The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury (EPUB)

Description

Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves… Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The Martian Chronicles Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America’s most beloved authors. In a much celebrated literary career that has spanned six decades, he has produced an astonishing body of work: unforgettable novels, including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes; essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays; The Illustrated Mein, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and numerous other superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous than these masterful chronicles of Earth’s settlement of the fourth world from the sun.Bradbury’s Mars 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. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn -first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars … and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time’s passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐Life on Mars is conceivable from your imagination, including the conditions on the planet and the Martian environment. All you have to do is reflect on and encapsulate humanity, our lives in the microcosm we call Earth, our history, the major achievements of mankind, our impressive array of capabilities, and the vast natural resources with which we have had to work. You can project the facts, factors, statistics, and general data out there into the farthest reaches of the universe, or onto any other planet out there in the solar system, such as Mars, the next closest planet to us, going away from the sun. You can think of the planets as if they were arranged in a complex pattern like a long curvy line of dominos. If they were part of an amazing infinitely complicated domino effect, Mars would certainly be one of the earliest ones to topple. Astronaut travel to our moon proved to be a challenging achievement, but the government today does not offer enough incentive or motivation to return anytime soon. It would be a different story if there were beneficial resouces on the moon which could promote and sustain life. Happiness and comfort living on or visiting any celestial body is important. But oxygen and water are the critical resources we must have in order to live anywhere. There is a good chance oxygen and water exists on Mars. So, boom or bust, Mars appears to be the next logical choice for future exploration. Obviously, you can’t send expeditions toward our Sun. They would incinerate, melt and burn to ashes. Traveling toward the farthest reaches of our galaxy makes perfect sense, traveling toward the next galaxy, as if we were sailing along with the debris from the “Big Bang.” For the immediate future, Mars would be the ideal stepping stone, if not the ultimate projected destination of mankind on Earth. NASA should make a feasibility study on the subject right away. Destination Mars depends on the terra firma of the planet. Specifically, exactly how hard is the ground when you land on it? How deep and how solid does the rocky surface extend when you dig into it? Are there pitfalls, sinkholes, quicksand, and quagmires? You don’t want to land your rocket on a sinkhole! Or, do you? The perfect location might well be an underground missile silo, offering the best protection from the elements and the climate. Farther away from your Red Crystal Trailer Park and deeper underground, do you drill into molten lava, gaseous material, or liquid chemicals? Potential sources of fuel and heat. How about a water source? Arriving flight crews will have to become explorers of the “New World” for this commodity, which is probably more precious than gold on Mars, and they must be re-supplied periodically with pure drinking water. Electricity should be simple: bringing solar generators and wind turbines should do the trick. You need shelter. Caves and cliff dwellings are possible. Or they could convert the rocket fusilages into shiny new “Airstream” travel trailers. Oxygen would be thin on Mars, if breathable at all. Crews would no doubt need a life-support system for oxygen. The gravity on Mars is significantly less than that on Earth, but should be about twice that on the moon, so getting around should be easier. Walking on Mars should be a breeze. Explorers can make great strides by leaps and bounds, and cover greater distances. Until a viable water source is located and the flight crew can grow their own food, their food must all be provided from the pre-packaged foodstocks brought with them aboard their flight, until they can be resupplied. Can they find proof of life on Mars? Doubtful there are any Martian rabbits hippedy hopping around the bunny trail; tasty vitamin-rich vegetables, or even edible insects. Basically, the life they find on Mars will be the life they bring with them. Nonetheless, flight crews should be trained to look for ephemeron specimens on Mars. How are wind conditions? Hurricanes and tornadoes, non-existent. But, is dust a problem? Like the Dust Bowl in Oklahoma in the 1930’s or recurring, raging sand storms in the Sahara desert? Definitely undesirable! It may be inferred from a recent news report I heard on television that the main reason Mars looks so barren through a telescope or from Voyager probe satellite images is because there is no magnetic field on Mars to protect it from cosmic winds and solar radiation. Life on Mars might have just been “blown away.” This suggests two things: First, the planet probably does not have a solid iron or metallic core at its center, or a magnetic polar axis. Secondly, it is difficult to sustain life forms on such a planet due to the inherent physical, chemical, and thermodynamic properties of matter. Not that I’m