In February 1999, the first rocketship from Earth will land on Mars. Its two crew members will immediately be shot dead by a Mr. Yll K, with a gun which fires bees. Six months later, the crew of a second rocket will be subjected to a mercy killing by Mr. Xxx, a psychologist, in the belief that his victims must be incurable lunatics. In April 2000, the crew of a third rocket will likewise be murdered, while under a deep hypnosis which persuades them that they are visiting their dead relatives and their childhood homes on Earth. But the fourth expedition, in 2001, will be successful, because almost the entire Martian population will have succumbed, in the meanwhile, to an unfamiliar disease carried by the Earthman—chicken pox.

After this, the process of colonization will go forward rapidly for the next four years, bringing the total number of settlers up to 90,000. Then, in November 2005, atomic war will break out on Earth and nearly all of them will return home, leaving the planet practically deserted until October 2026—the date of the arrival of the Thomas and Edwards families, two parties of war refugees escaping on hoarded rockets. These will form the nucleus of a new settlement; and no doubt, in time, others will follow them. Here Mr. Bradbury's Chronicles end.

It is easy to understand why science fiction, and more particularly space-travel-fiction, should be enjoying a revival of popularity at the present time. Faced by probable destruction in a third world war, we turn naturally to dreams of escape from this age and this threatened planet. But that is not the whole of the explanation. For, while the "realistic" two-fisted action-story is going through a phase of imaginative bankruptcy, the science-fiction story grows more prodigious, more ideologically daring. Instead of the grunts of cowboys and the fuddled sexual musings of half-plastered private detectives, we are offered adult speculation about the dangers of galactic imperialism and the future of technocratic man. The best of this new generation of science-fiction writers are highly sensitive and intelligent. They are under no illusions about the prospective blessings of a machine-age utopia. They do not gape at gadgets with adoring wonder. Their approach to the inhabitants of other worlds is anthropological and nonviolent. They owe more to Aldous Huxley than to Jules Verne or H. G. Wells. Insofar as the reading public is turning to them and forsaking the cops and the cowboys, the public is growing up.

This is not to suggest, however, that Ray Bradbury can be classified simply as a science-fiction writer, even a superlatively good one. Dark Carnival, his earlier book of stories, showed that his talents can function equally well within comparatively realistic settings. If one must attach labels, I suppose he might be called a writer of fantasy, and his stories "tales of the grotesque and arabesque" in the sense in which those words are used by Poe. Poe's name comes up, almost inevitably, in any discussion of Mr. Bradbury's work; not because Mr. Bradbury is an imitator (though he is certainly a disciple) but because he already deserves to be measured against the greatest master of his particular genre.

It may even be argued that The Martian Chronicles are not, strictly speaking, science fiction at all. The most firmly established convention of science fiction is that its writers shall use all their art to convince us that their stories could happen. The extraordinary must grow from roots in the ordinary. The scientific "explanations" must have an authoritative air. (There are, as a matter of fact, some science-fiction writers whose work is so full of abstruse technicalities that only connoisseurs can read it.) Such is not Mr. Bradbury's practice. His brilliant, shameless fantasy makes, and needs, no excuses for its wild jumps from the possible to the impossible. His interest in machines seems to be limited to their symbolic and aesthetic aspects. I doubt if he could pilot a rocketship, much less design one.

"The rockets were American," he remarks, with characteristically casual implausibility, "and the men were American and it stayed that way." In other words, he had decided, quite arbitrarily, to tell the story of a purely American immigration and doesn't want to confuse the issue by cluttering up Mars with a lot of foreigners. I think this decision has been entirely justified. For the impact of an immigration gains enormously in violence and drama when the immigrants all belong to the same cultural group.

Through the interstellar spaces, now, as once over the great plains—headed for Mars instead of California and Oregon—the Americans come. First the pioneers; rough, simple, uninhibited men who celebrate their arrival by shooting off their guns, shouting and dancing and getting drunk; later, they build the first crude noisy mining towns. Then the settlers and their womenfolk; city people, merchants, middlemen, bringing trade with them and respectability and tidiness and church religion. Then a great wave of Negroes from the southern states, looking for a new free life. Then the sophisticates; tourists, planners, reformers, interferers, sociologists, shoppers; amateurs of "atmosphere" and eccentrics like Mr. William Stendahl, who erects a replica of the House of Usher in order to mete out a literally Poetic justice to the Society for the Prevention of Fantasy. Then, last of all, the old, "the dried-apricot people," who wish merely to end their days somewhere else, amidst fresh sights and surroundings.

