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The Martian Chronicles
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The Martian Chronicles
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The Martian Chronicles
Audiobook9 hours

The Martian Chronicles

Written by Ray Bradbury

Narrated by Scott Brick

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

4/5

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Currently unavailable

Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

Ray Bradbury is a storyteller without peer, a poet of the possible, and, indisputably, one of America's most beloved authors. In a much-celebrated literary career that has spanned six decades, he has produced an astonishing body of work: unforgettable novels, essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays, and numerous superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminously than these masterful chronicles of Earth's settlement of the fourth world from the sun.



Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor-of crystal pillars and fossil seas-where a fine dust settles on the great empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn-first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman conquers Mars...and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race.



Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles is a classic work of twentieth-century literature whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage. In connected, chronological stories, a true grandmaster once again enthralls, delights, and challenges us with his vision and his heart-starkly and stunningly exposing in brilliant spacelight our strength, our weakness, our folly, and our poignant humanity on a strange and breathtaking world where humanity does not belong.



The twenty-seven stories contained in The Martian Chronicles are "Rocket Summer," "Ylla," "The Summer Night," "The Earth Men," "The Taxpayer," "The Third Expedition," "-And the Moon Be Still as Bright," "The Settlers," "The Green Morning," "The Locusts," "Night Meeting," "The Shore," "The Fire Balloons," "Interim," "The Musicians," "The Wilderness," "The Naming of Names," "Usher II," "The Old Ones," "The Martian," "The Luggage Store," "The Off Season," "The Watchers," "The Silent Towns," "The Long Years," "There Will Come Soft Rains," and "The Million-Year Picnic."
LanguageEnglish
PublisherTantor Audio
Release dateJun 30, 2010
ISBN9781400188246
Author

Ray Bradbury

In a career spanning more than seventy years, Ray Bradbury inspired generations of readers to dream, think, and create. A prolific author of hundreds of short stories and close to fifty books, as well as numerous poems, essays, operas, plays, and screenplays, Bradbury was one of the most celebrated writers of our time. His groundbreaking works include Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles, The Illustrated Man, Dandelion Wine, and Something Wicked This Way Comes. An Emmy Award winner for his teleplay The Halloween Tree and an Academy Award nominee, he was the recipient of the 2000 National Book Foundation Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters, the 2004 National Medal of Arts, and the 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, among many honors.

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Reviews for The Martian Chronicles

Rating: 4.049481052377504 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    The numbers grew steadily in proportion to the census of Earth Men already on Mars. There was comfort in numbers. But the first Lonely Ones had to stand by themselves.