an expert on the matter. Specifically, I believe that it is difficult to sustain life forms when conditions favor entropy increasing more dramtically than enthalpy. In other words, thermodynamically and atomically speaking, substances have a greater tendency to disassociate, separate, or fall apart rather than to attract, combine, and fuse together. A molecule would more readily have a tendency to break apart into atoms, rather than atoms naturally forming into molecules. As you probably have already guessed, complex molecules are the building blocks of life, which have formed from combining atoms into simple molecules, which fuse together from simple inorganic molecules into the more complicated organic molecules, with DNA present. Somehow, life forms in the process transforming from reactive chemical substances into biological creatures. Again, this favors an enthalpy thermodynamic reaction and organic chemistry. A breath of the Holy Spirit might somehow enter into the equation. Or the atmosphere on Mars might have to change with global warming. An artificial magnetic field and greenhouse gases might have to be generated. Then again, a sudden impact from a random collision with a water comet might instantly improve conditions for life on Mars. Be that as it may, you can never know for certain what living conditions are really like, until you actually set foot on Mars and try to survive there. Ordinarily, under more favorable conditions, travel to Mars would be like going on a camping trip to a remote wilderness region, only you couldn’t drive back to the convenience store for flashlight batteries, sodas, hot dogs, and marshmallows; gasoline, a warmer sleeping bag, matches, or a fishing lure. Besides, there might have been life on Mars in some way, shape, or form eons ago, before the time of dinosaurs on Earth. Plus, what do we know about the Martian moons? It might be worth a side-trip to go sightseeing there enroute, approaching near enough to shoot some close-up photographs for “National Geographic.” Newtonian physics applies to rocketry just as it does for cars driving down the interstate highway, except rockets have to overcome the force of gravity in order to escape from the atmosphere surrounding Earth. Funneled gases from onboard fuel storage containers must propel them through millions of miles of outer space, just to reach the orbit of Mars. That’s a requirement for a great amount of fuel. If it takes a rocket a little under two days (under 1 and 7/8 days) to reach the moon, then it would take roughly a year to reach Mars, according to my fuzzy arithmetic, allowing for rest stops, refueling, and any scenic side-trips–not to mention, time for dodging asteroids, meteors, and comets. Consequently, launching a rocket from Earth’s moon to Mars might be more sensible and economical. A newly arrived flight crew on the moon could board and “blast-off” in a freshly fueled and fully-stocked rocket from a permanent base on the moon. Eventually, quantum physics will send rockets to Mars faster. The first mission to Mars itinerary: Earth to our moon, moon to Martian moon, Martian moon to destination Mars. One-way ticket. No return trip. Travel timetable: 1 year, approximately 50 million miles. Flight crew volunteers plan to spend the rest of their lives on Mars. Follow-on missions to Mars are programmed and scheduled at semi-annual intervals for the next five years. So, after five and a half years, the personnel from ten flight crews should be included in the census of current population on Mars, assuming a 100 percent success rate, no fatalities, and no cancelled flights due to budget cuts, war, inclement weather, natural disasters, or accidents. Given all of the above information in the rapidly-changing, scientifically-challenged world in which we live today, if Mars is even remotely similar to the fictional fantasy world depicted by author Ray Bradbury in his 1950 novel, The Martian Chronicles, the newly arrived settlers on Mars can expect a tremendous amount of heartache, trouble, suffering, sorrow, and soul-searching. In a more realistic, pragmatic, and Darwinian universe, though, I believe the early inhabitants of Mars will be more like our pilgrims, soldiers, explorers, fortune-seekers, and western expansionists in the United States. If there ever were any Martians in existence, I believe they are long gone by now. Forty years ago and decades before the “Martian Land Rovers” landed on Mars and began sending images back to Earth, there was a natural history, geology, and astronomy exhibit in a large glass enclosure, tucked away in a dark, dreary, and dusty corner of an obscure science and engineering building on campus. Maybe it was a student’s idea for a science fair project. Inside the display case was a robotic gadget, some reddish-orange soil samples, various rocks, and a few Polaroid photographs. The contents might have been red rocks from the Rockies and sienna soil from the Red River Valley. Who knows? They could have been the same rocks and dirt you’d find on Mars. There might even have been a top secret mission to Mars and the proof arrived from the Smithsonian Institute in Washington, D.C., having been sent to the lab for further scientific analysis, placed on display, and promptly forgotten. We know rocks came back from the moon. The war years were difficult and uncertain times. Hysteria, paranoia, and riots ran rampant. Today, we can feel much more self-assured, confident, and secure in the knowledge we have gained. We have good intelligence, a fine free press, and uncensored news journalism, without hidden agendas favoring special interest groups or embraced by hostile foreign nations to thank. As we all now know, you can put tremendous amounts of information on the internet, but you can’t store really impressive secrets for very long.

