Started: May 11, 2018
Finished: May 30, 2018
Why I Read This Book / My History with this Book
This book has been on my list of "books to read someday" for years.
I don't remember where I first heard about it. I must have stumbled across a review or read about it somehwhere on Wikipedia years ago. But I've been vaguely interested in it for years now.
More recently. earlier this year Extra Credits did a 3 part series on this book, which re-kindled my interest.
See first part below:
This pushed The Martian Chronicles back to the front of my brain, and made me remember it when we had our next book club meeting.
We had all been exhausted by Don Quixote. (A book none of us finished--Whisky was right!) And we wanted to do something lighter and easier. So I proposed The Martian Chronicles.
The rule of our bookclub is that we have to stick to the classics. But... "classic" is an elastic term, and there are lots of modern 20th century classics. And this is arguably one of them.
Ray Bradbury is, after all, one of the most famous authors of the 20th Century.
I'm ashamed to admit I've never read his most famous book--Fahrenheit 451--which probably should have been the first Ray Bradbury book I tackled. (I actually proposed Fahrenheit 451 to our bookclub, but some of the other members had already read it.)
Anyway, we all agreed to do The Martian Chronicles next, so here I am with my review.
The Review--Some Spoilers
This book originated as a series of short stories about Mars that Ray Bradbury had written and published individually between 1946 and 1950. The short stories were later published as a book in 1950, with some attempts to weave them together. And although there is a general chronology to these stories, for the most part they still read like unconnected individual short stories. (A few of the stories do reference characters and events from previous stories, but these are the exception. Most of them are self-contained).
In other words, this book reads more like a short story anthology than it does a novel. And it presents much the same reading experience as a short story anthology. At the beginning of every story, there are new characters and new situations. The first couple pages I always read skeptically, wondering why I should care about these new characters, and wondering if this story will be worth investing in. Then, once I get a couple pages in, I'm usually hooked on the story. And I feel like I can't put the book down until I find out what happens. And several pages later, I get to the end of the story, and have to begin a new story all over again. And once again I'm skeptical about the new characters and new situations.
I think most of us are like that. We prefer to read one long story than a series of short stories. It does feel slightly exhausting to have to go through the work of getting yourself acquainted with new characters and new situations every few pages. (There's a reason why novels have always sold better than short story collections.)
But, the good news here is that once I actually got past the first couple pages, I almost always got hooked on the story, and felt like I couldn't put the book down until I had read it to the end. (Because this book was so enjoyable to read, I actually finished it a couple weeks before our book club meeting--a rarity for me. And it turned out that most of the people in our book club finished it ahead of schedule.)
Because Ray Bradbury had published a lot of short stories about Mars, there are various versions of this book floating around. Some later editions are more complete, and include more stories. Other modern editions have removed certain stories for reasons of political correctness.
For our bookclub, we tracked down an online version, which I believe contains the same stories as the original 1950 publication. (I've double-checked this on Wikipedia). One member of the bookclub did this book as an audiobook, and when we met up, we discovered that some of the stories we read were different. (Actually, since finishing this book on May 30th, I actually re-read it as an audio book while I was writing this review--available on Youtube HERE--and it was interesting to hear a few different stories.)
In general terms, this book tells the story of the fall of Martian Civilization, and then the rise and fall of human civilization on Mars.
That general outline was all I really knew about the book going in, and I was expecting something like Isaac Asimov's Foundation--an epic novel about the rise and fall of a civilization.
But once you get into the book, the tone is a lot different. It's true that the over-arching narrative is about the rise and fall of civilizations, but the individual stories themselves are much more fantastical and satirical in tone. There's a lot of dark humor in this book. (Many of the characters meet a gruesome end, but it's usually in a way that's ironic more than it is horrific).
Additionally, there's a strong element of sentimentality running through this book, as many of the stories deal with past memories and losses, and also feelings of longing.
Showing one example may be a good way to give an idea of the tone. So I'm going to spoil one of the stories.
The story "The Earth Men", tells of some of the first astronauts to land on Mars. They are expecting a big reception from the Martians befitting of the momentousness of the occasion, but instead are surprised and annoyed to find that nobody cares that they are from Earth. They walk up to the first Martian house they see, and tell the Martian housewife that they are from Earth. She doesn't care and wonders why they are bothering her. They try to explain that they are from Earth, and that this is the first time Earthmen have ever travelled to Mars. She gets upset that they are wasting her time. They continue to several different houses, where the same thing happens.
Eventually, they are put in an insane asylum, where they eventually discover that claiming to be from other planets is a common mental disease on Mars. And, because Martians can telepathically alter their appearance, nobody on Mars was surprised to see what appeared to be real Earthmen.
The earth astronauts try and try to convince the Martian doctors that they are not insane, and that they really are from earth. All in vain, and they are eventually deemed to be beyond help by the Martian doctors, and euthanized as a mercy killing.
This is the tone for most of the stories--weird, fantastical, bizarre, darkly humorous, and often with a macabre ending.
That being said, it's hard to generalize too much, because each story is its own separate thing. Many of the stories are similar in tone to what I described above, but some are not.
The other theme that runs through many (but not all) of the stories is sentimentality. Characters in these short stories spend a lot of time longing for the past, and also dealing with the emotions left over from losing loved ones in the past.
...it can be somewhat depressing at times. If you're looking for light escapist entertainment, this isn't always it. But it is well written, and the stories are suspenseful and interesting.