    Bradbury's work here can be read as a suicide note, a confession extracted at the end of a gun. Despite the conformist prosperity of the 1950s, it wasn't a hopeful time for many people. I am obviously not referring to minorities. The successive world wars and devastation of Europe and Asia were still present, though the sides had now changed and technology now offered the hand of God to the bold. Von Braun managed that shift without blinking, space appeared a cozy alternative to whatever batshit dogmatism we could manage down here. Martian Chronicles often shimmers but is largely stale. Perhaps that is the pioneer's fate. My favorite episode is when the black people all leave the South for the unknown of Mars. The hollow idiocy of racism stands there flummoxed, gaping at the heavens.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Welcome to my devour list, Bradbury. So impressed that this novel is as powerful as it is given its genesis is a string of independent short stories taking place on Mars. Within a span of 25 years, humanity manages to land on Mars, annihilate the native populace, wreak havoc on Earth decimating the human population (nuclear warfare), and ultimately survive to rebuild and destroy anew (or can our manifest destiny drive be channeled into something more symbiotic with our surroundings? can Mars/anything mold man into a more sustainable/conscientious species?). A fucking amazing and multi-faceted portrayal of humanity (so many characteristics creatively illustrated in such a short work). Even the ending was perfect.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Ah, I should have read it when I was a kid. This is a collection of stories wrapped around the arrival of man on Mars. This is a classic!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    these stories work together to present a novel of a view of mars. though it was written ever so long ago, the timliness of these stories is still valid, and a tribute to bradbury.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Magnificent stories -- some poignant, others frightening or humorous. Highly recommended.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I give this five stars in my first encounter in my teens. Now that I've read a dozen or more books from this idiosyncratic, American, wild science fiction and mystery and Hollywood nostalgia author, I dig other books better. But, boy ... Boy.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I just love Ray Bradbury. He has a way of making you think about the subjects he writes in a different and unique way. Each story is packed with a multitude of underlying questions of ethics, revenge, and the definition of people. It's been a long time coming for me reading this book, as it was one of my blind spots. Excellent, fantastic, and well worth the wait.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A series of slightly interconnected stories about the colonization of Mars. The first stories are about Martians and their society and are the most imaginative. Once Earthlings -- and in these stories they are all Americans- colonize Mars things become less interesting. The Americans basically turn Mars into small town America in the 1950s. While travel between Mars and Earth seems a fairly rapid process - "we'll be there by tonight, finish packing" - they still communicate via telephone and hand written letters. The first stories have Martians and Earthlings interacting, disastrously. One story has them both existing on Mars in different times on the space-time continuum. Most of the stories occur after most of the Martians have died from small pox brought by the first humans. These stories were written in the late 1940s, early 1950s, so the technology and gender roles are dated. The Martians have some cool technology, the Earthling have rockets and robots. All the women are housewives or spinsters. I enjoy reading Bradbury - he writes well and he always leaves you thinking about what you would do in those situations or he's reminded you of your childhood. This book made me a little sad that such a good author couldn't imagine a future with wonderful inventions or more for women to do than prepare dinner for their families.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I couldn't begin to tell you how many times I've read this book. No one else can write a short story quite like Bradbury. He has a dark insight into the worst part of humanity, and he can chill you to the bone in a mere two pages. There's a succinct quality to his work. In a single sentence, he can reveal human nature in a way that other writers struggle to do with 500 page tomes. There's a streak of horror in his work as well, and what makes it truly terrifying is that the thing he makes you fear is us.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Possibly my favourite Bradbury work, this is a seriously transcendent piece of literature, that had a disproportionate impact on my writing and critical faculties. It's not perfect, certainly, int its elements of Bradbury's usual flaws as a writer and in its occasional sledgehammer subtlety yet... that's to request something of the book which it is not, which is surely bad criticism. This is wonderful.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    There many things I like about this book and there many things I dislike. I believe I like the vignette format and I like Ray Bradbury's writing but the lack of faith in humanity bothers me. Some of it is very beautiful and some of it is very disappointing. Since women seem to not have characters in this future, the portrayal of women contributes to my unshakeable dissatisfaction. Four stars anyway... When it works it works.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Read aloud as a bedtime story for my twelve-year-old. Overall it was pretty well-suited for reading aloud.We particularly enjoyed the early chapters that were more outright critiques of colonialism and first contact. The kids also liked the chapter written after "The Fall of the House of Usher." One chapter had so much racism that my kid got more and more upset until we finally decided just to skip it. Also, the story of the last man on Mars finding the last woman on Mars contained enough sexism and fat-shaming that he repeatedly scoffed about what a jerk the protagonist of the chapter was. Over all we liked it. It wasn't quite what my twelve-year-old expected and wasn't quite what I remembered. The science and tech predictions haven't aged particularly well. But it's definitely a classic.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I first read this book in middle school, and it was one of my first introductions to Ray Bradbury's writing. It's a magical work, really a collection of short stories, but as always it's Bradbury's thorough understanding of human nature that sets him apart. Well, that and his prose. I could die a happy man if I ever wrote something that affected people as profoundly as Bradbury's work affects me.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A piercing - yet still loving in many ways - look at human nature through the idea of the colonization of Mars. Bradbury's writing is stunning, of course.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Wow, I really, really loved this. I found it interesting and surprising and thought-provoking. There are several stories that I want to read again and again. Bravo, Bradbury.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I remember reading Fahrenheit 451 at a young age and loving it. I remember questioning the female homemaker of the story, however, and wondering why such a progressive boundary-pushing writer couldn't give women a few more dignities. And now as I read his much earlier work, I feel the desire to return to that classic of burning lit and perhaps burn it too. For no author who questions racial prejudices and calls 1950s/40s America a dystopia should ever leave the female issue where it is.

