The Martian Chronicles

A book made from stories

Ray Bradbury wrote most of the Mars stories for magazines in the late 1940s. "The Million Year Picnic" appeared in Planet Stories in the summer of 1946, and "The Third Expedition" ran in the same magazine in the fall of 1948, under the title "Mars is Heaven!".

Publishers wanted a Mars novel, not a collection of Mars stories. Ray Bradbury answered by writing short connecting passages and fitting them between twenty-six of his stories. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction calls the result a collection of closely linked stories that could also be read as a novel in episodes.

Some of the bridging chapters are only a page long. "The Settlers", "The Locusts" and "Interim" simply report who is arriving and what they are building. They carry the reader forward in time between the longer stories.

Winesburg, Ohio, on Mars

Ray Bradbury named his model in the preface he wrote for the 1997 edition. The book was Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, a collection of linked stories about the people of one small town.

Sometime in my twenty-fourth year, I was stunned by its dozen characters living their lives on half-lit porches and in sunless attics of that always autumn town.

In the same preface he remembered his reaction. He had wished he could write a book half as fine as Winesburg, Ohio, but set on Mars. The Martian Chronicles borrows the shape: one place, many people, each with a story of their own.

"There Will Come Soft Rains": the house that kept running

The best-known chapter has no people in it. "There Will Come Soft Rains", dated August 2026 in the first edition, follows one automatic house in Allendale, California. The house is still standing after a nuclear blast has flattened the rest of the city.

The family who lived there are gone. All that is left of them is four silhouettes in the paint of the charred west wall. Inside, the house carries on as usual. A voice announces the date, the stove cooks breakfast, and small robot mice clean the floors. The family dog starves outside the kitchen door.

Late at night the house reads poetry to itself. In Ray Bradbury's own summary, the poem its machine repeats at the very end is Sara Teasdale's "There Will Come Soft Rains". Sara Teasdale wrote the poem in wartime and collected it in her 1920 book Flame and Shadow. The poem imagines birds and trees going on after people are gone, without noticing.

Asked in 1980 to pick the one story that best represented his work, Ray Bradbury chose this one. He called it a metaphor for how sad the world felt in 1950, only five years after the atom bomb was dropped.

"Usher II" and the book-burners

In "Usher II", dated April 2005 in the first edition, a government on Earth has burned all fantastic literature and art. A rich man named William Stendahl goes to Mars and builds an exact copy of the house in Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher".

Stendahl fills the house with robot copies of characters from the banned books. He invites the officials who ordered the burnings, kills them one by one, and then brings the house down, the way Poe's story ends. A year after the book came out, Galaxy printed "The Fireman", the story Ray Bradbury later expanded into Fahrenheit 451.

The dates, and the editions that changed them

The contents have changed more than once. The first British edition, called The Silver Locusts (1951), dropped "Usher II" and added "The Fire Balloons". A 1963 American paperback added "The Fire Balloons" and "The Wilderness".

The biggest change came in 1997. William Morrow and Avon issued a revised text in which all the stories were updated and "Way in the Middle of the Air" was left out. "Way in the Middle of the Air", dated June 2003 in the first edition, follows Black families leaving the American South for Mars while a white man, Samuel Teece, tries to stop them.

The chapter dates are the easiest way to tell the versions apart. The first edition runs from January 1999 to October 2026. The 1997 text moves every date thirty-one years later, so it runs from January 2030 to October 2057. In 2010 Subterranean Press published a Complete Edition with twenty-one more stories and other material.

The Martian Chronicles on Mars

Planetary scientists read the book too. According to the official Ray Bradbury website, NASA's Phoenix lander carried a digital copy of The Martian Chronicles to the far north of Mars.

On 22 August 2012, which would have been Ray Bradbury's ninety-second birthday, NASA named the spot where the Curiosity rover had touched down Bradbury Landing. Michael Meyer, NASA's program scientist for Curiosity, said many on the team had been inspired by Bradbury to dream of life on Mars.

The Martian Chronicles in Paris

French readers met Ray Bradbury through this book. In 1954 the Paris publisher Denoël issued Chroniques martiennes, translated by Henri Robillot, as number 1 of a new science-fiction series called Présence du futur. The Illustrated Man followed as number 3 the same year.

In 1964 the Club des amis du livre in Paris reissued the translation with a preface by the writer Aimé Michel, titled "Un Marco Polo du futur" (A Marco Polo of the future).

The book also reached the Paris stage. The writer Louis Pauwels turned it into a play in two parts for the Théâtre poétique national, directed by Jean-Claude Amyl. The national library records a performance at the Théâtre Saint-Roch on 14 February 1974.

When the English text was revised in 1997, Denoël followed with a new enlarged edition. Jacques Chambon joined Henri Robillot as translator, and the book kept its place as number 1 in Présence du futur.