Book Review: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

The Martian Chronicles may not be one of Bradbury’s most famous works, but it feels so genuine and clean that I could easily be persuaded that he wrote it at the peak of his career. While most science fiction books are situated in some further future, The Martian Chronicles is actually set in the “present past”. We have months and years that humanity has passed not too long ago, and that we can all remember. And yet, the book feels so real that if I didn’t know for a fact that the majority of people didn’t move to live on Mars in 2005 and a an atom bomb didn’t explode then, I would have believed every single word of it. Check that, even though I know the story in the book never occurred, I actually did believe, while reading, that it was one hundred percent true.

Moreover, each of the little stories perplexed in the big picture was so thorough and complete that I never forgot the names of the characters or got them wrong. Every character was unique as an individual, and even though I disagree with the life philosophy of the one or the other I came to understand why they did what they did or why they believed what they believed. I could not judge them because in their own eyes they were right and I was given the opportunity to observe reality from their perspective.

I also muse at the difference between the cultures of humans and Martians and how they crash together (with no apparent crash) when they come into contact. At first while reading I was convinced that, after all, we, the Earth people, were the bad guys in the story. We don’t have the knowledge, the age, the technology to go against these superb creatures from Mars, and suddenly because of a disease we carry we destroy an entire world and obtain the right to subvert it? That can’t be right! It’s not a story about the rise and fall of a great empire, after all – it’s the story of the rise and destruction of a world of wisdom and virtue. But these were my thought only in the beginning. Then I noticed the actual people on Mars. And that not all of them destroyed, and not all of them broke, and some of them understood and learned. And that was the beauty of the book really – Martians didn’t disappear entirely (in one of the chapters we see that they exist happily but in another spectrum of time), but they have taught us about their way of life, and they have enriched ours. They gave Earth men an alternative to start over and helped them by showing them how. They have showed that to the reader as well, and we all need to start over every once in a while.