“Book Review

A collection of loosely related short stories about Mars. As this was written in the 50s, the themes on Bradbury’s mind seem to be: nuclear war on Earth, imperialism, and racism. Some of the stories were amazing but others felt like they were only to thread the better stories together as a book.

Many of the stories were quite bleak with the Earth completely destroyed, and or in the throes of nuclear war but my favorite story was actually a funny one. The story chronicles the Second Expedition to Mars. The astronauts keep knocking on the doors of Martians trying to get them to recognize them and give them kudos for ““discovering”” Mars.

I mentioned this book to my friend and he told me story of how it came to be. Ray Bradbury was just starting out as a writer and was trying to sell his short stories to publishers in New York. A publisher told him he loves his stuff but it’s hard to sell short stories so could he make it into a book? Ray told him he had some stories about Mars lying around and the rest is history.

Some of the stories have not aged that well but as a whole this is a nice collection of stories from a gentler time when humans only seemed to worry about nuclear war with Russia. It’s fascination how the political climate affects the stories authors write.

My Rating: ★★★★

My 2019 Reading Challenge: #7

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