Tuesday, March 25, 2003

 
BOOK REVIEW: THE MARTIAN CHRONOCLES (1950) * * (2 stars out of 4).
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Ray Bradbury's classic collection of stories about Mars was very disappointing to me. The book, except for the very end, is set between 1999 and 2005. I usually really enjoy seeing how things like that hold up when the time comes. But this book did not hold up well at all, mainly because it is simplistic and slow. There's one particularly offensive story where the last man on Mars goes to great lengths to find the last woman on Mars. He tries calling houses at random, tries fancy hotels, and then finally reasons that a woman would be in a beauty parlor. Sure enough he's right. Then he drives for days to meet her. But when he sees that she's too fat, he drives away and never comes back. I have liked some of Ray Bradbury's short stories, and there are a couple clever ones in this book. But this occurred to me. Bradbury is often called America's greatest living science-fiction writer. But he wrote The Martian Chronicles, his first book, in 1949. The following year he wrote his next-best known work, Fahrenheit 451 (so named because that's the temperature at which books burn). But what has he really written since? There are some books you've heard of, like The Illustrated Man in 1951, Dandelion Wine in 1957, and Something Wicked This Way Comes back in 1962, and nothing else I've ever heard of. That's a fine collection of work for any author, but I don't think it's as impressive as a lot of other great writers. I'm starting to wonder if he might be okay, but overrated.

This is The Official Record. 7:01 PM
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