The Martian Chronicles: The Grand Master Editions

Man, was a a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in wave... Each wave different, and each wave stronger. The Martian Chronicles 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, including Fahrenheit 451 and Something Wicked This Way Comes; essays, theatrical works, screenplays and teleplays; The Illustrated Mein, Dandelion Wine, The October Country, and numerous other superb short story collections. But of all the dazzling stars in the vast Bradbury universe, none shines more luminous 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. Ray 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. Gale Research Russell Kirk feels that the greatest strength of The Martian Chronicles is its ability to make us look closely at ourselves. In Enemies of the Permanent Things: Observations of Abnormality in Literature and Politics, Kirk states: "What gives [ The Martian Chronicles ] their cunning is ... their portrayal of human nature, in all its baseness and all its promise, against an exquisite stageset. We are shown normality, the permanent things in human nature, by the light of another world; and what we forget about ourselves in the ordinariness of our routine of existence suddenly bursts upon us as a fresh revelation.... Bradbury's stories are not an escape from reality; they are windows looking upon enduring reality." The strange and wonderful tale of mans experiences on Mars, filled with intense images and astonishing visions. Now part of the Voyager Classics collection. The Martian Chronicles tells the story of humanitys repeated attempts to colonize the red planet. The first men were few. Most succumbed to a disease they called the Great Loneliness when they saw their home planet dwindle to the size of a fist. They felt they had never been born. Those few that survived found no welcome on Mars. The shape-changing Martians thought they were native lunatics and duly locked them up. But more rockets arrived from Earth, and more, piercing the hallucinations projected by the Martians. People brought their old prejudices with them and their desires and fantasies, tainted dreams. These were soon inhabited by the strange native beings, with their caged flowers and birds of flame. Contents: 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 Interim The Musicians Way in the Middle of the Air 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 The Million Year Picnic This is a collection of science fiction short stories, cleverly cobbled together to form a coherent and very readable novel about a future colonization of Mars. As the stories progress chronologically the author tells how the first humans colonized Mars, initially sharing the planet with a handful of Martians. When Earth is devastated by nuclear war the colony is left to fend for itself and the colonists determine to build a new Earth on Mars. "Man conquered Mars--and in that instant, Mars conquered him. The strange new world with its ancient, dying race and vast, red-gold deserts cast a spell on him, settled into his dreams, and changed him forever."--Cover The tranquility of Mars is disrupted by the earthmen who have come to conquer space, colonize the planet, and escape a doomed Earth