The Martian Chronicles (1950) By Ray Bradbury

It’s not like I missed the cultural influence of Ray Bradbury, I was, after all, raised on Flash Gordon and The Day the Earth Stood Still, eventually graduating to Star Trek and, dare I admit, all theories pertaining to a certain event that may or may not have occurred in Roswell, New Mexico -- in your deepest soul, you know it did.  Yet, it was only a few weeks ago that I first read Bradbury’s classic The Martian Chronicles.

The Chronicles is a collection of short stories describing the colonization of the Planet Mars by Earthlings.  The stories first appeared in print individually during the heyday of magazine publishing in the 1940s.  They were compiled into book form in 1950.

Think about that date for a moment.  Here is an author who was writing about not just space exploration, but interplanetary travel and settlement -- years before Sputnik, years before communications satellites, a quarter century before Neil Armstrong set foot on the relatively nearby lunar surface, and a half century before NASA’s “Curiosity” began roving around the red planet.  Bradbury was colonizing Mars and running tourist junkets between it at Earth!

The book is immensely thought-provoking, providing some early discussion on the arrogance of interacting with beings from another world from an assumed position of superiority. It preceded by years the publication of Rachel Carson’s environmental epic Silent Spring, not to mention the public debate about global warming, and offered commentary on how we were/are destroying Planet Earth.  Its anti-war commentary remains frighteningly on target.

But the book is also fun, nowhere more so than in the tale of the first successful landing on Mars, as foreseen in a Martian woman’s dream.  She tells her husband that in her dream a man from another world -- who she is clearly enthralled by -- will arrive via rocket ship the next night in a nearby meadow.  As the next night falls and the first Earthling lands his rocket ship on Mars and disembarks, he is immediately shot dead by the jealous husband.

It takes several attempts before Earthlings are finally able to successful establish an outpost on Mars, beginning the colonization process whereby they work to remake the planet in Earth’s image.

To my surprise, Bradbury also incorporates some rather biting social commentary into his book by capitalizing on the time period it was written in, the years immediately after World War II when the American military was still officially segregated, and the Jim Crow-era was still uncontested in the South.  I don’t know if my favorite author, James Baldwin, was a Bradbury fan, but I believe I can safely surmise he would have applauded the chapter titled June 2003, Way In the Middle of the Air.  It tells the story of how overnight the entire African American population of a small Southern town packed up without notice to begin their interplanetary Great Migration to Mars.

At only 182 pages, this book is a fast read.  My advice though is to savor it, reading no more than a couple of chapters a night, and then read it again.  I already have.