Green Town, Somewhere on Mars; Mars, Somewhere inEgyptAn 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 filmdirector, Federico Fellini. As he shot his screenplays scene by scene, he refusedseeing the new footage trapped in the camera and printed in the laboratory at the endof each day. He wanted his scenes to remain mysteriousprovocateursto lure him on.So it has been with my stories, plays, and poems over most of my lifetime. So itwas withThe Martian Chroniclesin the years just before my marriage in 1947,culminating in the rapid surprises of the final work in the summer of 1949. Whatbegan as an occasional story or “aside” concerning the Red Planet became apomegranate explosion in July and August of that year when I jumped to mytypewriter 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 sellingnewspapers, I did what most writers do at their beginnings: emulated my elders,imitated my peers, thus turning away from any possibility of discovering truthsbeneath my skin and behind my eyes.Even though I wrote a series of very good weird/fantasy stories which werepublished in my midtwenties, I learned nothing from them. I refused to see that I wasdisturbing a lot of good stuff in my head and trapping it on paper. My peculiar storieswere vivid and real. My future tales were lifeless robots, mechanical and motionless.It was Sherwood Anderson’sWinesburg, Ohiothat set me free. Sometime in mytwentieth-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 Icould write a book half as fine as this, but set it on Mars, how incredible that wouldbe!”I scribbled down a list of possible sites and folks on that distant world, imagined
