The Martian Chronicles

Reception

Upon publication, The Paris Review noted that "The Martian Chronicles ... was embraced by the science-fiction community as well as critics, a rare achievement for the genre. Christopher Isherwood hailed Bradbury as 'truly original' and a 'very great and unusual talent'."[29] Isherwood argued that Bradbury's works were "tales of the grotesque and arabesque", and compared them to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, writing that Bradbury "already deserves to be measured against the greatest master of his particular genre."[30] Writer and critic Anthony Boucher and critic J. Francis McComas praised Chronicles as "a poet's interpretation of future history beyond the limits of any fictional form".[31] The writer L. Sprague de Camp, however, declared that Bradbury would improve "when he escapes from the influence of Hemingway and Saroyan", placing him in "the tradition of anti-science-fiction writers [who] see no good in the machine age". Still, de Camp acknowledged that "[Bradbury's] stories have considerable emotional impact, and many will love them".[32]

A decade of after its publication, Damon Knight in his "Books" column for F&SF listed The Martian Chronicles on his top-ten science fiction books of the 1950s.[33]

By September 1979 more than three million copies of The Martian Chronicles had been sold.[34]


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