Engagement:
Genre:
Science Fiction
Published:
1950
Page Count:
268
Where to Buy:
The Martian Chronicles
#
Content Ratings
Moderate Themes
The collection is a sustained meditation on colonialism, the human capacity to destroy what is beautiful and alien, censorship, racial segregation allegorized through Martian society, and mankind's self-destructive tendencies.
Mild Violence
The decimation of the Martian population through human-carried disease, a massacre of native Martians, and Earth's nuclear self-destruction are depicted; violence is often rendered with lyrical distance rather than graphic immediacy.
Synopsis
A linked series of stories following humanity's colonization of Mars and the near-extinction of its telepathic native civilization, spanning several decades as Earth's problems—racism, censorship, nuclear war—follow humans to their new world. Poetic, elegiac, and often deeply melancholy, the book reads as much as a meditation on human nature as a science fiction narrative. One of Bradbury's finest achievements and a foundational text of American speculative fiction.