Check your calendar. Then find a first edition of The Martian Chronicles, the Doubleday hardback from 1950 whose chapters are dated like entries in a ship’s log, starting in January 1999. The last of them, “The Million-Year Picnic”, is dated October 2026. By Ray Bradbury’s original reckoning, an American family should be sitting in a boat on a Martian canal right about now, peering into the water to find out who the Martians are. Later printings pushed every date forward by 31 years, as publishers do when the future turns up on time and embarrassingly short of rockets. Purists know the truth. Bradbury’s Mars has run out of calendar, and we are living in the book’s epilogue. Nobody sent a card.
It was never really a novel. It’s a fix-up, stitched together from stories Bradbury sold to pulps like Planet Stories and Thrilling Wonder Stories in the late 1940s, joined by short lyrical bridges that read like prose poems found on the back of a seed packet. British readers got it in 1951 as The Silver Locusts, which sounds like a Hammer picture Peter Cushing turned down. The science was shaky even then: canals, breathable air, golden-eyed Martians with books that sing. Mariner 4 would photograph a cratered dead rock fifteen years later, and it made no difference whatsoever. Bradbury always said he was a fantasist rather than a science fiction writer, and Mars was his mirror, not his destination.
What’s in the mirror is not pretty. The first expeditions die in thoroughly un-pulp ways. One is shot by a jealous Martian husband. Another is committed to an asylum, because the locals assume anyone claiming to be from Earth is a telepathic lunatic. The third lands in a perfect replica of a 1920s Illinois town, where the crew are greeted by their dead parents and tucked into bed. It’s still one of the most quietly horrible things in fifties SF, an EC horror comic written by a poet. Then chickenpox does to the Martians what European diseases did to the Americas, and the settlers arrive with hammers, hot dogs and a compulsion to rename everything after places back home. Sam Parkhill opens his hot-dog stand the very night Earth blows itself up, the worst-timed business launch in literature. “Usher II” takes revenge on the book-burners three years before Fahrenheit 451 turned the idea into a career. “There Will Come Soft Rains” gives us an automated house carrying on cooking breakfast after its family have become shadows on the wall: a smart home with nobody left to be smart for, reading poetry to the ash.
The book got Bradbury out of the pulp ghetto. Christopher Isherwood gave it a glowing review, and suddenly a writer from the rocket-and-ray-gun magazines was being shelved in libraries with serious authors. EC Comics, meanwhile, simply nicked a couple of his stories for Weird Science. Bradbury wrote them a gracious note pointing out that they’d forgotten to pay him. They paid, and an official run of adaptations followed. A man who answers piracy with a polite invoice is a rarer creature than any Martian. Television had a go in 1980 with a transatlantic miniseries starring Rock Hudson, which Bradbury reportedly found dull. He wasn’t wrong, though it’s worth hunting down for the sets alone, if you’re the sort of person who enjoys seventies spacecraft that look as though they were made from upturned lampshades.
Which brings us to the uncomfortable bit. Walk into a big Waterstones on a Saturday and you’ll find the SF and fantasy shelves colonised by romantasy: sprayed edges, dragons, brooding fae princes with jawlines you could slice bread on, and enough werewolf shifter romance to keep a silver mine in profit. Bradbury hasn’t been banished so much as embalmed. Fahrenheit 451 sits on the syllabus, The Martian Chronicles turns up on the occasional reading list, and a book read under duress at fifteen rarely gets picked up again voluntarily at thirty-five. A slim collection of quiet, mournful linked stories is a hard sell next to a ten-volume completist saga or a fifteen-second clip. The cruellest joke is that Bradbury saw it coming. Mildred Montag, staring at her wall-sized screens while her “family” chattered at her, is the patron saint of the scroll. The prophet of the post-literate age has become one of its casualties.
To be fair to the shifters, none of this is new, and sneering at what people enjoy reading is a mug’s game. Mars’s first great literary craze was Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Barsoom: a Virginian gentleman, a scantily clad princess, swordfights and a great deal of heaving, which made it romantasy about a century before anyone coined the word. Bradbury grew up on Burroughs and adored him. Genre fiction has always run on hormones as well as ideas. The trouble isn’t that people read romance. The trouble is that the loud books push the quiet ones off the front tables, and the quiet ones don’t have the marketing budget to push back.
“Obscurity” is relative, mind you. In 2012 NASA named the spot where the Curiosity rover touched down Bradbury Landing, so it’s hard to call a man forgotten when his name is on a patch of Gale Crater. The writers haven’t forgotten him either. Shadow Show, the 2012 tribute anthology edited by Sam Weller and Mort Castle, gathered the likes of Margaret Atwood, Joe Hill, Kelly Link and Alice Hoffman to write in his honour, and Stephen King has never been shy about crediting the small-town dread of Something Wicked This Way Comes as formative.
Full disclosure: SFcrowsnest’s own founder is among the guilty. Stephen Hunt’s The Rise of the Iron Moon (2009), the third of his Jackelian novels, starts out as a gaslamp invasion yarn, with something vast and hostile looming over the Kingdom of Jackals. It then ups sticks and carries the action to a Mars stranger than most readers would think to imagine. It’s a long way from Bradbury’s cinnamon-scented Illinois-on-Mars, but it comes from the same impulse: the red planet as a place for dreaming, not a rover’s telemetry spreadsheet. Commodore Jared Black is a long way from the Green Town bandstand, but he’d recognise the itch.
So, the anniversary nobody marked. Seventy-six-year-old spoiler ahead. At the end of “The Million-Year Picnic”, the father finally keeps his promise to show the children the Martians. He points down into the canal, and they see their own reflections looking back. If you want to see a Martian this October, Bradbury already told you where to look. Switch your phone off, look into the black glass, and there’s your Martian. Then go and find a copy of the book. Preferably a battered old paperback with a lurid cover, and preferably before the calendar runs out on the rest of us.
Join the conversation (0)