The Martian Chronicles From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction novel by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by fleeing humans from a troubled Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel, containing Bradbury stories originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. For publication, the stories were loosely woven together with a series of short, interstitial vignettes. Bradbury has credited Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio[1] and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as influences on the structure of the book. He has called it a "half-cousin to a novel" and "a book of stories pretending to be a novel". As such, it is similar in structure to Bradbury's short story collection, The Illustrated Man, which also uses a thin frame story to link various unrelated short stories. Like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, The Martian Chronicles follows a "future history" structure. The stories, complete in themselves, come together as episodes in a larger sequential narrative framework. The book was published in the United Kingdom in 1951 under the title The Silver Locusts, with slightly different contents: the story "The Fire Balloons" was added, and the story "Usher II" was removed to make room for it. In the Spanish language version, the stories were preceded by a prologue by argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. |
