Ray Bradbury's _The Martian Chronicles_

I hadn't thought of the parallels to the European conquest of the New World before. It does seem like something Bradbury would have had in mind. Living in the American Southwest, with its many echoes of the Spanish colonial past, he would have been personally aware of being a newcomer in an ancient land. There is something of the Southwest in his visions of the Martian desert, the dusty dried-up canals and ruins. In this context, stories like "Night Meeting" (one of my favorites at the time) in which a settler from Earth has a mysterious night-time encounter with a Martian from the vanished past, take on new and poignant meaning. I never saw the mini-series though, and have never really wanted to, preferring to stick with the images produced by my own imagination.

"Dark they were, and golden eyed" (or something like that) is another of his Martian stories, I don't think it's in the Martian Chronicles even though it is thematically related (and consistent). I like that one too.

"The Silver Locusts" was a better title.

I read somewhere that Frank Darabont, I think, is developing it as a movie, with Bradbury himself scripting. This kinda worries me, as FD is such a goddamn sentimentalist & I have the feeling he'll really pile it on, which is not what the stories need. (I haven't seen the mini-series.)

---

Frank Darabont will be adapting The Martian Chronicles?

Bradbury: We're doing The Martian Chronicles over. It was done as a series 20 years ago by NBC. It wasn't bad. But it was boring. Really boring. And they had a lot of good people, but it was a disappointment. So now, Frank Darabont is going to write and direct a new version. And he's a very fine writer and director, [of] Shawshank Redemption and The Green Mile. And also, his second project is Fahrenheit 451, which he's taking over from Mel Gibson.

Mel Gibson was supposed to direct it five years ago, but he's let five years go by, and written 10 screenplays on Fahrenheit. Can you imagine that? If you know the novel, you need to have 10 screenplays? How about one? Why not shoot the novel? Twenty years ago, when Sam Peckinpah was a friend of mine, he planned to do a film. And I said, "Sam, how you going to do it?" And he said, "It's very simple. You tear the pages out of your novel and stuff them in the camera." And I said, "That's right." I'm a screenwriter.

"Fahrenheit 451," meanwhile, struck me as a brilliant film and the perfect realization of Bradbury's story (if I'm remembering correctly). Re-making this film is a utterly pointless as Burton's ham-fisted butchering of "Planet of the Apes."

It's something that struck me when rereading "And the Moon Be Still as Bright" when the revelation that chicken pox slew most of the Martians came up. I immediately thought of the devestation disease worked upon the Native American population -- after that the various parallels and commentaries throughout the book made perfect sense when seen through that lens. It's not a one to one comparison, but it still definitely holds. The brief story "The Musicians," about the children who literally play with the bones of the Martians in all ignorance, is perhaps the most unsettling in that regard (the more so because Bradbury tells the story through the childrens' eyes and lets you draw your own conclusions).

The record ended in a circular hissing.

Beautiful, my favorite short story collection. I originally found it in a thrift stop, the copy with really wonderful super-stylized Ian Miller illustrations. The cover:

http://tbn2.google.com/images?q=tbn:QT7ebJnoiuqNUM:http://g-ecx.images-amazon.com/images/G/01/ciu/86/64/937c828fd7a076a53c3b3110._AA240_.L.jpg

I need to go find it an scan those illustrations in. Really wild stuff....

the opening story with ylla crying, remembering a dream about captain nathaniel york, and her husband getting jealous (and pulling out a bee gun??)

the earth references feel so dated ("beatiful ohio," the atom bombs, the REALLY unfortunate story about jim crow era black southerners escaping to mars), but the colonization of mars feels timeless. earth people keep ruining everything, no matter how big and grand, as stated in the fourth expedition story...sadly, THAT theme feels timeless

my students are reading this and they're very polarized on it; half love it; half feel it is morbid and weird

your students otm

In the morning the brass band played a mournful dirge.
From every house in the street came little solemn processions
bearing long boxes, and along the sun-filled street, weeping,
came the grandmas and mothers and sisters and brothers and
uncles and fathers, walking to the churchyard, where there were
new holes freshly dug and new tombstones installed. Sixteen
holes in all, and sixteen tombstones.
The mayor made a little sad speech, his face sometimes
looking like the mayor, sometimes looking like something else.
Mother and Father Black were there, with Brother Edward,
and they cried, their faces melting now from a familiar face
into something else.
Grandpa and Grandma Lustig were there, weeping, their
faces shifting like wax, shimmering as all things shimmer on a
hot day.
The coffins were lowered. Someone murmured about "the
unexpected and sudden deaths of sixteen fine men during the
night--"
Earth pounded down on the coffin lids.
The brass band, playing "Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean,"
marched and slammed back into town, and everyone took the day
off.

I know I stan for this all the time on the sf rolling thread but you gotsta check on the Sladek Bradbury parody.

