"The justly famous, most excellent Martian Chronicles is a congeries of magnificent short tales, linked by a cleverer-than-thou framing mechanism intended to fool the eye 24 times a second," said The Los Angeles Times, after hailing Bradbury as a writer included "among the mere handful of noted and memorable American writers who have made a reputation from the short story."
"They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea..." So begins this classic chronicle of the colonization of Mars. More fantasy than science fiction, the stories create a rich allegory of the tragic moral blindness of mankind. In lyrical prose, Bradbury describes the decline of the mysterious and fragile Martian civilization, overwhelmed by the human newcomers. These are tales not of bug-eyed monsters and laser-wielding spacemen, but of common people - families, truck-stop owners, priests - who confront a new world with their human pride, fears, tenderness, and greed intact. And at the heart of each story lies the basic conflict between man's search for new frontiers and his irresistible urge for the comfort of the past. Bradbury's writing is a brilliant blend of satire and wonder, terror and innocence, bitterness and poetic fantasy.