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Forget the sci-fi label. This is magnificent, seductive storytelling that just happens to be set mostly on Mars. It’s beautiful, brilliant, startling. It drips with deliciously poetic imagery (and references great poets/poems). It raises profound questions, uses odd analogies, and features dark tragedy, comedy, big ideas, and interesting plots.

At times, the weird unreality reminded me of : I understood, even when it shouldn’t quite make sense.

It comprises more than a dozen, almost self-contained, short stories that tell a broader, chronological story of human colonisation of Mars, and the consequences for individuals and societies of both species on both planets. (The practicalities of how humans settle so thoroughly on Mars, in huge numbers, in a short timeframe, are ludicrous, but irrelevant.) The broad warnings about the worst instincts of our race are still true and relevant. In addition, there is one, or sometimes two, short vignettes before each main chronicle.


Image: Panoramic version of cover art (.)

Ponder

Reality: How can you distinguish the extraordinary from the impossible; reality from hallucination, madness, or wishful thinking from the truth? How do you prove your sanity, your story, your existence? (Topical in a time of conspiracy theories.) If I met an alien, would I believe them or question myself?

Science and religion: What happens when science makes religion redundant?
�If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life?�
The moral is that:
�Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly.�

Telepathy: Creative ways to use it to project alternative realities.

Colonialism: Bradbury balances the excitement of exploration and fresh starts against the dangers of colonisation: infectious disease, deadly misunderstandings, and cultural imperialism/destruction. Renaming places after the invaders� heroes is �A kind of imported blasphemy�, where you �bludgeon away all the strangeness�. The characters of colour are most sympathetic to their potential impact on Mars and Martians.
The possibility of return has practical and psychological consequences for individuals and the extent to which they "settle". What happens if the choice is suddenly about to disappear?

Missionaries: Religion and colonialism collide in missionary work.
�Shouldn’t we solve our own sins on Earth?�
Man always makes God in his own image, or rather, the image of those to be converted, so it needs to be tweaked on a new world. That offers the exciting prospect of discovering new sins on a new planet, but is the one Truth thereby diluted and invalidated? (See also my review of Michel Faber’s The Book of Strange New Things, HERE.)

The main chronicles

I’ve omitted the short scene-setting pieces between the main ones, though they are exquisite in their own way.
The years are those in my copy (which omits Usher II), but in some editions, 31 years was added to each of them.

Ylla (February 1999)
A Martian couple live in a beautiful home, but are enduring a declining marriage on a declining planet. Her premonition of what’s to come alarms her husband.

The Earth Men (August 1999)
Humans arrive, expecting a triumphant welcome, but they’re passed from one uninterested person to another: �Maybe we could go out and come in again�. It felt like a Monty Python sketch, until the dark twist.

The Third Expedition (April 2000)
Mind games have dramatic consequences.

And the Moon Be Still as Bright (June 2001)
Tension arises when some of the fourth expedition trash cultural artefacts. Others are respectful of this new world and want to preserve it, and even go native - but at what cost?
"We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things."

The Green Morning (December 2001)
The power of one person to make a difference. (See .)

Night Meeting (August 2002)
A construction worker encounters a retired man who loves what’s different about Mars.
�If you can’t take Mars for what she is, you might as well go back to Earth.�
The man also says �even time is crazy up here�, foreshadowing the worker’s next encounter, where the boundaries of before and after, alive and dead, are unclear.

The Fire Balloons (November 2002)
The dilemmas of being a missionary on an alien world, and whether you can be alive, let alone have a soul, without a corporeal body.

Way in the Middle of the Air (June 2003)
Black Lives Matter! To escape racism and bonded labour, many of the African-Americans of a southern town depart for Mars:
�Between the blazing white banks for the town stores, among the tree silences, a black tide flowed.�
Their white masters are enraged, casually express racist ideas in racist terms, and try to force them to stay.
"Every day they got more rights... anti-lynchin' bills, and all kinds of rights. What more do they want? They make almost as good money as a white man."
The black people leave their few and meagre possessions behind, "placed like little abandoned shrines", as if they had suddenly taken up in the Rapture.
Bradbury's good intent is clear, but some of his descriptions rely on stereotypes that sound offkey today ("a round water-melon head").

