Bradbury, Ray - The Martian Chronicles - ( Item 140238 )
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Bradbury, Ray - The Martian Chronicles - ( Item 140238 )
Published in London by Folio Society. 2015. First Thus. Fine Hardback. No inscriptions or bookplates. Near Fine slipcase. Very slight marks to slipcase. Introduced by Chris Hadfield. Illustrated by Mick Brownfield. Astronaut Chris Hadfield introduces these tales of space travel and thwarted utopian dreams. The Martian Chronicles. 'Science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle'. Published in 1950, Ray Bradbury's dark short stories of Martian colonisation appeared when the idea of life on the Red Planet was very real. Space travel was still a fantasy, but with the destruction of Nagasaki and Hiroshima fresh in his mind, and new rocket technology offering untold possibilities, Bradbury, like many science-fiction writers, turned his thoughts to the sky. However, instead of a new and distant utopia, he imagined how humanity's failings would follow us into space, and how our clumsy notions of manifest destiny are doomed to repeat themselves, no matter how far we journey. The Martian Chronicles book. Bound in buckram, blocked with a design by Mick Brownfield. Set in Adobe Caslon Pro with Railroad Gothic display. 256 pages. Frontispiece and 8 colour illustrations. 9.5" x 5.75". Tales from scientists and dreamers. Drawn from the horrors of colonisation in the United States, the Chronicles focus on the experiences of the ordinary men and women who leave a troubled Earth for a new life on Mars. What follows is the inevitable deterioration from naive pioneering spirit to destructive avarice, played out among the ruins of a decimated indigenous civilisation. Beginning with the first expeditions, the stories explore each stage of Mars' doomed conquest. We meet deluded priests, determined to convert the strange aboriginals to a foreign and redundant god; we flee on crystal sandships with an ignorant hot-dog vendor, terrified he will be robbed of his claim; and in '– and the Moon Be Still as Bright' two colonists clash, torn between duty and the realisation that the men who follow them will tear the planet apart. In his brilliant introduction, the celebrated Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield asks why generations of scientists and dreamers continue to be inspired by the beauty of Bradbury's 'delightful impossibility'. He gives fascinating insight into the training here on Earth for future Martian expeditions, and what the hope for a new life on Mars gives us, 'in spite of ourselves'. Artist Mick Brownfield's colourful illustrations, inspired by 1950s sci-fi, vividly portray this quest to be Martian, along with the ghostly splendour of Bradbury's alien landscapes. 'The bitter irony of The Martian Chronicles is both stark and shocking' . GUARDIAN. An extract from Chris Hadfield's introduction. Bradbury's Mars offered unlimited new opportunity for exploration and discovery, and expansion of human awareness. Yet virtually every step in the Chronicles, as through much of human history, is a misstep. Mutual ignorance and distrust between normally peaceful peoples leads to violence and death. Greed causes unfathom- ably bad behavior; uncomfortably reminiscent of gold-hungry Conquistadors in the New World, five hundred years previous. Anger and frustration at the constraints of an intensely bureaucratic society somehow permit the craziest of personal behavior. And the ultimate threat of the destruction of it all somehow draws everyone back into the maelstrom, as if there is no escape. As if we all have a necessity to accept the consequences of everyone's actions, and take our punishment, no matter how deadly. . . Bradbury's inclusion of the repeated patterns of human behavior, right down to inadvertent genocide caused by external pestilence and unfamiliar disease, makes The Martian Chronicles an ageless cautionary tale. It made me pause and ask myself – could it be possible that we are forever unable to go beyond who we were? Will every great opportunity of discovery be tainted, tarred, and eventually destroyed by our own clumsy, brutish hand? . . If the answer were simply yes, if this book stopped there, it could not have lasted. And possibly therein lies its longevity, and its ability to both challenge and inspire successive generations of readers. Ray Bradbury was born in Illinois in 1920, and spent most of his life in Los Angeles. He did not go to university and was a full-time writer from the age of twenty-three; his short story 'Homecoming' was picked from the slush pile at Mademoiselle magazine by Truman Capote. Bradbury's first book, a collection of short stories entitled Dark Carnival, was published in 1947. The Martian Chronicles (1950) was followed by The Illustrated Man (1951) and his seminal work of dystopian science fiction, Fahrenheit 451, in 1953. He died in 2012. From the Folio Society description. ISBN: B017EIDFQG .
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