Title: The Martian Chronicles

Author: Ray Bradbury

Publisher: William Morrow 1950

Genre: Science Fiction

Pages: 288

Rating:  4 / 5 stars

Reading Challenges: Science Fiction; Mount TBR; Fall Into Reading

How I Got It: J owns it

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. Inconnected, 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.

For the first 20 pages, I was thoroughly confused. I didn't realize that this was a collection of related short stories.  Once I readjusted my perspective, I found that I really enjoyed these stories.  The reader has to look at Earth and Mars through an alien viewpoint.  We see Mars and its inhabitants as they are.  And then we see how the humans from Earth see Mars.  Such strange little stories.  But if put into a 1950s era mindset, they completely make sense.  Not my favorite science fiction, but a good collection.