The Martian Chronicles

'Who wants to see the Future, who ever does? A man can face the Past, but to think - the pillars crumbled, you say? And the sea empty, and the canals dry, and the maidens dead, and the flowers withered?' The Martian was silent, but then he looked ahead. 'But there they are. I see them. Isn't that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.'

"Night are night for every year and every year, for no reason at all, the woman comes out and looks at the sky, her hands up, for a long moment, looking at the green burning of Earth, not knowing why she looks, and then she goes back and throws a stick on the fire, and the wind comes up and the dead sea goes on being dead."

"The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water."

They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea, and every morning you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls, or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust which, taking all dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind. Afternoons, when the fossil sea was warm and motionless, and the wine trees stood stiff in the yard, and the little distant Martian bone town was all enclosed, and no one drifted out their doors, you could see Mr. K himself in his room, reading from a metal book with raised hieroglyphs over which he brushed his hand, as one might play a harp. And from the book, as his fingers stroked, a voice sang, a soft ancient voice, which told tales of when the sea was red steam on the shore and ancient men had carried clouds of metal insects and electric spiders into battle.

They biked in summer, autumn, or winter. Autumn was most fun, because then they imagined, like on Earth, they were scuttering through autumn leaves.
They would come like a scatter of jackstones on the marble flats beside the canals, the candy-cheeked boys with blue-agate eyes, panting onion-tainted commands to each other. For now that they had reached the dead, forbidden town it was no longer a matter of ‘Last one there’s a girl!’ or ‘First one gets to play Musician!’ Now the dead town’s doors lay wide and they thought they could hear the faintest crackle, like autumn leaves, from inside. They would hush themselves forward, by each other’s elbows, carrying sticks, remembering their parents had told them, ‘Not there! No, to none of the old towns! Watch where you hike. You’ll get the beating of your life when you come home. We’ll check your shoes!’

“Nosotros, los habitantes de la Tierra, tenemos un talento especial para arruinar las cosas grandes y hermosas.”

“Fuimos y somos todavía un pueblo extraviado.”

“Quisimos derribar a Darwin, Huxley y a Freud, pero eran inconmovibles. Y entonces, como unos idiotas, intentamos destruir la religión…Lo conseguimos bastante bien. Perdimos nuestra fe y empezamos a preguntarnos para qué vivíamos. Si el arte no era más que la derivación de un deseo frustrado, si la religión no era más que un engaño, ¿para qué la vida? La fe había explicado siempre todas las cosas. Luego todo se fue por el vertedero, junto con Freud y Darwin.”

“Llegaron porque tenían miedo o porque no lo tenían, porque eran felices o desdichados, porque se sentían como los Peregrinos. Cada uno de ellos tenía una razón diferente. Abandonaban mujeres odiosas, trabajos odiosos o ciudades odiosas; venían para encontrar algo, enterrar algo o alejarse de algo. Venían con sueños ridículos, con sueños nobles o sin sueños.”

most men felt the great illness in them even before the rocket fired into space. And this disease was called The Loneliness, because when you saw your hometown dwindle the size of your fist and then lemon-size and then pin-size and vanish in the fire-wake, you felt you had never been born, there was no town, you were nowhere, with space all around, nothing familiar, only other strange men.

I am a librarian. I discovered me in the library. I went to find me in the library. Before I fell in love with libraries, I was just a six-year-old boy. The library fueled all of my curiosities, from dinosaurs to ancient Egypt. When I graduated from high school in 1938, I began going to the library three nights a week. I did this every week for almost ten years and finally, in 1947, around the time I got married, I figured I was done. So I graduated from the library when I was twenty-seven. I discovered that the library is the real school. (Paris)

In 1949, Bradbury and his wife were expecting their first child. He took a Greyhound bus to New York and checked into a room at the YMCA for fifty cents a night. He took his short stories to a dozen publishers and no one wanted them. … Bradbury had dinner with an editor at Doubleday. When Bradbury recounted that everyone wanted a novel and he didn't have one, the editor … asked if the short stories might be tied together into a book length collection. The title was the editor's idea: … "The Martian Chronicles." Bradbury liked the idea and recalled making notes in 1944 to do a book set on Mars. That evening, he stayed up all night at the YMCA and typed out an outline. He took it to the Doubleday editor the next morning, who read it and wrote Bradbury a check for here Wiki says “ten thousand dollars”; but the interview cited as the source of the story (ref. Paris) says “seven hundred fifty dollars” – maybe the Wiki writer thought they’d be cute by adjusting it for inflation? When Bradbury returned to Los Angeles, he connected all the short stories and that became The Martian Chronicles.