Well, I guess I throw one of my favorites into the ring. It’s certainly not the deepest book out there, but it’s a fun read. I love how the book is basically an anthology collection, much like what he did with The Illustrated Man, which makes it easy to pick up and read if you’ve got a spare 10-15 minutes. It probably won’t win the vote, but I thought I’d throw it out there. Plus, it had a zany NBC miniseries starring Rock Hudson and Roddy McDowell.
A couple of years ago I went through a sci-fi kick (I don’t usually read much sci-fi) and picked this up from my local library after hearing Bradbury compared to magic realist authors like Garcia Marquez (who rocks my world). While far from magic realism (though I can see the parallels), “The Martian Chronicles” is pretty darn good. A fun read and, yeah, pretty cool how the short stories all come together in one long story arc spanning several years (generations even?). The last few stories are particularly effective, especially as you start getting news of events on Earth from the Martian perspective and feeling the confusion of the colonists there.
I seem to vaguely remember the mini-series from when I was a kid, but also being rather disappointed at how unlike Star Wars it was (I had the same reaction to 2001, which I didn’t really understand until, well, 2001).
Oh yeah! I remember the mini-series too! I must have been very young when I saw it though cos I remembered just not getting it. I knew that it was… interesting, but beyond me at that point. You right about the Star Wars effect though. I think that really was the benchmark in my head back than.
I also highly recommend “The Illustrated Man”. Similar setup, although I feel that Ray really dropped the ball on about two of the stories by having weird endings that, rather than being shocking, ends up a “WTC*” moment where my head implodes into a ball of energy. Now the first story in it is a classic short story- “The Veldt” (virtual reality room that becomes the plains of Africa under the control of a few meddling kids). And a few others really stand out, like the one about the astronauts floating in space waiting to die.
I also just read that Zack Snyder is going to make a movie version of “The Illustrated Man” after he does “Watchmen”. Considering he’s batting 2 for 2 in my book, I look forward to his take on it.
And Armando, the years that it takes place during has changed a bit. One of the newer prints of the book added 30 years to every date to make it a bit more plausable. Though he had a more romantic “sword and planet” view of the red planet, which is totally not plausable
*WTC- What the Craaaaap
Yes, but he’s a bit late to the game. It’s going to be a coughneedlesscough remake of the 1969 classic with Rod Steiger.
I read “The Veldt” in a Bradbury anthology just before reading The Martian Chronicles. What a freaky, disturbing story! Those kids gave me the creeps.
Who’s Zack Snyder? I’d heard “Watchmen” was back on after years (hell, almost 20) of development hell. At one point Terry Gilliam was attached to the project! I’m not sure that book is really filmmable, honestly, at least not without losing a lot of material, which in the original is included as “extras” like the fake newspaper articles and the comic within a comic, etc.
I don’t know which edition of “Martian Chronicles” I read, 13. I got the sense of the book regardless and, while some of the cold war concerns are a bit dated, I thought it was still a pretty good and very powerful yarn. The technology gap is not as shocking as in, say, Herman Hesse’s The Glass Bead Game, which is his attempt at sci-fi but which ends up feeling incredibly retro in its portrayal of technology (still a good book, though).
The3- I like to block that movie from my mind.
Armando- There’s actually a few different versions. There’s the most popular one and then there are a few others that add a few of his other short stories that fit into the Martain realm. One version from a few years back actually took out a few chapters because it wasn’t PC, something to do with alleged racism, though more recent prints brought those stories back in.