I wrote a post
about The Martian Chronicles and Solaris on June 21st, 2011.
In honor of Ray Bradbury, who passed away on June 5th at the age of
91, I am including part of this post today, the part that has to do with The Martian Chronicles. Rest in peace,
Ray Bradbury and thank you for your wonderful books. For those of you who have
never picked up his books, now is the time to do so.
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(Excerpted from my post The Martian Chronicles and Solaris
from June 21st, 2011):
I have
been a fan of science fiction since I was a teenager, probably from the time I
first read The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. I also read Something Wicked This Way
Comes, The Illustrated Man and Fahrenheit 451, and enjoyed them all. Bradbury is a
thought-provoking and outstanding sci-fi writer (90 years old and still with
us), and his books have a haunting quality about them. You don’t forget them
easily. I don’t recall all of the stories in The Martian Chronicles in detail, just that there were
certain parts that were quite scary in that what was suggested was considerably
terrifying. You just knew that something terrible was going to happen to some
of the earthlings who made it to Mars, and it did (the third expedition was
liquidated by the Martians who posed as dead family members such that the
deluded (and lonely) crew ended up just giving in to the delusions). The
following passage from the chapter ‘April 2000: The Third Expedition’ is an example of the type of
terror Bradbury could instill in his readers: “And wouldn’t it be horrible
and terrifying to discover that all of this was part of some great clever plan
by the Martians to divide and conquer us, and kill us? Sometime during the
night, perhaps my brother here on this bed will change form, melt, shift and
become another thing, a terrible thing, a Martian. It would be very simple for
him to just turn over in bed and put a knife into my heart……..His hands were
shaking under the covers. His body was cold. Suddenly it was not a theory.
Suddenly he was very afraid……..Carefully he lifted the covers, rolled them
back. He slipped from bed and was walking softly across the room when his
brother’s voice said, ‘Where are you going?’…...’For a drink of water’. ‘But
you’re not thirsty’. ‘Yes, yes, I am’. ‘No, you’re not’. Captain John Black
broke and ran across the room. He screamed. He screamed twice. He never reached
the door”.
This was
all Bradbury wrote about the actual murder of Captain John Black and the
massacres of the crew of the third expedition. You knew that murders were
occurring in the rest of the Martian houses who had crew members staying with
them because they were the ‘families’ of these crew members, but Bradbury
didn’t have to elaborate at all about them, because it was left to our
imaginations to figure out what was happening to them all. Superb sci-fi horror
in a category all its own.