7 Out-of-This-World Facts About Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Martian Chronicles’

For around the first decade of his writing career, Ray Bradbury stuck exclusively to short stories. He published what was technically his first novel in 1950: The Martian Chronicles, which collected and connected many of his Mars-set short stories (plus a few written specifically for the collection). Alongside later novels, such as Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), the book became one of Bradbury’s most famous works. To celebrate the 75th anniversary of The Martian Chronicles, here are a few facts you might not know about the iconic novel.

1. It wasn’t Ray Bradbury’s idea to publish The Martian Chronicles.
2. The Martian Chronicles wouldn’t exist without Edgar Rice Burroughs.
3. Different versions of The Martian Chronicles feature different stories.
4. The Martian Chronicles includes one of Bradbury’s most famous short stories: “There Will Come Soft Rains.”
5. The Martian Chronicles features an homage to Edgar Allan Poe in the form of “Usher II.”
6. The Martian Chronicles inspired some scientists to explore Mars.
7. I Am Legend author Richard Matheson and Logan’s Run director Michael Anderson teamed up to adapt The Martian Chronicles.

It wasn’t Ray Bradbury’s idea to publish The Martian Chronicles.

In 1949, Bradbury was looking to make more money from his writing—his wife, Maggie, was pregnant—so his friend, writer Norman Corwin, suggested he go to New York to sweet-talk editors in person. All of the editors asked if he had a full-length novel to sell, to which he replied, “No I’m a sprinter.”

On his last night in the city, the author had dinner with Walter Bradbury (no relation) from Doubleday, who asked, “Ray, what about all those Martian stories you’ve been writing in the pulp magazines during the last 10 years? Don’t you think they would make a novel if you wove them together in some sort of tapestry and called it The Martian Chronicles?” His suggestion sparked Bradbury’s memory; he had read Sherwood Anderson’s connected short story collection Winesburg, Ohio (1919) a few years earlier and had thought, “wouldn’t it be wonderful if someday I could write a book as good as this but put it on the planet Mars.”

He spent the rest of the night writing the outline for the fix-up novel—which charts the human exploration, and eventual colonization, of Mars—and the next day Walter paid him $750. The editor then asked if he had “any other material that you could give me that we could kid people into thinking it was a novel?” Bradbury described to him what would become The Illustrated Man (1951) and earned another $750 that day.

The Martian Chronicles wouldn’t exist without Edgar Rice Burroughs.

When asked in an interview about whether space exploration interested him as a kid, Bradbury replied, “I wasn’t thinking about space, I was thinking about John Carter and about Mars.” One of the very first stories Bradbury ever wrote was about the Red Planet. “{My parents} bought me a toy typewriter for my twelfth birthday because they knew I wanted one,” he recalled. “I wrote a sequel to The Gods of Mars by Edgar Rice Burroughs, and episodes of Buck Rogers and Tarzan.” In a 2012 New Yorker article, Bradbury went as far as to say, “I know that The Martian Chronicles would never have happened if Burroughs hadn’t had an impact on my life at that time.”

Different versions of The Martian Chronicles feature different stories.

The stories that readers find in The Martian Chronicles will vary depending on which edition they pick up. The original edition put out by Doubleday in 1950 features 26 stories, but in the UK—where it was published under the title The Silver Locusts—“Usher II” was axed to make room for “The Fire Balloons.” (The latter story has since been included in some American versions, such as the 1997 edition, which included a story called “The Wilderness” but nixed “Way in the Middle of the Air”) In the Dutch version, “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” was included (the story was originally called “The Naming of Names,” which is, confusingly, also the title of an entirely different short story in the novel).

The most comprehensive edition of The Martian Chronicles was published by Subterranean Press in 2009. In addition to including all of the original short stories, it also has additional Mars stories—called “The Other Martian Tales”—along with essays and screenplays by Bradbury, Richard Matheson, Joe Hill, John Scalzi, and Marc Scott Zicree.

