Talk:The Martian Chronicles

Dark they were and Golden-Eyed

This story is related to the Martian Chronicles. Someone please add it in. Thank you! — Preceding unsigned comment added by 164.104.136.60 (talk) 16:23, 28 February 2013 (UTC)

This story was one of my favourite Bradbury Martian tales, and I'm almost certain that it was in the edition of "The Martian Chronicles" that I first read, during the mid-1970s. That edition was a hard-cover one for a book club, but I don't recall exactly which club; it may have been the Science Fiction Book Club, or the Book of the Month Club, or something similar. I believe the publisher (club) was British, as I borrowed it from an expatriate British engineer whilst we were living in Malaysia, and he had many more titles from that club in a uniform edition, from a subscription. This particular book was probably at least ten years old when I read it, so I'm guessing it was published around 1960. If anybody has details of that edition, including its publisher, date and contents, please do add that info to the article. yoyo (talk) 10:56, 1 March 2014 (UTC)

I've discovered that it has been sold on Amazon.co.uk at some stage in the past, and was published by the Science Fiction Book Club in 1953. yoyo (talk) 15:06, 2 March 2014 (UTC)

The Internet Speculative Fiction Database is excellent for this sort of thing - apparently the story did appear in this Dutch version of the book published in 1974. But not in any of the English-language versions, including the 1953 SF Book Club printing. To confuse matters it was originally called "The Naming of Names", which was used as the title of a completely different story in the book itself. -Ashley Pomeroy (talk) 20:16, 22 June 2023 (UTC)

Discussion

A number of the stories were produced for Radio's X-1 series, I will check my audio files for actors' names which might help track down broadcast dates. --Alf ^melmac 13:08, 20 January 2006 (UTC)

The Watchers

The Bradbury short story The Watchers published in Weird Tales in 1945 is unrelated to the bridge passage of the same name in The Martian Chronicles, so I have removed the "may be different" speculation. — Walloon 18:13, 22 January 2006 (UTC)

Thanks for checking and correcting that, Walloon. - 68.100.18.183 00:05, 23 January 2006 (UTC)RandomCritic.

wrong dates!

The movie version of The Martian Chronicles starts in 1999. The book, though, starts in 2030. I think that should be changed in the article. It should be specified that the book and the movie have different dates. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 75.132.222.42 (talk) 20:12, 2 December 2007 (UTC)

I've got the book in front of me right now and the first chapter is in January, 1999. --ziekerz (talk) 17:15, 16 January 2008 (UTC)

Recent editions of this book have had the dates updated for 21st century readers. Don't know why this was done, maybe this would be a good section to add to the article about why this was done and how readers reacted to this. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 169.232.225.164 (talk) 04:21, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

See Publication History

Date issues are addressed in the Publication History section. As 2030 approaches and no human has yet to land on Mars, expect publishers to advance the dates again.2601:140:8980:4B20:1CDA:D1F2:B279:E3AF (talk) 00:39, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Title of article should be italicized

It is a book title, as shown by capitalization of the word "Chronicles." 201.9.212.47 (talk) 02:51, 5 March 2008 (UTC)

Way in the Middle of the Air

This story was deleted from the edition I bought, so the year 2034 depicted in the main article probably should be deleted? Book was created for Book of the Month Club, ISBN 0-965-01746-X. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 169.232.225.164 (talk) 04:20, 23 April 2008 (UTC)

See "Way in the Middle of the Air" under Contents

Publication History for the story is written into this section. You are right, the story was not included in the 1997 edition. 2601:140:8980:4B20:1CDA:D1F2:B279:E3AF (talk) 00:43, 13 December 2020 (UTC)

Paris Review

"Around 1947, when I published my first novel, Dark Carnival, I met the secretary of Norman Corwin, a big name in radio—a director, writer, and producer. Through her I sent him a copy of Dark Carnival and wrote a letter saying, If you like this book as much as I like your work, I’d like to buy you drinks someday. A week later the phone rang and it was Norman. He said, You’re not buying me drinks, I’m buying you dinner. That was the start of a lifelong friendship. That first time he took me to dinner I told him about my Martian story “Ylla.” He said, Wow, that’s great, write more of those. So I did. In a way, that was what caused The Martian Chronicles to be born.

There was another reason. In 1949, my wife Maggie became pregnant with our first daughter, Susan. Up until then, Maggie had worked full-time and I stayed home writing my short stories. But now that she was going to have the baby, I needed to earn more money. I needed a book contract. Norman suggested I travel to New York City to meet editors and make an impression, so I took a Greyhound bus to New York and stayed at the YMCA, fifty cents a night. I took my stories around to a dozen publishers. Nobody wanted them. They said, We don’t publish stories. Nobody reads them. Don’t you have a novel? I said, No, I don’t. I’m a sprinter, not a marathon runner. I was ready to go home when, on my last night, I had dinner with an editor at Doubleday named Walter Bradbury—no relation. He said, Wouldn’t there be a book if you took all those Martian stories and tied them together? You could call it “The Martian Chronicles.” It was his title, not mine. I said, Oh, my God. I had read Winesburg, Ohio when I was twenty-four years old, in 1944. I was so taken with it that I thought, Someday I’d like to write a book like this, but I’d set it on Mars. I’d actually made a note about this in 1944, but I’d forgotten about it.

I stayed up all night at the YMCA and typed out an outline. I took it to him the next morning. He read it and said, I’ll give you a check for seven hundred and fifty bucks. I went back to Los Angeles and connected all the short stories and it became The Martian Chronicles. It’s called a novel, but you’re right, it’s really a book of short stories all tied together."

http://www.theparisreview.org/interviews/6012/the-art-of-fiction-no-203-ray-bradbury

Hopefully these quotes will be helpful. --Gwern (contribs) 18:07 11 May 2011 (GMT)

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The legacy of The Martian Chronicles

I think it would be great to add a section to the article on the cultural contributions of the work since it remains in print and popular so long after it was first published. What do you think? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 99.203.16.62 (talk) 02:30, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

I think this would be difficult as its impact is both huge and diffuse. It has become a cultural touchstone, like the Bible used to be (i.e. anyone in Western culture writing or reading a story 100 years ago would have been familiar with all the stories in the Bible). Who has since written a Mars story without being aware of TMC? And I would wager that most writers of Mars stories take care to be not too much like Bradbury, lest they be accused of epigonism. So I would agree that TMC has been tremendously influential, and yet there is little in sci fi where you could point at and say, that's Bradbury right there. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:9D41:A19E:E763:A58 (talk) 07:47, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

The following comic strip has episodes directly based on TMC stories: https://www.bedetheque.com/serie-7950-BD-Chronique-d-extraterrestres.html 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:9D41:A19E:E763:A58 (talk) 07:59, 4 October 2021 (UTC)

Interpretation of "The Fire Balloons" has been called "ambiguous"

That is clumsy English. It is the story itself that is ambiguous, precisely because it allows multiple interpretations, each of which can be as clear and crisp as you want. One might say that the interpretation is problematic because of the ambiguities inherent in the story, especially when viewed in the context of the rest of the work. 2A01:CB0C:CD:D800:9D41:A19E:E763:A58 (talk) 08:10, 4 October 2021 (UTC)