| Product Summary | | Format: Paperback | | ISBN: 9780553278224 | | Publisher: Bantam Books | | Publish Date: 7/1/1994 | | Buy.com Sku: 30099327 | | Item#: R2FVRS | | Buy.com Sales Rank: 8596 | | Dimensions (in Inches) 6.75H x 4L x 0.5T |
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| | | | "One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost, icicles fringing every roof, children skiing on slopes, housewives lumbering like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets.|And then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town..." (from the first line) Leaving behind a world on the brink of destruction, man came to the Red planet and found the Martians waiting, dreamlike. Seeking the promise of a new beginning, man brought with him his oldest fears and his deepest desires. Man conquered Mars--and in that instant, Mars conquered him. The strange new world with its ancient, dying race and vast, red-gold deserts cast a spell on him, settled into his dreams, and changed him forever. Here are the captivating chronicles of man and Mars--the modern classic by the peerless Ray Bradbury.
Annotation:
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.
| Author Bio| Ray Bradbury | | Before he was 14, Ray Bradbury and his family moved several times to and from Waukegan, Illinois, where he was born, to Tucson, Arizona. In 1934 they moved to Los Angeles, where Bradbury has since spent most of life. After graduating from high school in 1938, he sold newspapers for four years on L. A. sidewalks, while publishing his own amateur science fiction magazine, his first story sale not coming until 1941. Turning his attention to full-time writing in 1943, Bradbury continued to write short stories, the best of which he compiled in 1947's DARK CARNIVAL collection. Through the 1950s and well into the 1960s, Bradbury was the reigning king of science fiction. Starting with the masterpiece THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES (1950), Bradbury's output from this period is fairly littered with classics; FAHRENHEIT 451 (1951), the collections THE ILLUSTRATED MAN (1951) and THE GOLDEN APPLES OF THE SUN (1953), SOMETHING WICKED THIS WAY COMES (1962), and the I SING THE BODY ELECTRIC collection (1969). Over his career, he has received numerous awards and honors, including having a crater on the moon named after his novel DANDELION WINE. His writing continued apace, but Bradbury began branching out in the 1960s, exploring scriptwriting, lecturing, and architecture; he served as a consultant on Walt Disney World's Epcot Center, the United States Pavilion at the 1964 World's Fair, as well as on other structures around the country. Though not much of his written work has been explicitly "science fiction," it has often contained enough of an element of the fantastic that he is primarily considered to be a science fiction writer. Even so, Bradbury has earned a prominent place in the pantheon of American literature. |
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