The Martian Chronicles - by Ray Bradbury (Paperback)

Book Synopsis

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 Man, 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.

Review Quotes

"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

"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