Mr. Bradbury contrasts his very earthy Earthmen with the weird, beautiful, remote Martians; fair, brown-skinned creatures who have eyes like gold coins. They live in houses of crystal, amidst groves of wine-bearing trees; they paint pictures with chemical fire and make books sing by stroking them, like harps, with their six-fingered hands. They wear masks when they wish to hide their feelings. Their children play with golden spiders. Their race is already dying out and most of their cities are uninhabited by the time the first rocketships arrive; but they have accepted their fate calmly, with a philosophy which resembles Taoism. When the chicken pox plague nearly annihilates them, the few survivors hover around the Earth-settlements in ghostly impotence. One, who tries in his loneliness to attach himself to the Earthmen, telepathically takes on the forms of their lost children and friends. He dies of exhaustion, being unable to satisfy everybody at once.

The immigration fails because, with its hot-dog stands and neon lights and gin and hymn singing and automobiles, it remains too obstinately American; it renames the mountains and the forests and the rivers, but it never takes true possession of the planet; its settlement is only a camping party, not a real home. A few realize this. The first of them is Jeff Spender, an archaeologist attached to the Fourth Expedition. Forseeing the vandalism and crass materialism which will follow their occupation, he turns crazy, believes himself to be a chosen avenger of the Martians, and kills several of his companions. His warning and his death are in vain. The Americans do their ugly stupid will and depart, lured by homesickness to their own destruction in Earth's atomic war. And then, at length, after many years, comes Mr. Thomas. He, unlike all his predecessors, has made a complete act of immigration. He blows up his rocket and burns his old papers; and when his children ask to see the Martians he shows them their own reflections, in the water of a canal. Such, as I understand it, is the moral of this book.

The Martian Chronicles is episodic; a collection of formal short stories interspersed with bridge-passages which are written in the style of prose-poems, only a few paragraphs long. It has been impossible for me, in this small space, to convey more than a hint of the vital imagination, anger, humor and pity which Mr. Bradbury has brought to his work. Two of his best stories I have not even referred to; I must mention them now. The first of them is about Mr. Hathaway, one of the very few settlers who remains on Mars after the outbreak of the war on Earth. When his wife and his three children die, he makes four robots to resemble them. He lives with these robots, happy after a fashion, and sometimes even forgetting that they are not human. He grows old. They do not change. Then, one morning, a rocketship lands on its way back from a twenty-year voyage to Jupiter, Saturn and Neptune; it is the same ship of which Hathaway was a crew member on the Fourth Martian Expedition. Hathaway dies of a heart attack brought on by his excitement. When his old friend, the Captain, breaks the news to the robot-wife, she explains that Hathaway has never taught her, or the children, how to feel sad. "He didn't want us to know. He said it was the worst thing that could happen to a man to know how to be lonely and know how to be sad and then cry." So the Captain and his men take off again, for Earth, leaving the robots to their uncanny mimic life. ". . . and in that hut, as the wind roars by and the dust whirls and the cold stars burn, are four figures, a woman, two daughters, a son, tending a low fire for no reason and talking and laughing." They probably won't wear out for two hundred years.

The other story is set in the war-devastated California of 2026. It is about a marvelous mechanical house; a house which cleans itself, cooks its own meals, waters its own garden, wakes its inmates in the morning and reads aloud to them in the evening. But the inmates are no longer there. All that remains of them are their silhouettes, scorched into the wall of the west face by an atomic blast. The house goes on functioning, hour by hour, day by day. This story simply describes its automatic motions, from dawn till ten o'clock on an August evening, when the wind blows a tree bough through the kitchen window, knocking over a bottle of cleaning solvent and starting a fire. The house makes horribly human attempts to save itself, but it fails. "In the last instant under the fire avalanche, other choruses, oblivious, could be heard announcing the time, playing music, cutting the lawn by remote-control mower, or setting an umbrella frantically out and in the slamming and opening front door . . . a few last cleaning mice darting bravely out to carry the horrid ashes away!" And so our lopsided, labor-saving, thought-destroying mechanistic culture symbolically dies.

Have I made this book sound depressing? It is not—despite its dreadfully timely theme, and one's knowledge that the worst part of its prophecy may well come true, not in 2005 but this very next year. Only the second-rate artist depresses his readers. In work such as this, the sheer lift and power of a truly original imagination exhilarates you, almost in spite of yourself. So I urge even the squeamish to try Mr. Bradbury. His is a very great and unusual talent.