The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury, 1950
Science fiction FantasyContemporary fictionLiterary fiction
Mars, settled story by story: linked tales of loneliness, wonder and the things humans ruin simply by arriving.
Feels like wonder, melancholy and unease. About home, faith and time.
A page from the book
Time has a smell, and you have known it since childhood.
There was a smell of Time in the air tonight. He smiled and turned the fancy in his mind. There was a thought. What did time smell like? Like dust and clocks and people. And if you wondered what Time sounded like it sounded like water running in a dark cave and voices crying and dirt dropping down upon hollow box lids, and rain. And, going further, what did Time look like? Time look like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, 100 billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing. That was how Time smelled and looked and sounded. And tonight-Tomas shoved a hand into the wind outside the truck-tonight you could almost taste time. Ray Bradbury.Bradbury wrote most of these stories for 1940s pulp magazines, then stitched them into a book with new short bridge chapters written to hold them together.
Books that feel like this
More by Ray Bradbury
Fahrenheit 451
Ray Bradbury, 1953
A fireman who burns books begins to read one, in a future where screens are family and speed is peace.
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Questions readers ask
- What is The Martian Chronicles like?
- Feels like wonder, melancholy and unease. About home, faith and time.
- What should I read after The Martian Chronicles?
- If you liked The Martian Chronicles, try One Hundred Years of Solitude (Gabriel García Márquez), Tuck Everlasting (Natalie Babbitt) and This Is How You Lose the Time War (Amal El-Mohtar).
A taste of the feed
The moment you realise time isn’t passing but turning in circles.
—Qué quería —murmuró—, el tiempo pasa. —Así es,—dijo Úrsula—, pero no tanto. Al decirlo, tuvo conciencia de estar dando la misma réplica que recibió del coronel Aureliano Buendía en su celda de sentenciado, y una vez más se estremeció con la comprobación de que el tiempo no pasaba, como ella lo acababa de admitir, sino que daba vueltas en redondo.
One Hundred Years of Solitude · Gabriel García Márquez
What it means to be one turn of a wheel that never stops.
Everything’s a wheel, turning and turning, never stopping. The frogs is part of it, and the bugs, and the fish, and the wood thrush, too. And people. But never the same ones. Always coming in new, always growing and changing, and always moving on. That’s the way it’s supposed to be. That’s the way it is.
Tuck Everlasting · Natalie Babbitt
What do you bring someone who has all of time?
I want to be a body for you. I want to chase you, find you, I want to be eluded and teased and adored; I want to be defeated and victorious—I want you to cut me, sharpen me. I want to drink tea beside you in ten years or a thousand. Flowers grow far away on a planet they’ll call Cephalus, and these flowers bloom once a century, when the living star and its black-hole binary enter conjunction.I want to fix you a bouquet of them, gathered across eight hundred thousand years, so you can draw our whole engagement in a single breath, all the ages we’ve shaped together.
This Is How You Lose the Time War · Amal El-Mohtar
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