    I will no longer put these classics "in their historical contexts" and allow liberal and artistic writers to lock me in a house, enslaved to an archaic ritual.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A fantastic set of short stories that are loosely connected about the first encounters on Mars and the colonization of it. Each story has its own theme that is incredible and thought provoking. They can be humorous, haunting, or suspenseful. I loved each one as they would blow my mind on concepts that I would have never thought of. Incredible book!
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    A beautiful but not always successful book. While it's been called one of the first classic science fiction novels, it's hard to say what "The Martian Chronicles" really is. Is the story of Earth's conquest of Mars sort of a space Western, with the red planet playing the role of the American West and the doomed, mysterious Martians playing the role of the Native Americans? Is it an Atomic Age warning about the dangers of technology and human greed? Is it an attempt to confront an alien culture or reverie about small-town American values? In the end, I think it's the jarring combination of both of these last two things -- the utterly unfamiliar and the hopelessly corny -- that really undoes the book. The author seems to take pains to depict the Martians as having values utterly unlike our own: they're psychic beings obsessed with aesthetics, beauty, and balance, but even before the Earthmen appear, Bradbury also, in some respects, portrays them as not too different from fifties-era suburban American families. "The Martian Chronicles" is one of those books that goes a million miles without seeming, in some ways, to leave the author's backyard. The book is full of fifties quaintness -- the sort of cloying stuff that you can see in the period's studio Hollywood pictures and sanitized TV shows, which was mercilessly skewered by the generations that followed -- and I'm not sure if aspects of it didn't seem gauzy and dated on the way that it was published. Bradbury was, of course, a sort of chronicler of small-town Midwestern life, but it serves him rather badly here. You'd have to be an American to take Bradbury's glowing depictions of American consumer culture and friendly small-town life at all seriously. No wonder so many European science fiction writers chose to ignore most of what American science fiction writers produced: Bradbury puts us on Mars, but then shows us drugstores, movie theaters, hot dog stands, and chocolate malteds. His future is specifically, and, perhaps, in places, knowingly American, but it also makes his vision seem a bit parochial. Much of "The Martian Chronicles" seems like an uncomfortable juxtaposition of futurism and nostalgia. When it works, it works because Bradbury is, at the sentence level, such a good writer. The parts of "The Martian Chronicles" that describe the Martians and the structures that they leave behind are genuinely haunting and beautiful: you can feel the ruins' silence and power. The guy was a real master of atmosphere. Whatever other problems it might have, "The Martian Chronicles" remains a joy to read. Before he died, Bradbury voiced support for the Tea Party movement, which caused a lot of anguish in leftish literary circles. But I don't think that, as some suggested, he was just going senile: there's a lot of forthrightly populist material here, particularly in the chapter in which a man constructs a replica of Poe's "House of Usher" in which to trap and kill a bunch of academic social-improvement types who would criticize or ban fantasy literature. Of course, Bradbury's political views also seem to contain some particularly, maddeningly American contradictions. His Mars seems, like many Westerns, a vision of an unspoilt anarchist/libertarian paradise, which makes his obsession with comfortable American domesticity all the weirder, to say nothing of his own clearly literary pretensions and his reverence for Martians as a spiritually oriented, aesthetically refined civilization. The gee-whiz tone of some of the book and the author's obvious pessimism about the inescapable self-destructiveness of human nature are also difficult to reconcile. Personally, though, I can't take battle cries against censorship too seriously from an author whose work doesn't contain a trace of sex, little explicit violence, and, from a certain perspective, not too much psychological danger, either. The tone of this book is sometimes mournful, often awestruck, but generally placid. The lady doth protest too much: while it was written in the first days of the Comics Code, there's nothing here that seems worth censoring. "The Martian Chronicles" is, in a sense, a fine read, but I ended up respecting its author a bit less after reading it. How many times do you hear yourself saying something like that?
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Man this book got me thinking!!! And quite frankly it was a little disturbing. But that being said it was really good! Probably one of my favorites!
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    If you like to read science fiction & short stories, I highly recommend this book. Here are some stories I enjoyed the most:

    August 1999: The Earth Men
    They declared that they were from the Earth. The people on the planet Tyrr were not impressed.

    April 2000: The Third Expedition
    Captain John Black's expedition to Mars. They saw familiar faces.

    August 2002: Night Meeting
    Tomas Gomez meets a Martian.

