The brown-skinned, yellow-eyed people of Mars live a beautiful, peaceful life rich with art, music, and philosophy, until the humans from Earth land on their planet and attempt to colonize it in this classic collection of linked short stories. The planet Mars acts as a mirror to the worst (and, very occasionally, the best) of humanity--sometimes literally, as when the telepathic Martians masquerade as the humans' long-dead relatives. Eventually, the humans are defeated, both on Mars and on Earth, by their own weaknesses. THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES is not hard SF in any sense. It's a poetic, mythic vision of Mars, as Percival Lowell might have imagined it to be when he saw shadows through his telescope and thought they were canals. And it's a series of vignettes about real people who react in very familiar ways in a strange place. As Bradbury describes it in his introduction to the revised 1997 edition, he was attempting to write WINESBURG, OHIO, set on Mars.
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