Book Review: The Martian Chronicles

Title: The Martian Chronicles

Author: Ray Bradbury

Rating: 3.5 of 5 STARS

Finished Reading: February 2

Own: Yes!

Why Chosen: Read Zen in the Art of Writing and wanted to read more of what he had written besides Fahrenheit 451.

In Zen in the Art of Writing, Bradbury writes about how The Martian Chronicles morphed from unrelated short stories into a book after his editor read them and suggested with a few additions he could build the stories into a book. This is obvious while reading the book. It sometimes seemed jumbled and jerky moving from one story to the next. I could identify the short bridges that Bradbury added to try to make all the pieces into a whole.

The stories were written in the 1940s and there is definitely a "retro" flavor to them. My favorite was the last: The Million Year Picnic that tells of two families fleeing to the now deserted Mars in order to escape an atomic war on Earth and begin a new civilization. Bradbury's future looks a whole lot like the past and his stories remind us that no matter where we humans travel we will bring our sin nature with us.

Check out this article from CNN on our romance and imaginations through literature and film with Mars.

Favorite Excerpts:

Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young. (from a Martian wife!)

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"They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn't try too hard to be all men and no animal. That's the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn't mix. Or at least we didn't think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn't move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down our religion.

We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outfliging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people."

"And these Martians are a found people?" inquired the captian.

"Yes. They knew how to combine science and religion so the two worked side by side, neither denying the other, each enriching the other."

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...the thing that he wanted was Mars grown green and tall with trees and foliage, producing air, more air, growing larger with each season; trees to cool the towns in the boiling summer, trees to hold back the winter winds. There were so many t hings a tree could do: add color, provide shade, drop fruit, or become a children's playground, a whole sky universe to climb and hang from; an architecture of food and pleasure, that was a tree. But most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs, and a gentle rustling for the ear when you lay nights in your snowy bed and were gentled to sleep by the sound.

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You could see her thoughts swimming arouund in her eyes, like fish - some bright, some dark, some fast, quick, some slow and easy, and sometimes, like when she looked up where Earth was, being nothing but color and nothing else.