A book Review by Cándido Pintos Andrés
"A poet in Mars: The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury"
Photo by Cándido Pintos
Rather than just an author of Science Fiction, Ray Bradbury is a writer in capital letters. In The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury shows us a collection of short stories of deep reflections on humanity and society, with the disguise of the colonization of Mars, when he is really talking about destruction and decay. Along the book, and apparently through the different expeditions to Mars, the author addresses the problem of racism, religion, the expansion of capitalism, the machine-age utopia, the future of technology, loneliness and solitude. In fact Mars, as the multiple rockets of the story, is just a means and the book could be entitled The American Chronicles with just a few changes and new descriptions
But he is also a visionary, and his stories are a showcase for both future technology (“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 ..”) and the threats posed by this technology against its creators (“The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly”)
Ray Bradbury writes with evocative language and masters creating emotional atmospheres with a prose touched by poetry. If not among the best, one of the most influential writers of his generation, inside and even outside the literary world, despite the fact that “We earth men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things.”
Cándido Pintos Andrés
