★★ (of 5)

• Full Title: The Martian Chronicles
• Author: Ray Bradbury
• Year: 1950 (mine was 2012 paperback)
• Pages: 241
• Genre: Fantasy
• Publisher: Simon & Schuster
• ISBN 978-1-4516-7819-2 (paperback)
• Wikipedia page
• Author’s Wikipedia page

 

Summary

First published in 1950, The Martian Chronicles is a collection of short stories and vignettes, mostly previously published in science fiction magazines like Planet Stories, Thrilling Wonder Stories, and Weird Tales, though some were written specifically for this book. I learned while writing this review that such a construction is called a fixup. All the stories relate to humankind’s plans for, and actions on, Mars. Some include interactions with the original Martians.

 

My Impression

When I began reading, my first impression was: “This is considered a sci-fi classic?” It didn’t hit any of the marks I expected from science fiction, even the older works with which I’m familiar. There were odd twists of grammar and language that I couldn’t explain. Characters were simplistic, irritating, caricatured.

As I kept on, mostly through curiosity, it continued to not get much better. Few, if any of the characters had depth. Their motivations seemed overly childlike. Dialog between adults sounded like it was written by a child, based on other children talking.

In the story called Way In The Middle Of The Air (which is about a bunch of black people abandoning their jobs and homes in order to move to Mars, and which has been removed from some modern editions), I though at first Bradbury was trying to make a statement about racism, which would have been quite a leap for a white sci-fi writer in the 1940s. But instead it seemed like he just indulged in it, giving himself a chance to use the N-word repeatedly and to portray black people as simpletons.

It was weird that all the towns and people and technology seemed like they were from the 1940s, rather than from a future being imagined in the 1940s — the book is supposed to take place from 1999 through 2026. Again using Way In The Middle Of The Air as an example, both the black and white people in the story seem exactly like I would expect them to be in a southern town in the 1940s or ‘50s U.S.

There were some poignant moments, or at least parts that could have been but nothing about this book was outstanding to me, and very little of it was enjoyable except that it was very, very short (relative to the thousand-page biography I recently finished). At times, it seemed as if Bradbury were about to make commentary on how humans could be expected to pollute Mars (and by extension other planets someday) just as we have polluted Earth, but then he veered from that. There were times it seemed he was about to point out the absurdity of some human instinct or practice, , but then he moved on from that too.

In the end, there’s just a short speech by a father — apparently the final father of the final family in humanity, griping that humans made too many machines and forgot what was important (though he never says what the important part was) and so basically we all deserved to die in atomic wars. And in the story, everyone does — except this final family.

 

Conclusion

Perhaps too much time has passed since these stories were first penned, or maybe I wasn’t in the right frame of mind for it. But I couldn’t help but be disappointed and now I feel more out-of-joint than ever from all the people who consistently rank this as an all-time classic. My second star was charity.

 

Addendum

I slept on it, wondering if I was too harsh here, but when I woke up, I was of the opinion that I wasn’t harsh enough. I forgot to mention the incredibly bad portrayals of women, even worse than one would expect from the time period. Women are repeatedly referred to as confined to the roles of wives and girlfriends, only existing to cook and clean (and of course bear children). At the end, with a single human family known to have survived, the parents hope to spot another family they’d thought was coming because the other family had three little daughters “future wives”. One woman is deemed worthless because she’s overweight and unattractive. Again, I thought for a second that maybe Bradbury was setting up these stereotypes in order to knock them down, but then he just left them there as if accepting them.

The science was horribly, astoundingly wrong — again, even for the 1940s. For example, the “canals” were a mistranslation of canali (Italian for grooves) in the 1800s — and by the 1910s scientists had shown that there weren’t even grooves, much less water-filled canals. As early as the 1890s, astronomers were beginning to doubt the existence of an Earth-like atmosphere on Mars, noting its spectrum was more like that of the Moon than like Earth. Bradbury has his humans breathing “thin” air on Mars, as if they’d simply climbed a high hill. The orbits of Mars’ two moons had been mapped by then (one orbiting in less than eight hours and the other requiring more than 30 hours), but Bradbury has them racing through the sky together. Bradbury has men on Mars viewing — with the naked eye — the continents of Earth — the closest Earth ever gets to Mars is about 34 million miles (at which distance Earth would appear no larger than the smallest pixel), and it’s almost never that close. Telepathy, shapeshifting, timeslips, dream prophecy, and other magical/fantasy elements make regular appearances, which induced me to change the genre above from science fiction to fantasy.

 

 

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