Check out

man i read this all of the way through for the first time ever and i kinda disliked a lot of it. i wish it had honed in on its one morbid weird thing it does well and not done a bunch of scattershot other stuff. i felt like the ending was a little unearned, i don't know why.

i fantasize about a john ford adaptation of this, in technicolor

http://img.photobucket.com/albums/v87/Inuxx/She%20Wore%20a%20Yellow%20Ribbon_zpszggwprtu.jpg

"i felt like the ending was a little unearned, i don't know why."

It's been probably 30 years since I read this, but it is a short story collection and not a novel; is it the sequencing of the stories that you object to?

I've been reading "The Illustrated Man" with one of my kids, and it really does ramble and repeat a lot. Atom bombs, drifting through space, morbid, etc., just like Martian Chronicles. But every so often it hits some nice profound sci-fi beats.

haha yeah one of my students was like 'will they EVER stop sending expeditions to Mars?' and I was like 'i feel u'
it's like that LOTR anecdote where someone says 'not another fucking forest' during a reading

'Not another fucking elf' actually :)

So do they roll the years in the dates forward every time there is a new edition?

what's the story where everyone has left the martian colony but it's still kinda there? that one really stuck in my head

xp i dunno... did they ever do this again?

Events in the book's original edition ranged from 1999 to 2026. As 1999 approached in real life, the dates were advanced by 31 years in the 1997 edition.

Maybe that was the only time. Jusr never noticed until just now when I compared a digital copy with a physical copy from the public library.

Library book has a 1977 copyright but then says "First Simon & Schuster paperback edition March 2012."

My paperback copy has the 1999-2026 dates. I guess 2030 is coming up pretty soon. Look like they'll have to push the dates again.

yeah, but Blade Runner is like 'in the year 2019'... it's speculative fiction, why bother updating

Reminds me of how Stephen King kept messing with the story dates for The Stand:

The novel was originally published in 1978 in hardcover, with a setting date of 1980, in abridged form. The first paperback release in 1980 changed the setting date to 1985.

In 1990, The Stand was reprinted as The Complete & Uncut Edition. King restored over 400 pages of text that had been removed from his original manuscript, revised the order of the chapters, shifted the novel's setting 10 years forward from 1980 to 1990, and accordingly corrected a number of cultural references.

I guess it's hard for an author to recognize that his own SF story has become a period piece.

^this

It’s not Ray’s fault it’s taking us so long to get our asses to Mars.

lol

did he live to see some of the rad footage from there (beyond the Viking photos)?

I didn’t know about The Stand’s updates the first time I read it, couldn’t figure out why it was set in the ‘90s but the characters were all straight out of the Nixon era.

"Night Meeting" is such a cool story, it feels like the eye of the duck of the collection - it might be the only story where something actually inexplicable happens, and it gives you this tiny glimpse of the Martian civilization and everything outside of the humans' knowledge. It has such a melancholy and sweet tone, and adds this little bit of uncertainty to the destructive march forward that the rest of the book portrays.

I can't remember if I've even read this, time to find out.

Updating years in SF stories is one of the reasons that a certain kind of nerd sucks very badly

Meanwhile I haven't read this book in 30+ years but have always felt very warm towards it and this revive makes me wanna reread

> I can't remember if I've even read this, time to find out.

it's short stories, i think some of which are in other collections. but they aren't all in the big 2 volume collection, some are missing.

ie The Fire Balloons was also in The Illustrated Man

I feel like originally it was one volume and stories specific to that collection? But it wouldn't surprise me if there was an expanded version now

I remember watching the TV show when it first broadcast in the UK, maybe only broadcast here once maybe. I picked up the book years after that and of course it was deeper and sadder

I still think about the missionary pondering whether alien physiology engenders the capacity for alien sins

I watched the tv series when broadcast in the UK -- I don't recall it ever being repeated. The martians *really* creeped me out.

https://i0.wp.com/musingsofamiddleagedgeek.blog/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/803full-the-martian-chronicles-28198029-screenshot.jpg

Yeah to be clear i think the tv series was really well done, it's a shame it's been ignored

From what I recall of the TV mini-series it was a strange mixture of very good (costume & set design) and very bad (Darren McGavin). I'm not really sure the story translates well to the visual medium, maybe Tarkovsky could have managed it? Rock Hudson probably wouldn't have played Colonel John Wilder then.

I think it's good that there was a moment in prestige mini-series culture where it was even an idea but yeah you're not wrong about the details

the tv series was easily available and cheap, at least a few years ago when i bought mine (£7.93, 2011, oh)

has been updated to BR, i notice. (and less cheap)

I've just read it, I hadn't read it before. It's curious that one of the most celebrated works of SF is hardly SF at all, more romantic fantasy. It could almost be called 'The Tamarian Chronicles' and set in a magical realm, reached through a mysterious portal. It's not about Mars at all, really, but 1940s America. Like an elegy for a lost time, written while the time was at its highest. Not that he doesn't see its flaws - racism, materialism, ignorance, brutality (though he seems completely blind to the misogyny, 'The Silent Towns' being the worst example). But that's why it's an elegy not a celebration. I can see some of its merits but I found it hard to like, maybe because I lack the nostalgia for that age that he clearly has, even while acknowledging its flaws.