The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury (Bantam Books - Paperback) book collectible [Barcode 9780553278224] - Main Image 1
The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury (Bantam Books - Paperback) book collectible [Barcode 9780553278224] - Main Image 2
The Martian Chronicles - Ray Bradbury (Bantam Books - Paperback) book collectible [Barcode 9780553278224] - Main Image 3
Title:
The Martian Chronicles
Genre:
Science Fiction
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Binding:
Paperback
Type of Book:
Fiction
Number of Pages:
182
Number of Chapters:
26
Synopsis:
The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel, containing stories Bradbury originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. For publication, the stories were loosely woven together with a series of short, interstitial vignettes.

Structure:

Bradbury has credited Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as influences on the structure of the book. He has called it a ”half-cousin to a novel” and ”a book of stories pretending to be a novel”. As such, it is similar in structure to Bradbury’s short story collection, The Illustrated Man, which also uses a thin frame story to link various unrelated short stories.

Like Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, The Martian Chronicles follows a ”future history” structure. The stories, complete in themselves, come together as episodes in a larger sequential narrative framework. The overall structure is in three parts, punctuated by two catastrophes: the near-extinction of the Martians and the parallel near-extinction of the human race.

The first third (set in the period from January 1999—April 2000) details the attempts of the Earthmen to reach Mars, and the various ways in which the Martians keep them from returning. In the crucial story, ”—And the Moon be Still as Bright”, it is revealed by the fourth exploratory expedition that the Martians have all but perished in a plague caused by germs brought by one of the previous expeditions. This unexpected development sets the stage for the second act (December 2001—November 2005), in which humans from Earth colonize the deserted planet, occasionally having contact with the few surviving Martians, but for the most part preoccupied with making Mars a second Earth. However, as war on Earth threatens, most of the settlers pack up and return home. A global nuclear war ensues, cutting off contact between Mars and Earth. The third act (December 2005—October 2026) deals with the aftermath of the war, and concludes with the prospect of the few surviving humans becoming the new Martians, a prospect already foreshadowed in ”—And the Moon be Still as Bright”, and which allows the book to return to its beginning.

Publication history:

The book was published in the United Kingdom under the title The Silver Locusts (1951), with slightly different contents. In some editions the story ”The Fire Balloons” was added, and the story ”Usher II” was removed to make room for it. In the Spanish language version, the stories were preceded by a prologue by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.

The book was published in 1963 as part of the Time Reading Program with an introduction by Fred Hoyle.

In 1979, Bantam Books published a trade paperback edition with illustrations by Ian Miller.

A 1997 edition of the book advances all the dates by 31 years (thus running from 2030 to 2057), includes ”The Fire Balloons”, and replaces ”Way in the Middle of the Air” (a story less topical in 1997 than in 1950) with the 1952 short story ”The Wilderness”, dated May 2034 (equivalent to May 2003 in the earlier chronology).


Influences:

The background of Mars shared by most of the stories, as a desert planet crisscrossed by giant canals built by an ancient civilization to bring water from the polar ice caps, is a common scenario in science fiction of the early 20th century. It stems from early telescope observations of Mars by 19th century astronomers who, beginning with Italian Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877, believed they saw straight lines on the planet. Schiaparelli called them canali (”grooves” or ”channels”), which was popularly mistranslated into English as ”canals”. Based on this and other evidence, the idea that Mars was inhabited by intelligent life was put forward by a number of prominent scientists around the turn of the century, notably American astronomer Percival Lowell. This ignited a popular fascination with the planet which has been called ”Mars fever”. Planetary astronomer Carl Sagan wrote:
”Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.”

In a later introduction to the stories, Bradbury cites the Barsoom stories by Edgar Rice Burroughs and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson as literary influences.

Reception:

Boucher and McComas praised Chronicles as ”a poet’s interpretation of future history beyond the limits of any fictional form.” In his ”Books” column for F&SF, Damon Knight selected The Martian Chronicles as one of the 10 best sf books of the 1950s. L. Sprague de Camp, however, declared that Bradbury would improve ”when he escapes from the influence of Hemingway and Saroyan,” placing him in ”the tradition of anti-science-fiction writers [who] see no good in the machine-age.” Still, de Camp acknowledged that ”[Bradbury’s] stories have considerable emotional impact, and many will love them.”

Adaptations:

Film:

In 1988, the Soviet Armenian studio Armenfilm produced the feature film The Thirteenth Apostle (Russian: Тринадцатый апостол), starring Juozas Budraitis, Donatas Banionis, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, based on the The Martian Chronicles.

Radio:

The Martian Chronicles was adapted for radio in the science fiction radio series Dimension X. This truncated version contained elements of the stories ”Rocket Summer”, ”Ylla”, ”–and the Moon be Still as Bright”, ”The Settlers”, ”The Locusts”, ”The Shore”, ”The Off Season”, ”There Will Come Soft Rains”, and ”The Million-Year Picnic”.

”—and the Moon be Still as Bright” and ”There Will Come Soft Rains” were also adapted for separate episodes in the same series. The short stories ”Mars Is Heaven” and ”Dwellers in Silence” also appeared as episodes of Dimension X. The latter is in a very different form from the one found in The Martian Chronicles.

A very abridged spoken word reading of ”There Will Come Soft Rains” and ”Usher II” was made in 1975 with Leonard Nimoy as narrator.

Television miniseries:

In 1979 NBC commissioned a three-episode miniseries adaptation in partnership with the BBC with a total running time of just over four hours, The Martian Chronicles. The adaptation was written by Richard Matheson and was directed by Michael Anderson. The series star was Rock Hudson as ’Wilder’, with Darren McGavin as ’Parkhill’, Bernadette Peters as ’Genevieve Selsor’, Bernie Casey as ’Jeff Spender’, Roddy McDowall as ’Father Stone’, and Barry Morse as ’Hathaway’, as well as Fritz Weaver. Bradbury found the miniseries ”just boring”.

Television adaptations of individual stories:

The cable television series The Ray Bradbury Theater adapted some individual short stories from The Martian Chronicles including ”Mars is Heaven”,”Usher II”, ”And the Moon Be Still as Bright” and ”The Martian”. Video releases of the series included a VHS tape entitled Ray Bradbury’s Chronicles: The Martian Episodes with some editions containing 3 episodes and other editions containing 5.

Comic books:

Several of the short stories in The Martian Chronicles were adapted into graphic novel-style stories in the EC Comics magazines, including ”There Will Come Soft Rains” in Weird Fantasy #17, ”The Million-Year Picnic” in Weird Fantasy #21, ”The Silent Towns” in Weird Fantasy #22.
Author:
Ray Bradbury
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Publisher:
Bantam Books
Barcode:
9780553278224
Country:
United States
Publication Date:
1979-09-01
Publication Year:
1950
Number of Copies:
1
Language:
English
Quantity:
1
Date Added:
2023-05-12 14:27:15