Science Fiction History: 1950 Ray Bradbury and The Martian Chronicles

About the 1950 sci-fi novel The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

--1950. Ray Bradbury was not strong on technology. Perhaps the hot breath of a rocketship would not really create a local summer in the midst of a North American winter, melt snow, make flowers bloom. But it was a lovely picture. Bradbury's Martians were an old and perhaps decadent race, seemingly without modern weaponry. The crew of one expedition from earth was, presumably, killed with the single crossbow of a jealous Martian husband. The crew of another wound up in a Martian madhouse. And did the dead, then, live again--on Mars? But the Martians, ludicrously, fatally, had no resistance to one of the mildest of earth's illnesses. Did they all die? Were those ghosts--or survivors--in the red-dry hills? What did earthfolk do with this 2nd chance at an empty world? The Martian Chronicles may be science fiction, they may be fantasy: They are beautiful, whatever else they may be.