I decided to rename myself Bookaholic in the name of originality.
Brief overview and essence of the book for the lazy:
And let’s start with a reference in Fallout 3 to one of the last stories in the book. Essentially, this is a live-action adaptation of a scene from the book. The video is not mine.
There will be gentle rain, there will be the smell of earth,
The chirping of nimble swifts from dawn to dusk,
And the night roulades of frogs in the ponds,
And plum blossoms in white-foamed gardens.
The fire-breasted lump will fly onto the fence,
And the robins trill weave a ringing pattern.
And no one, and no one will remember the war –
Experienced and forgotten, there’s no need to stir it up.
And neither the bird nor https://1xcrypto.co.uk/ the willow will shed a tear,
If the human race disappears from the Earth.
And spring… and spring will meet a new dawn,
Without noticing that we are no longer there.
This verse partially expresses the essence of the book, which Ray Bradbury tried to put into his book.
And now in detail.
The book talks about the colonization of Mars by people of the future and about those events, even mythical, happening to the colonizers of Mars. The narrative itself occurs through a series of small stories, actually chronicles themselves, which are not connected by plot, characters (with some exceptions) but tell about events in one setting, in chronological order.
The book is not about the problems of colonization. In general, it’s hard to call it science fiction. Even Bradbury himself did not want to classify this book as this genre. It’s just fantastic, sometimes it even seemed like fantasy. At the beginning you feel like some kind of Martian fairy tale, if we talk about the first few stories. They contain a description of the environment of the indigenous Martians. I’ll try to show this in an excerpt:
… K eats golden fruits growing from crystal walls, or cleansed things up by scattering handfuls of magnetic dust, which the hot wind carried away along with the rubbish.
Illa lay down under the canopy, and at the order of her husband, flaming birds soared into the dark sky. The ribbons stretched, the canopy soared into the air. The sands squealed and went down; past, past stretched blue hills, pushing back their house, columns draining the rain, flowers in cages, singing books, quiet streams on the floor.
He shouted at the birds, and they soared higher and higher, flying like thousands of lazy sparks, like crimson-yellow fireworks.
But this, unfortunately, ends somewhere in the fourth story, which is a shame, because I would be interested in reading such a fairy tale. This is not science fiction because everything is simple from a technical point of view. Fly to Mars? Without any problems. Let’s take it and fly. Mars is quite suitable for life without drastic terraforming. The air is just a little thin, that’s all. The only thing there is a story about the greening of Mars and that’s it. Almost no new technologies. Rotary phones, rocket mail, etc.d. But that’s not what the book is about. If you want the scientific and technical problems of colonizing Mars, you can read "The Martian".
In this book, Bradbury tries to reveal what we will do with Mars and whether we will change at all when we fly to populate other planets. Spoiler: no.
For example, in a story dated June 2032, the astronauts, upon arriving on Mars, arrange outdoor recreation and scatter garbage. In another story, “The Shore,” a priest flies to Mars to preach to the spirits of extinct Martians (lore is problematic here, but more on that later). In the story of Ether II, earthly laws and bureaucracy moved to Mars (logical in principle). In it, a themed house on Mars dedicated to the work of Edgar Allan Poe is destroyed due to a law banning “fantasy”. This story is generally a harbinger of “Fahrenheit 451” and, in principle, the meaning of the story is similar.
In general, this is when a student says that in the next class he will take up his studies hard. There will be only A’s. But in the end, I still spend the whole day playing dotka and coping.
On the other hand, why change??
All this is reinforced by the fact that a global war will soon begin on Earth. This is not a major spoiler, because it is mentioned almost at the beginning. T.e. We couldn’t save our home planet, we’re going to move to someone else’s.
As for the lore, it’s problematic. Maybe the lore doesn’t make sense in this piece, but I tried to understand it.
The fact is that people already live on Mars before people arrive. A fairly advanced civilization, so advanced that it believes that there is no life on Earth. When astronauts arrive from Earth, the Martians think they are hallucinating. After the mysterious story “The Taxpayer,” in which “Solaris” begins, I began to think that there are ordinary Martians and some mimics who pretend to be the beloved and deceased relatives of astronauts. And soon the Martians completely die from a virus brought from Earth. Very quickly, if you look at it chronologically. After the story “Night Meeting” everything became even stranger. After it, I started thinking about the cyclical nature of the civilization of Mars and Earth, especially after the ending. I tried to dig into this but didn’t find much sense.
As for impressions, it’s easy to read. If desired, the main chronicle can be read in a weekend. But, personally, I don’t really like story collections and somewhere in the middle I was bored. For the same reason I did not read other chronicles and non-canonical stories. I wasn’t interested anymore. But I’m not saying the story is bad. It’s interesting, thought provoking and easy to read.
Thank you for your attention.
Other reviews: https://stopgame.ru/user/magnus97/blogs
Best comments
Not bad written. But delving into the chronology of The Martian Chronicles is stupid. While reading, I had the feeling that each story was interesting, but the connection between them was questionable. although there are several coherent stories. It is very noticeable that Bradbury’s thoughts are tossed around like a drunken midshipman during a storm. This really annoyed me. After reading everything, I was at a loss, because his "Rust" And "451 degrees by headlights." – very good. But I have a habit of reading even the annotations. There, of course, a completely different author shared his opinions about the book. To my surprise, it was the latter who opened my eyes to the reason for all the inconsistencies. The fact is that Ray Bradbury came up with several quite different stories, but did not know how to combine them. And now I’m sitting at the bar. he watched history. how several guys wore a new jacket, but for a certain time. Apparently they pooled their money and bought it. Everyone walked the streets in it, and then shared their impressions (by the way, Bradbury seems to have this story). And then the idea came to him (to pull the wool over my ears) to combine his different stories into the collection “The Martian Chronicles”.
P.S. I understand you’ve read "The Martian". Then a question for you: “The main character in the book breaks through his glove and flies like Superman in space ?"
No. In "Marsiania" the GG (a leaky name memory) suggests this, but in the end he is simply snatched by the captain, on a rope, from his dismantled ship. The book creates tension by the fact that the GG ship will quickly escape and the captain may not have enough cable.
And so the film and the book, in terms of events as a whole, are very similar.