⭐It’s been ages since I’ve read this collection. It’s definitely worth re-reading; Bradbury is an amazing writer whose work has lost none of its freshness. The quality of writing is matched by a rich imagination and a fine sensitivity to the human psyche. Timeless.

⭐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.

⭐The Martian Chronicles was written more than 70 years ago when the average person knew nothing about Mars’ atmosphere or its ability to support life. Ray Bradbury made Mars an Earth-like planet, with more or less humanoid Martians, a breathable atmosphere, birds in the sky and fish in the canals. We now know that the planet is cold with no surface water, a thin atmosphere and no visible life. Bradbury’s vision of human colonization of Mars and total war on Earth is bleak and, in the end, feels hopeless. His idea of how quickly we would be able to get from Earth to Mars using rockets , or that an individual could have a spaceship for his family to escape from Earth is ridiculous. And why would everybody pack up and leave Mars when war broke out on Earth, especially when many had left Earth to try to start a better life on a new planet?Some authors have written timeless science fiction by setting it a long way into the future and/or in a distant galaxy (Asimov’s Foundation series, Frank Herbert’s Dune series), or by not relying on the technology of the author’s time (Asimov’s Robot short stories fail on this point). Ray Bradbury could have written a more inspiring book if he’d allowed the settlers on Mars to build an improved version of life on Earth. Instead he seems to focus on the worst of mankind, resulting in a fairly bleak forecast for our future. I appreciate that Bradbury’s outlook will have been influenced by the start of the Cold War with its threat of nuclear Armageddon. I also accept that this is one of his early books and he was still learning his craft. But I still think that the book didn’t have to be so hopeless.This is not a book I would recommend, or one I’ll be in a hurry to read again.

⭐I don’t know why I thought that this was a novel, rather than a collection of short, highly atmospheric stories centered around man’s first experiences of M ars…However, another Ray Bradbury collection – “The Golden Apples of the Sun” – is one of the best collections of short stories I have ever read, so I was happy enough to have paid my £1.99, and game to give it a chance. It’s not quite, I have to admit, up to the standard of the aforementioned collection…Having said that, the 26 stories in the collection – some funny, some dark, some downright sad, and all wonderfully atmospheric – all weave together perfectly to create a poignant, beautifully realised ‘history ‘ of migration to Mars, the quality of man, and the nature of human existence.

⭐Having read this Kindle edition many years after reading an original book version, I now really agree that “they do not write Science Fiction (not like that they don’t) anymore”.This is a true Classic Science Fiction collection comprising, as it does, the major individual chronicles that make up this iconic story. Some of these stories are not in every plublished edition of the Book and well done Kindle for issuing an edition that includes some of the less available stories.Yes this is a Classic but I had not realized how dated some of Bradbury’s writing style can come across now, though in no way does that diminish the totality of the social, political and (in an out dated way) scientific insights.Interestingly I have just finished a Paperback Sci-Fi novel, comparatively recently written, in which one of Bradbury’s characters is lifted – name, character and purpose – from one of the Chronicles. What a compliment, but what crass insousance.DJG