Usher II (April 2005)
Subversive dystopian comedy that's also a tribute to Poe's Fall of the House of Usher. I reviewed it HERE.

The Martian (September 2005)
A middle-aged couple regret that they left the body of their dead son on Earth. It's a heartbreaking story of parental grief and the power of believing what one wants to believe.
�If you can’t have the reality a dream is just as good�. But is it?

The Off Season (November 2005)
Staking everything on the imminent influx of thousands of new settlers and jumping to conclusions about a Martian’s intent. Then they see a terrible sight in the sky that will change everything.


Image: Sam's Hot Dogs by Les Edwards ()

The Watchers (November 2005)
Bizarre. (view spoiler)[There’s nuclear war on Earth, the settlers get a message to “come home� - and they almost all do. (hide spoiler)]. I wouldn’t!

The Silent Towns (December 2005)
Comedy (but based on unflattering gender stereotypes). If you were the only man in the world and I were the only girl� I might still prefer to be single.

The Long Years (April 2026)
The lengths people go to when surviving for years, cut off from others. Is Hathaway’s solution a sign of madness or a way of preserving a degree of sanity?

There Will Come Soft Rains (August 2026)
The title is from an anti-war poem by Sara Teasdale, , written during WW1.
Bradbury writes an initially comic (computerised ) and very cinematographic scene that felt disorientingly different from the previous chronicles. But it arises from the horrific cinders of a nuclear explosion. An automated house continues its programmed routines of preparing meals, cleaning, watering the lawn, playing films, running baths, reading favourite poems - all for people who aren’t there. People whose shadows were captured on a wall, in a moment: mowing the lawn, picking flowers, tossing a ball.


Image: Shadows on the wall ()

It's worth browsing YouTube for the many short amateur animations this has inspired. Given that Bradbury wrote the story, afraid of nuclear war with the USSR, a was notable, and also for its imagery that might shock some Christians. Many of the others were too cutesy, and without enough humour or horror, imo. Oddly, only one of the half-dozen I watched included the most memorable image of all, but I didn't like its hybrid visuals: photos with cartoonish animation superimposed, intercut with real world video. That one is .

The Million-Year Picnic (October 2026)
Hope for new Martians, a new Adam and Eve.


Quotes

Like Fahrenheit 451 (see my review ), rain, and fire recur in exquisite descriptions; wine is added to the mix here.

Beauty
� “They had a house of crystal pillars� by the edge of an empty sea.�

� “The old canals filled with emptiness and dreams.�

� "The ship... came from the stars, and the black velocities, and the shining movements, and the silent gulfs of space� It had moved in the midnight waters of space like a pale sea leviathan."

� Wouldn't you love to live in a "gentle house" or one with "whispering pillars of rain" that closes itself in “like a giant flower, with the passing of the light�?

� “The stars� were sewn into his flesh like scintillas swallowed into the thin, phosphorus membrane of a gelatinous sea-fish.�

� “The wind blew at her and, like an image on cold water, she rippled, silk standing out from her frail body in tatters of blue rain.�

� “The fire� fed upon Picassos and Matisses� like delicacies, baking off the oily flesh, tenderly crisping the canvases into black shavings.�

Analogies
� “The flame birds waited, like a bed of coals, glowing on the cool smooth sands.�

� “Up and down the green wine-canals, boats as delicate as bronze flowers drifted.�

� “Sky was hot and still as warm deep sea-water.�

� “A dead, dreaming world.�
“The dreaming dead city.�

� “Spender filled the streets with his eyes and his mind.�

� “He� listened to the peaceful wonder of the valley.�

Ideas
� “Your insanity is beautifully complete.�

� "There was a smell of Time... like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like, it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dripping down on hollow box-lids, and rain... Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room� Tonight you could almost touch time."

� “Who wants to see the Future?... A man can face the Past.�

Homage?

I was reminded of this book by Becky Chambers' To Be Taught, If Fortunate, which I reviewed HERE.