Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams and metaphor - of crystal pillars
and fossil seas - where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a
silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and
commercialize, to grow and to learn - first a trickle, then a torrent, rushing
from a world with no future toward a promise of tomorrow. The Earthman
conquers Mars...and then is conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of
comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient,
mysterious native race.
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Ray Bradbury
The Martian Chronicles
ePub r1.0
SoporAeternus
15.05.16
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Título original:
The Martian Chronicles
Ray Bradbury, 1946
Diseño de cubierta: Titivillus
Editor digital: SoporAeternus
ePub base r1.2
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With love and gratitude,
to Maggie/Marguerite,
who typed this manuscript
way back in 1949.
And to
Norman Corwin
and
WALTER I. BRADBURY,
fine friends and midwives!
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Green Town, Somewhere on Mars; Mars, Somewhere in
Egypt
An Introduction by Ray Bradbury
“Don’t tell me what I’m doing; I don’t want to know!”
Those are not my words. They were spoken by my friend, the Italian film
director, Federico Fellini. As he shot his screenplays scene by scene, he refused
seeing the new footage trapped in the camera and printed in the laboratory at the end
of each day. He wanted his scenes to remain mysterious
provocateurs
to lure him on.
So it has been with my stories, plays, and poems over most of my lifetime. So it
was with
The Martian Chronicles
in the years just before my marriage in 1947,
culminating in the rapid surprises of the final work in the summer of 1949. What
began as an occasional story or “aside” concerning the Red Planet became a
pomegranate explosion in July and August of that year when I jumped to my
typewriter each morning to find what rare new thing my Muse was willing to deliver.
Did I have such a Muse? And did I always believe in that mythical beast? No.
Early on, in and out of high school, and standing on a street corner selling
newspapers, I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders,
imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truths
beneath my skin and behind my eyes.
Even though I wrote a series of very good weird/fantasy stories which were
published in my midtwenties, I learned nothing from them. I refused to see that I was
disturbing a lot of good stuff in my head and trapping it on paper. My peculiar stories
were vivid and real. My future tales were lifeless robots, mechanical and motionless.
It was Sherwood Anderson’s
Winesburg, Ohio
that set me free. Sometime in my
twentieth-fourth year, I was stunned by its dozen characters living their lives on half-
lit porches and in sunless attics of that always autumn town. “Oh, Lord,” I cried. “If I
could write a book half as fine as this, but set it on Mars, how incredible that would
be!”
I scribbled down a list of possible sites and folks on that distant world, imagined
titles, started and stopped a dozen tales, then filed it away and forgot it. Or
