Book 89: The Martian Chronicles

Written by Ray Bradbury

I read Fahrenheit 451 years ago (and plan to re-read soon) but haven’t read anything else from Bradbury. This week Library of America shipped me a volume of his “Novels & Story Cycles” (every month they send a different book from their collection), and I gave The Martian Chronicles a shot. I found parts of the book incredibly compelling (vivid, ingenious, and prognostic) and other parts forgettable. It turns out that the book is a fix-up novel - composed of previously uncorrelated stories that were subsequently pieced together and edited for continuity. Despite the inconsistency of this work, though, I can’t wait to read more from the author and finish the volume.

Favorite Passages:

The ship came down from space. It came from the stars, and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space. It was a new ship; it had fire in its body and men in its metal cells, and it moved with a clean silence, fiery and warm. In it were seventeen men, including a captain. The crowd at the Ohio field had shouted and waved their hands up into the sunlight, and the rocket had bloomed out great flowers of heat and colour and run away into space on the third voyage to Mars?

We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose. And Egypt is a small part of Earth. But here, this whole thing is ancient and different, and we have to set down somewhere and start fouling it up. We’ll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and the mountain King George Mountain and the sea the Dupont Sea, and there’ll be Roosevelt and Lincoln and Coolidge cities, and it won’t ever be right, when there are the proper names for these places.

They brought in fifteen thousand lumber feet of Oregon pine to build Tenth City, and seventy-nine thousand feet of California redwood, and they hammered together a clean, neat little town by the edge of the stone canals. On Sunday nights you could see red, blue, and green stained-glass light in the churches and hear the voices singing the numbered hymns. ‘We will now sing 79. We will now sing 94.’ And in certain houses you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist at work; or the scratch of a pen, the poet at work; or no sound at all, the former beachcomber at work. It was as if, in many ways, a great earthquake had shaken loose the roots and cellars of an Iowa town, and then, in an instant, a whirlwind twister of Oz-like proportions had carried the entire town off to Mars to set it down without a bump.