. Tremendous hope for technology, and such despair regarding humanity. I'm not a big fan of collections when it comes to long-form reading, but I did enjoy this glimpse into the mind of mid-twentieth century America. There are some dark stories in this collection, but Bradbury isn't known for his rosy outlook of the future, so you shouldn't be surprised.

2030, les premières fusées quittent la Terre pour un monde nouveau. La colonisation de Mars vient de débuter. Mais, sur la planète rouge, vit déjà un peuple d'une infinie sagesse. Cette antique civilisation devra-t-elle disparaître pour qu'une nouvelle puisse s'épanouir ? Pour les 20 ans de la collection Lunes d'encre, cette réédition collector de Chroniques martiennes - premier ouvrage de science-fiction publié par les Editions Denoël - offre un écrin somptueux au style enchanteur de Ray Bradbury.

Chroniques martiennes

Marion

3.5 ⭐
J'ai beaucoup aimé les premières nouvelles qui ont un humour un peu décalé et WTF. Dommage qu'on perde cette ambiance au fur et à mesure. Néanmoins ça reste sympa et les sujets abordés sont intéressés. Toutes les nouvelles ne se valent pas mais dans l'ensemble c'est un classique de SF agréable à lire.

Allison Garrett

Overall the book was good it just felt more like an anthology to me than a novel. I read this for my 10th grade English class and I really like Bradburys style of writing and all of the stories it was just hard to get into because there were never the same protagonists or characters.

Fraser Simons

Confession time: I super duper conflated this with John Carter. I was very confused for a while, and this certainly exceeded my expectations, which is what I assign 4 star reads. 

A really neat thing about this was there’s like a… directors commentary? I guess? Where, in between each short story, the author puts in a few sentences. At first I thought this would be really annoying but it doesn’t overstay it’s welcome and it’s often really interesting. Especially the context of the stories spring boarding him into other works, such as Fahrenheit. He also talks about how X story is situated in his mind in the 50s, when reactionary elements seeded anti-intellectualism we now see the product of today. But also we’ve come a long way too. it’s quite interesting to me. It’s impossible to separate this from the author as a result; but in the most unique way I’ve read lol. 

I expected pulp action fantasy and stayed for the specificity of theme that makes “good” classics embed themselves in cannon (often). Loneliness, especially, is handled well here. Visually, thematically, and well articulated. As with most “old” sci-fi, the dialogue is the weakest link. I kind of wonder what I’d have rated this without the fascinating commentary and had I not been expecting something completely different. It could have been 3 stars. I’m not sure. Regardless, it’s this kind of serendipity that endears me to plenty of books I remember fondly, so it feels a certain kind of fair.

Pat G.

This was awesome. Not usually a fan of this chronicled format, but it all tied together very well. This is also my first Bradbury.  

It veered hilariously in some places - very unexpectedly - going into some horror which is right up my alley. I was holding my breath a bit when it started getting racial, but was happy to see where it went. 

Philosophical, political, sad, cheerful, enriching, enlightening, dreadful… 
I was surprised at how much variety in the story was packed into these 180 pages. I suspect this is made easier by the format, maybe I’ll try more of these chronicled-style stories in the future. 

Will certainly read more Bradbury after this, he’s a legend after all and I know now it’s for good reason.

Crónicas marcianas

rafael

Desde hace mucho tiempo quise leer este libro. Cuando empecé a leer ciencia ficción, Bradbury era uno de los escritores a quienes se hacía referencia a menudo. Entonces sentí que era casi una obligación buscar sus libros. El primero que leo es "Crónicas marcianas" y dejé en stand-by "Fahrenheit 451". Tras terminar el primero estas son unas breves apreciaciones que puedo compartir.

Las crónicas de Bradbury narran un intento de colonización del planeta Marte. Aquella estrella roja que tanto interés ha despertado en el hombre desde hace... no sé, quizá desde siempre, cuando nuestro cielo, antes del smog, permitía observar más de un astro. Recién en 1975 aterrizaría la primera nave en Marte pero ya en 1950 Bradbury alucinaba, como muchos otros hasta ahora, cómo la humanidad intentaría extender su dominio, su raza, sus anhelos y desenfrenos.

En mi opinión, este libro funciona muy como una advertencia, una alerta temprana, sobre el destino del hombre. Y creo que después de casi 70 años no pierde vigencia. Con tanto debate sobre la crisis climática y la búsqueda de soluciones sostenibles... ¡Vaya! Si solo leemos el diálogo entre Spender y el Capitán Wilder en la crónica "Junio 2001: Aunque siga brillando la luna" nos queda mover la cabeza asintiendo. La crítica social de Bradbury tiene vigencia. No podríamos negarlo. Y es por eso que he podido disfrutar al leer cada crónica. Aunque algunos textos sean un poco predecibles no me parece que hayan perdido ese gancho que empuja a buscar más respuestas en la siguiente crónica. 

Por último, una crónica alucinante es "Usher II". Una compleja y emocionante narración que critica la censura (moral) del arte y adelanta lo que después será "Fahrenheit 451". Pero que al rendir tributo a E.A. Poe y hacer referencia a Orwell, que ya había publicado "1984", y a Lewis Carroll, se convierte en un texto único. Una locura bien narrada. No por nada se titula también "Carnival of Madness". 

Lo recomendaré cuando me pregunten por libros. Asegurado.

The Martian Chronicles There Will Come Soft Rains, and Usher II

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