Bradbury’s Mars is Earth-like in its atmosphere and requires little or no alteration to make it habitable, and the humans have simply transported their recognisably 1940s world to a new place.Īsk me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I’ll say yes. The science is pretty much non-existent, and there is very little fantasy beyond the basic premise of what can be done with telepathy. At this early stage, the stories are quite interesting but I was wondering why the book had acquired such a reputation as a sci-fi classic.
As happened there, after a few setbacks the incoming race becomes the dominant one, with the Martians proving unable to resist the new diseases the humans have brought to their world. There are fairly clear parallels here with the arrival of the first settlers to America, with the misunderstandings and tragedies that happen between the races. The first few episodes tell of the first astronauts arriving on the planet. This gives a kind of dream-like, almost surreal, quality, especially to the later stories. Instead, the stories are fundamentally about humanity and it seems as if Bradbury creates Mars and the Martians anew each time to fit the story he wants to tell. While the human side of the story is populated with consistently ’40s characters, the Martian side evolves and changes as the book progresses, meaning that it never becomes a fully realised world in the sense of most fantasy novels.
The book is very episodic in nature though it does have a clear underlying timeline. But a very different Mars from the one we know today – this one is populated by intelligent beings who seem fairly human in some ways, but have telepathic powers that mean that some of them can sense the approach of the men from Earth. Written as short stories for magazines in the late 1940s and pulled together with a series of linking pieces for publication in book form in 1951, the book is set around the turn of the millennium, when man is beginning to colonise Mars.
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