The Martian Chronicles includes one of Bradbury’s most famous short stories: “There Will Come Soft Rains.”

“There Will Come Soft Rains,” a haunting tale of a lone automated house left standing in the wake of a nuclear bomb explosion, is widely considered to be one of Bradbury’s best short stories. In a write-up for Bradbury’s 2007 Pulitzer Prize Special Citation, Sean Murphy commended the author for writing about the destructiveness of nuclear weapons: “While time has (mostly) quelled the likelihood of total annihilation, Bradbury was a lone voice among his contemporaries in contemplating the potentialities of such horrors.” The author himself considered it to be the story that summed up his essence as a writer.

Nuclear warfare wasn’t the only real-world topic that Bradbury tackled in The Martian Chronicles. The dangers of colonization are commented on in “And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” which sees the indigenous Martian population killed by chicken pox brought by the Earthmen. And “Way in the Middle of the Air” sees Black people fleeing to the freedom of Mars and leaving behind a society that runs on their exploitation.

The Martian Chronicles features an homage to Edgar Allan Poe in the form of “Usher II.”

Bradbury believed that “Poe’s influence on the modern short story is unmatched in English and American literature” and he paid tribute to the macabre author in a few of his short stories: “The Exiles,” “Pillar of Fire,” and The Martian Chronicle’s “Usher II.” In the latter story, a man on Mars builds a replica of the mansion described in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher” so that he can creatively murder—via various Poe-inspired means—those in power who oversaw mass book burning on Earth 30 years earlier. Bradbury soon turned his pen again to the subject of government-mandated book burning in a novella called The Fireman, which went on to become Fahrenheit 451 (and may well be set in the same universe as “Usher II”).

The Martian Chronicles inspired some scientists to explore Mars.

On August 6, 2012, NASA’s Curiosity rover touched down on Mars, and the mission’s team decided to name the landing site Bradbury Landing in memory of the author, who had died of an undisclosed illness just a couple of months earlier on June 5 at the age of 91. “This was not a difficult choice for the science team,” explained Michael Meyer, the program scientist for the mission. “Many of us and millions of other readers were inspired in our lives by stories Ray Bradbury wrote to dream of the possibility of life on Mars.” The name was announced on August 22—Bradbury’s birthday and the day Curiosity went for its first drive on the Red Planet.

Along with members of the Curiosity team citing Bradbury’s Mars-set stories as inspiration, a couple of other scientists have also credited Bradbury with igniting their interest in researching Mars. Peter H. Smith—who led the team that designed the cameras for the Mars Pathfinder mission and was the principal investigator for the Phoenix mission—credits Bradbury with sparking his Martian curiosity. “I remember being amazed that we knew so little about our neighbors,” Smith said in his foreword to Orbiting Ray Bradbury’s Mars. “However, the fuzzy images became clear when I read The Martian Chronicles and on long journeys with Ray I could find the underlying Martian communities.” John Grant—who worked on the Spirit and Opportunity mission—tells a similar story of being enthralled by The Martian Chronicles as a child and declared, “That I am a Martian is thanks in no small part to Ray Bradbury.”

I Am Legend author Richard Matheson and Logan’s Run director Michael Anderson teamed up to adapt The Martian Chronicles.

In 1980, The Martian Chronicles was adapted into a TV miniseries, with Richard Matheson (best-known for penning 1954’s I Am Legend) serving as the writer and Michael Anderson (who had directed the 1976 film Logan’s Run) directing the three episodes. The ensemble cast included Rock Hudson, Bernadette Peters, and Roddy McDowall. Despite all of the big names attached to the project, Bradbury wasn’t impressed with the finished product and summed up his thoughts in just one word: “Boring.”

The Martian Chronicles has also been adapted into an opera, a video game, and a graphic novel. Select short stories were also adapted into episodes of the The Ray Bradbury Theater TV series and the Dimension X radio show. Star Trek star Leonard Nimoy even lent his voice to an abridged audio version of “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “Usher II.”

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