The Martian Chronicles is a roughly connected collection of short stories written at various times by Ray Bradbury that were about humans going to Mars. They don't really have a coherent story but some of the characters and events cross over and it beats having to read 50 stories separately but is it worth reading them at all?
Where Fahrenheit 451 showed the sci-fi side of Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles shows his poetic side.
In many ways it is more ambitious than 451, indeed many of the themes that Ray had to connect with the thread of storytelling show themselves off beautifully here with short stories exploring colonialism, religion, need of belonging, blowing ourselves to bits (something that doesn't sound as far-fetched considering the events we are all going through) and he creates a wonderful mythology about Mars one that is more fantastical than realistic for sure but feels lived in.
Although even when talking about hardcore science-fiction books this little collection of stories manages to achieve something that I have seen very few stories do right, namely that it shows how weird and magical and utterly incomprehensible that other lifeform (be it Martians or otherwise) can be.
Ultimately this is a book about people and their stories, experiencing it brought out a lot of emotions and I was ultimately left amazed by how well the whole was written.
Highly highly recommended if you're into short stories
I think it might have been the first time I came across this kind of thing. Multiple stories going across differnt time spans connected by location. Piers anthony did an interesting twist on this type of thing with one coherent story that goes across time periods where the characters are the same. Still one thing at the time I read it was there where so many short story anthologies from the magazines and award winners and this with it all being sorta one story made it different and interesting. I think its the first time I encountered the cycle type thing and it being unclear what is past and what is present. I sometimes think the modern martian manhunter stuff is pretty influenced by it to.
This reminds me of that story in the book about a martian and a man running into eachother and both being convinced that they are living in present
is that in the middle to? maybe it was the end but yeah that is what I mean with cycles and time.
Yeah I'm pretty sure it's in the middle, atleast it's after people have towns and settled down