    June 2003: Way in the middle of the air
    He said he can't publish this story on 1949.
    The story is about black people who did not rely on the politicians and set themselves free with technology.

    April 2005: Usher II
    This is where Fahrenheit 451 started. I haven't read Poe's Amonticillo so I'm convinced I should read it.

    I listened to an audiobook of Martian Chronicles narrated by Ray Bradbury. I like that he added commentaries. After finishing the audiobook, he said that he was more optimistic than he was when he wrote this. He believed that we are going to Mars not to runaway from ourselves but to fulfill ourselves. If he would write it again, it will have a different ending. But, he said that he has total respect to the young person than he was. After reading the final chapter, he was touched by the feeling that he put in it for these people and for their hope and the face of annihilation to exist in the universe and eventually to move on out to the stars.
    "I believe that we will someday live among the stars and live forever."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I listened to the audiobook and in the introduction the author tells the reader how the Chronicles came to be. He also tells the reader that this is not science fiction because there is no science. It is a collection of short stories that are at the same time good prose, philosophy and story telling. The stories share some connections and are about colonizing Mars by humans from earth. Time period covered is from the 2000 to 2026. The author wrote them as short stories but later was encouraged to publish them as a book so there are some short vignettes to connect the stories. I think the publishing date is 1950 for the first edition by Doubleday. The genres are considered to be Science fiction, Post-apocalyptic fiction, Horror, Dystopian fiction. There is a lot of literary influence in these stories. Bradbury said the John Carter of Mars books and 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. Bradbury cited the Barsoom stories and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson as literary influences. I liked the Fire Balloons that addresses evangelism and Christianity and the concept of sin in other beings. Especially interesting was Usher II which addresses censorship and moral police (House of Usher, Poe) and would later be revisited when the author wrote Fahrenheit 451. And the last story, The Million Year Picnic, reminds me of an Adam Eve type story. Over all, you can tell that these stories are dated and the audio was good but not exceptional in any way. While the stories are dated you can still recognize how a book written in 1950 contributed to a lot of current literature and it does capture the age it was written (cold war, fear of blowing up the earth, rocketry). Rating 3.875
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I loved this book. Each tale had its own melancholy. Mars was perhaps too believable but its destiny was also disappointingly believable. A bleak vision, beautifully written.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    I really enjoyed this book. It gave a very different view of life and really brought you to a different dimension.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Interesting to see how different a colonisation tale written by a thoroughly American writer is from those of people who come from more traditionally colonial powers. Dated at times but generally an impressive collection of stories.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    There were many interesting takes on scifi that despite the age of the stories I have never heard before. I wound up not really enjoying it though. The changing length of stories didn't give me enough time to appreciate some of the more interesting stories and the longer ones bored me once the plot was revealed.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    2/5
    I thought it was rather immature book. Obviously the science of Mars and space was unknown when this was written so I don't fault that. Imagine taking a white 1950s US town and putting it on Mars. The setting is different but everything else is the same, almost. So where is the science fiction? Well from the Martians of course. Luckily it was short.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Reading classic science fiction usually devolves to a game of "spot the allegory". Bradbury doesn't disappoint in that respect - he tries to capture all of the fissures in American society by transplanting them to Mars. The main thrust of the narrative is a critique of manifest destiny, the American tendency to thoughtlessly expand its culture and values beyond its existing borders, like a virus that infected the continent and spread West. The Americans arrive on Mars like bulls in the proverbial china shop, although there are a few dryly comic examples of their false starts in attempting to interact with the native Martians.

    A section that deals with race relations is especially powerful. Bradbury did not see a solution to Jim Crow on earth - instead, African Americans leave the South en masse to move to Mars. He insightfully points out how much southern whites depend on having a black underclass to shore up their own status and identity.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A set of short stories that make a coherent "novel" of episodic nature.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    Lyrical. Oh so beautiful. Why did I never read this before? First published in 1950? It reads as if it could have been written yesterday.If you've never this book, you should.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I could not get past the male-centric blue-eyed American (US) nostalgia for a never-never middle American life. And the stories seemed to careen between caustic eyed views of human destructiveness and romantic flights of fancy. Oh, and women are the barest afterthought. Still there is something, but the big bitter seeds taint the flavor.