⭐Written as short stories for magazines in the late 1940s and pulled together with a series of linking pieces for publication in book form in 1951, the book is set around the turn of the millennium, when man is beginning to colonise Mars. But a very different Mars from the one we know today – this one is populated by intelligent beings who seem fairly human in some ways, but have telepathic powers that mean that some of them can sense the approach of the men from Earth.The book is very episodic in nature though it does have a clear underlying timeline. While the human side of the story is populated with consistently ’40s characters, the Martian side evolves and changes as the book progresses, meaning that it never becomes a fully realised world in the sense of most fantasy novels. Instead, the stories are fundamentally about humanity and it seems as if Bradbury creates Mars and the Martians anew each time to fit the story he wants to tell. This gives a kind of dream-like, almost surreal, quality, especially to the later stories.The first few episodes tell of the first astronauts arriving on the planet. There are fairly clear parallels here with the arrival of the first settlers to America, with the misunderstandings and tragedies that happen between the races. As happened there, after a few setbacks the incoming race becomes the dominant one, with the Martians proving unable to resist the new diseases the humans have brought to their world. At this early stage, the stories are quite interesting but I was wondering why the book had acquired such a reputation as a sci-fi classic. The science is pretty much non-existent, and there is very little fantasy beyond the basic premise of what can be done with telepathy. Bradbury’s Mars is Earth-like in its atmosphere and requires little or no alteration to make it habitable, and the humans have simply transported their recognisably 1940s world to a new place.However, as the stories progress, Bradbury allows his imagination to take full flight and some of the later stories are beautifully written fantasies with more than a little philosophical edge. There is the usual mid-20th century obsession with approaching nuclear holocaust on Earth, but Bradbury widens it out, using the isolation of the Mars colonists to examine human frailties and concerns more broadly. Loneliness features in more than one story, with the contrasting sense of community and nostalgia that first drives people to make their new homes as like their old ones as they can, and then calls them back home to be with those they left behind when Earth is finally ravaged by the inevitable war.There is a fabulous story about race, Way Up in the Middle of the Air – black people choosing to make a new home on Mars, leaving the southern states where, while they may be nominally free, they are still treated as inferior beings. I imagine this story must have been extremely controversial and possibly shocking at the time of writing, since it doesn’t shy away from showing the white people as little better than racist abusers.One of my favourite stories is The Fire Balloons, telling of Father Peregrine on a mission to bring Christianity to the surviving Martians, and fighting against the prejudice of his colleagues that beings so different from humanity could not possess souls. The wonderful imagery in this one is perfectly matched by some of Bradbury’s most beautiful writing, and it is both thought-provoking and moving.But I could go on picking out favourites, because the comments ‘beautifully written’, ‘great imagery’, ‘fantastically imaginative’ and ’emotionally moving’ could be applied to most of the later stories in the book. Though the episodic nature prevents the reader from developing much emotional attachment to specific characters, the imagination Bradbury shows more than makes up for this lack. In one story, there are no characters – just a house falling into disrepair and eventually consuming itself, and yet Bradbury makes this one of the most moving stories about the after-effects of war that I have read. The final story offers some hope for the future but the overall tone is of the inevitability of self-destruction that was felt so strongly in the world in the decades of the Cold War.So I too am now convinced that this book deserves its status as one of the great classics. Is it sci-fi? I’m not sure, and I feel to pigeon-hole it as that is more likely to put people off anyway. And I don’t think anyone should be put off reading it just because it’s ‘genre’ fiction – it is as thought-provoking and well written as most ‘literary’ novels and shows a great deal more imagination than they usually do. One I will undoubtedly come back to again and again.

⭐Gosh, four stars! I’ve surprised myself but it’s not worth any more than that. There’s not enough of of real innovation or gripping story in here to justify five stars. I’ll admit I read this in my teens and really enjoyed it, but beyond a few original ideas there is simply not enough follow up an the first couple of very atmospheric stories.Above all I felt this was thin stuff from a writer who could certainly do much better when it comes to building a picture of an alien race. After an amazing start, Bradbury was not trying his best when he wrote most of this. He took a handful of memes and just repeated and reiterated. There is a lack of development and depth. Too much is trivial and mischievous.

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