The family settles around a campfire and William explains how he purchased the rocket when the Great War started and hid it in case he needed to escape Earth, as Edwards did too. The father burns in a campfire a variety of documents, including government bonds, he brought to Mars to burn “a way of life”.
While he burns his papers, he tells his sons that Earth has been destroyed, that interplanetary travel has ended, that people grew too dependent on technology and couldn’t manage its war time use, and that the way of life on Earth “proved itself wrong” through its own self-destruction.
He warns his sons that he will tell them the last point everyday until they really understand it. William finishes burning his papers, saving a map of Earth for last. William takes the family to the canal and tells the children that they will be taught what they need to learn and that they are going to see Martians. William stops at the canal and points to the family’s reflection in the water.
Influences
Fascination with Mars, the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and comics
Bradbury’s fascination with Mars started when he was a child, including depictions of Mars in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ The Gods of Mars and John Carter, Warrior of Mars. Burroughs’ influence on the author was immense, as Bradbury believed “Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world.” Bradbury said that as a child, he memorized all of John Carter and Tarzan and repeated the stories to anyone who would listen. Harold Foster’s 1931 series of Tarzan Sunday comics had such an impact on his life that “The Martian Chronicles would never have happened” otherwise.
Literary influences
Ray Bradbury referred to The Martian Chronicles as “a book of stories pretending to be a novel”. He credited a diverse set of literary influences that had an effect on the structure and literary style of The Martian Chronicles, among them Sherwood Anderson, William Shakespeare, Saint-John Perse, and John Steinbeck, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs, particularly the Barsoom stories and John Carter of Mars books.
Bradbury was particularly inspired by plot and character development in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio that helped him write “vivid and real” stories that improved his earlier writings that were “lifeless robots, mechanical and motionless”.
The author said the stories took their form as combinations of component “Martian pensées” which were “Shakespearian ‘asides,’ wandering thoughts, long night visions, predawn half-dreams” honed in a manner inspired by the perfection of Saint-John Perse.
The combination of separate stories to create The Martian Chronicles as “a half-cousin to a novel” was a suggestion of Doubleday editor Walter Bradbury (no relation to the author), who paid Ray Bradbury $750 for the outline of the book. The author only then realized such a book would be comparable to his idea of Winesburg, Ohio.
For his approach to integrating previous work into a novel, Bradbury credited Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as influences on the structure of the work. Winesburg, Ohio is a short story cycle, and The Grapes of Wrath separates narrative chapters with narrative expositions that serve as prologues to subsequent narrative chapters.
The idea of using short vignettes, intercalary chapters, and expository narratives to connect the full-length Chronicle stories, their role in the overall work, and the literary style used to write them, Bradbury said were “subconsciously borrowed” from those in The Grapes of Wrath, which he first read at age nineteen, the year the novel was published.
Reception
Upon publication, The Paris Review noted that “The Martian Chronicles … was embraced by the science-fiction community as well as critics, a rare achievement for the genre. Christopher Isherwood hailed Bradbury as ‘truly original’ and a ‘very great and unusual talent’.” Isherwood argued that Bradbury’s works were “tales of the grotesque and arabesque”, and compared them to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, writing that Bradbury “already deserves to be measured against the greatest master of his particular genre.”
Writer and critic Anthony Boucher and critic J. Francis McComas praised Chronicles as “a poet’s interpretation of future history beyond the limits of any fictional form”. The writer L. Sprague de Camp, however, declared that Bradbury would improve “when he escapes from the influence of Hemingway and Saroyan”, placing him in “the tradition of anti-science-fiction writers who see no good in the machine age”. Still, de Camp acknowledged that Bradbury’s “stories have considerable emotional impact, and many will love them”.
A decade of after its publication, Damon Knight in his “Books” column for F&SF listed The Martian Chronicles on his top-ten science fiction books of the 1950s.
By September 1979 more than three million copies of The Martian Chronicles had been sold.
