R.L. Stine Suggests Ray Bradbury's 'Martian Chronicles'
Wednesday, July 16, 2008
THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES
By Ray Bradbury
For age 12 and older
A series of popular short stories stitched into a book, "The Martian Chronicles" has been entertaining science-fiction lovers since 1950.
The stories, which are loosely related, revolve around the colonization of Mars between 1999 and 2026. Those dates must have seemed far off to the author, Ray Bradbury, but had to be advanced to 2030 to 2057 in the most recent edition. Despite that, the book has aged well, mostly because we earthlings continue to be fascinated with the Red Planet and the tantalizing thought of extraterrestrial life.
Don't look for any cute and playful ETs in these pages, however. Martian sightings are few and far between, though their presence is always felt, even after a plague brought from Earth nearly wipes them out.
The earliest colonists are, for the most part, hard to like and thus deserving of their fate. That tens of thousands of settlers follow them on rockets to Mars (re-creating their home towns and small cities in the vast Martian nothingness) is an act that seems destined to end unhappily.
-- Marylou Tousignant
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