2013 read #93: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury
181 pages
Published 1950
Read from July 15 to July 17
Rating: ★★★★½ out of 5

Until now, my only significant exposure to Bradbury consisted of Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Of the two, Something Wicked lingered with me the most over the years. What I most admire is Bradbury's hand at description, the shadowed fantasy spaces at the edge of childhood awareness and in the chill of autumn nights, the unsettling familiarity and familiar terror of adolescence in memory. My description could never do Bradbury justice.

Only one segment of The Martian Chronicles, the all too brief interlude titled "The Musicians," is suffused with what I would consider the Bradbury magic, the realms of macabre unreal that open when the adults don't know where you are. The rest of the stories and snippets tend to be more or less predictable but still quite excellent samples of late Golden Age sci-fi. My favorite full story in the set, "The Million-Year Picnic," is a hybrid of these two styles, a sharply observed vignette of adolescence in the ruins of two worlds.

Throughout this book Bradbury emphasizes scene and sensory marvel over character; a product of its time, most of the characters in The Martian Chronicles are broad archetypes, rendered vivid through Bradbury's skill but nonetheless lacking some substance, whereas concepts and imagery go all-out.