Legacy
Continued popularity of The Martian Chronicles
On November 28, 1964, the NASA spacecraft Mariner 4 flew by Mars and took the first close-up pictures of the Martian surface that were far different than those described by Ray Bradbury. In spite of direct visual and scientific information since then that indicate Mars is nothing like Bradbury’s descriptions in The Martian Chronicles, the novel remains a popular work of “classic short stories”, “science fiction”, and “classic fiction anthologies and collections” as indicated by the Amazon book store best seller lists.
In an introduction to a 2015 edition of the work, Canadian astronaut and former International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield speculated on the continuing popularity of the work, attributing it to beautiful descriptions of the Martian landscape, its ability to “challenge and inspire” the reader to reflect on humanity’s history of related follies and failures, and the popular idea that someday some people will come to accept Mars as being their permanent home.
Bradbury attributed the attraction of readers to his book because the story is a myth or fable rather than science fiction. He said “… even the most deeply rooted physicists at Cal-Tech accept breathing the fraudulent oxygen atmosphere I have loosed on Mars. Science and machines can kill each other off or be replaced. Myth, seen in mirrors, incapable of being touched, stays on. If it is not immortal, it almost seems such.”
Bradbury Landing on Mars
The August 6, 2012, Martian landing site of Curiosity, NASA’s Mars Rover, was named Bradbury Landing in honor of Ray Bradbury on August 22, 2012, on what would have been the author’s 92nd birthday. On naming it, Michael Meyer, NASA program scientist for Curiosity, said: “This was not a difficult choice for the science team. Many of us and millions of other readers were inspired in our lives by stories Ray Bradbury wrote to dream of the possibility of life on Mars.”
Adaptations
Theater
A stage production of “Way in the Middle of the Air” was produced at the Desilu Studios Gower Studios, Hollywood, California in 1962.
The debut of a theater adaptation of The Martian Chronicles was at the Cricket Theater (The Ritz) in Northeast Minneapolis in 1976.
Film
MGM bought the film rights in 1960 but no film was made.
In 1988, the Soviet Armenian studio Armenfilm produced the feature film The 13th Apostle, starring Juozas Budraitis, Donatas Banionis, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, based on The Martian Chronicles. The film was directed by Armenian actor and screenwriter, Suren Babayan.
The Uzbek filmmaker Nozim To’laho’jayev made two films based on sections from the book: 1984’s animated short There Will Come Soft Rains (Russian: Будет ласковый дождь) and 1987’s full-length live action film Veld (Russian: Вельд), with one of the subplots based on The Martian.
In 2011 Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights with the intention of producing a film franchise, with John Davis producing through Davis Entertainment.
Music
The Martian Chronicles was adapted as a full-length contemporary opera by composer Daniel Levy and librettist Elizabeth Margid. This is the only musical adaptation authorized by Bradbury himself, who turned down Lerner and Loewe in the 1960s when they asked his permission to make a musical based on the novel.
The work received its initial readings from the Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater in 2006, and was presented in workshop form in the inaugural season of the Fordham University Lincoln Center Alumni Company in 2008.
The “Night Meeting” episode was presented at Cornelia Street Cafe’s “Entertaining Science” series on June 9, 2013. The entire work was presented as a staged reading with a cast of Broadway actors at Ars Nova NYC on February 11, 2015. Three scenes were presented as a workshop production with immersive staging, directed by Carlos Armesto of Theatre C and conducted by Benjamin Smoulder at Miami University, Oxford OH on September 17–19, 2015.
In 2001 a Danish melodic metal band Royal Hunt released a concept album called “The Mission,” based on “The Martian Chronicles.”
Hungarian Progressive rock band Solaris named their first studio album “Marsbéli Krónikák” in honour of The Martian Chronicles
Radio
The Martian Chronicles was adapted for radio in the science fiction radio series Dimension X. This truncated version contained elements of the stories “Rocket Summer”, “Ylla”, “–and the Moon Be Still as Bright”, “The Settlers”, “The Locusts”, “The Shore”, “The Off Season”, “There Will Come Soft Rains”, and “The Million-Year Picnic”.
“—and the Moon Be Still as Bright” and “There Will Come Soft Rains” were also adapted for separate episodes in the same series. The short stories “Mars
