The Martian Chronicles
by Ray Bradbury
Summary
Ray Bradbury links a set of previously published magazine stories into one chronicle of Mars between 1999 and 2026, opening with three expeditions of Earthmen who find, and mostly fail to understand, an old Martian civilization of telepathic, golden eyed people. The Third Expedition is the book's best remembered chapter: the crew lands to find an idyllic replica of Green Bluff, Illinois, filled with what look like their own dead relatives, lets its guard down for a joyful reunion, and is murdered in its sleep. Waves of American settlers arrive once the Martians have been wiped out, unintentionally, by chicken pox carried on an earlier crew, and rebuild the empty planet into small town America, complete with hot dog stands and Fourth of July fireworks. Jeff Spender, an archaeologist on the Fourth Expedition, sickened by what colonization destroyed on Earth and is about to destroy again on Mars, kills several of his own crewmates before Captain Wilder shoots him. When nuclear war finally breaks out back on Earth, nearly every colonist abandons Mars to go home to it, and the book closes with the Thomas family, among the last arrivals, looking into a canal and seeing their own reflections as the new Martians.
Bradbury writes less like a science fiction engineer plotting technology than like a poet arranging moods, and the book reads as a set of linked stories sharing one shore rather than a novel with a single throughline. Some chapters run only two or three pages and vanish from the plot that follows them entirely. Readers hoping for a straight colonization saga can find that looseness frustrating, while readers who come for the atmosphere, homesickness and guilt carried across an empty red landscape, tend to reread individual chapters long after forgetting the order they arrive in.
Bradbury built the book from stories he had already sold to pulp magazines, stitching them together with short connecting vignettes into what he called a half cousin to a novel, a structure he credited to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio. He revised the internal chronology as real spaceflight fell behind his fictional one, pushing every date forward by thirty one years for a 1997 edition.
Historical Context & Significance
Doubleday published The Martian Chronicles on May 4, 1950, three years before the Hugo Award existed to recognize science fiction at all, so no genre prize was there to weigh in. Christopher Isherwood reviewed it warmly, calling Bradbury a truly original writer with a very great and unusual talent, and critics Anthony Boucher and J. Francis McComas described it as a poet's interpretation of future history reaching past the limits of any fictional form. The book's only major prize came decades later and for different reasons: the Pulitzer board gave Bradbury a special citation in 2007 for his distinguished, prolific and deeply influential career as an author of science fiction and fantasy, not this book by name.
Sales built slowly and steadily through decades of reissues and school curricula. Adaptations have stayed modest next to the book's influence, among them a 1980 NBC television miniseries and a 1988 Soviet Armenian film called The Thirteenth Apostle. Its clearest monument sits on Mars itself, where NASA named the Curiosity rover's 2012 touchdown site Bradbury Landing, announcing it on what would have been the author's ninety second birthday.