The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is a must-read for any fan of classic science fiction or speculative fantasy, a crucial precursor to films like Avatar and Alien and books like Kim Stanley Robinson’s Red Mars and Dan Simmons’ Hyperion, and a haunting prophesy of humanity’s destiny to bring our old dreams and follies along with us wherever we may venture forth.

Soar above the fossil seas and crystal pillars of a dead world in the pages of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles. A milestone of American literature, this classic collection of poetic, interconnected vignettes about life on the red planet diverges from the War of the Worlds theme, in which humanity must defend its shores against its neighbors. For in Bradbury’s prismatic and philosophical vision, humanity is the conqueror, colonizing Mars to escape an Earth devastated by atomic war and environmental catastrophe.

Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves. Each wave different, and each wave stronger.

Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America’s most beloved authors. 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. 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 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.

“A prescient, lyrical writer with an abiding hatred for intolerance, Bradbury influenced generations of readers and many of our most famous dreamers, from Stephen King to Steven Spielberg.”  - Junot Diaz

“How I passed so much of my life without devouring everything Ray Bradbury has ever read is beyond me...on the bright side, how fortunate I am to experience all this for the first time! My God.”  - R. F. Kuang

“What has this man from Illinois done that episodes from the conquest of another planet leave me in terror and loneliness, I question, as I close the pages of his book. . . .In this book of phantasmagoric experiences, Bradbury has put his empty Sundays, his American boredom, his loneliness, just like Sinclair Lewis did in Main Street.” - Jorge Luis Borges

“The Martian Chronicles was the first science fiction book to make me feel a character's righteous rage... and the first science fiction book to make me feel loss and loneliness in my gut, doing it without featuring a single human, save as a shadow on a wall... The Martian Chronicles, in short showed me what words can truly do. It showed me magic.”  - John Scalzi

“Mars in his hands...is not a place described with scientific accuracy or even much consistency, but a state of mind…. Space ships are not miracles of technology, but psychic conveyances, serving the same purpose as Dorothy's whirlwind-borne house in The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, or the trance of the traditional shaman: they get you to the Otherworld.”  - Margaret Atwood