Also, you wouldn't have expected it in a book called "The Martian Chronicles" but surprisingly enough a lot of the stories deal with a nostalgia for small town American life. It's a theme through several stories, but comes up most prominently in "The Third Expedition". To quote from part of it:
Their boots were deadened of all sound in the thick green grass. It smelled from a fresh mowing. In spite of himself, Captain John Black felt a great peace come over him. It had been thirty years since he had been in a small town, and the buzzing of spring bees on the air lulled and quieted him, and the fresh look of things was a balm to his soul.Of course, back in the 1940s there was still a small town America to feel nostalgic for. Nowadays, the mass industrialization of agriculture and the subsequent migration to cities has pretty much killed small towns.
So, ironically, a book about futuristic space travel now reads as something more old-timey and less futuristic. (Actually, I shouldn't make that sound like it was an unintended irony. I think that was Ray Bradbury's intention all along).
That's all I have to say about this book in general. I do have a few comments on individual stories.
My Own Nostalgia
This is probably of interest to nobody else but me, but since this is my blog, I'm going to indulge myself.
I was reading through one of the stories about robots who mimicked human emotion. And the tone of the story reminded me of a similar story I had read in a science fiction anthology in my childhood. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of it, but the tone of the stories was so similar, I began to suspect that maybe this book wasn't my first exposure to Ray Bradbury after all. Maybe I had read some of his short stories in my youth.
...and then I got to "There Will Come Soft Rains". And I realized I had read this story once before, almost 30 years ago, when I was about 12.
It had been included in a science fiction anthology I had gotten from the library. (Like most of the stories in The Martian Chronicles, the story fits into the broader chronology, but can also easily stand independently as its own thing.)
Memory is a funny thing. I couldn't have actually recalled any of "There Will Come Soft Rain". But I could recognize it. As I started reading it, I started remembering where I was and how I was feeling when I first read it. I remember reading it on a hot summer afternoon while I was sunbathing outside in the backyard next to the pool. I remember feeling right on the boarder between comfortably hot and uncomfortably hot--slightly annoyed by the heat, but at the same time too lazy to move inside.
(I've blogged about this before, but every now and again we have one of these experiences which jars a memory that we had previously thought forgotten. And it makes you wonder what else is hidden away in your memory banks, just waiting for the right trigger to release it again.)
It also made me feel very nostalgic for my childhood 30 years ago. But then, I'm easily sentimental.
Sidenote: "There Will Come Soft Rains" is about a futuristic automated house left empty after a nuclear war.
It's no surprise, then, that it was originally published in 1950, when nuclear bombs were something new, and fears about nuclear war were on everyone's mind.
In a sane world, we wouldn't have stopped worrying about nuclear bombs until we got rid of the problem. But what happened instead is that we just got tired of worrying about it, and after 70 years these stories are no longer topical. Even even though the threat of nuclear warfare has never gone away.
Way in the Middle of the Air
I've never actually read the 1965 play The Day of Absence by Douglas Turner Ward, but I'm familiar with it by reputation. (You'll remember it was the inspiration for the protests which caused all the trouble at Evergreen College last year (W)).
There's a story in The Martian Chronicles with a similar premise, Way in the Middle of the Air, which was originally published in 1950. (So it actually predates The Day of Absence by 15 years.)
In the story, all the black people leave a Southern town to go to Mars.
The white racists in the town, who had spent their whole lives hating and harassing the black people, suddenly realize too late how dependent they actually are on the black people. Without black people performing all the necessary labor, the town can't actually function.
It struck me as a very clever story, and an anti-racist one.
Unfortunately, though, it's been omitted from a lot of recent editions of this book.
This turned out to be an issue at our bookclub meeting, because someone who had done this book by audio book had actually missed out on this story.
Apparently one reason the story is often omitted from later editions is because of political correctness. In the story, the white racists make repeated use of the word "nigger".
Personally I think this is unfortunate. (I don't approve of using the n-word myself, but in the context of the story it makes sense. This is the word that white racist people would have used in the 1940s.)
However, I did a Google search on this story, and found out from this blogpost HERE that another reason it was omitted was because of continuity. Ray Bradbury wrote these stories out of order, so this story was one of the last stories he wrote, even though it falls earlier in the continuity. But it then created continuity problems, because there were no other references to black colonialists on Mars. So apparently it was omitted from some of the later re-printings at the request of Bradbury himself.
Usher II
As I mentioned above, I've never read Fahrenheit 451 (ashamed to say). But I know the general premise of it by reputation.
The short story Usher II --one of the stories in The Martian Chronicles--contains many of the same elements as Fahrenheit 451. Both take place in a futuristic world where books are banned.
I wondered if perhaps The Martian Chronicles took place in the same universe as Fahrenheit 451. So I googled it.
It turns out that Fahrenheit 451 was written many years later, So it isn't connected to The Martian Chronicles. But Usher II was one of Ray Bradbury's first experiments with the idea. So Usher II is one of the precursors to what would later become Fahrenheit 451.
Connections to Other Books I've Read
In The Martian Chronicles , the Martian race is wiped out by the chicken pox. I'm fairly sure this is meant to be an overt nod to War of the Worlds by H.G. Wells.
Mentioned briefly in Usher II are Alice in Wonderland and For Whom the Bell Tolls.
Video Review
Video Review HERE and embedded below:
Link of the Day
"Chomsky on Chomsky", Stony Brook Interview #1 by Bill Zimmerman
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