The Martian Chronicles

The Martian Chronicles is a science fiction fix-up novel published in 1950 by the American writer Ray Bradbury, assembled from short stories into a continuous chronicle.

The book projects American society immediately after the Second World War into a technologically advanced future, in which humanity's capacity to create and to destroy produces both miraculous and devastating results. Events include the destruction of Martian and human civilisations, though the book contains no stories set at the catastrophes themselves, which is a deliberate effect of the chronological arrangement.

The result is a colonisation narrative with an ending that is already known. The colony is left to build a new Earth on Mars after nuclear war removes the home planet. Bradbury wrote the stories separately and then ordered them into a chronicle, so the book moves in leaps: expeditions that fail, a settlement that grows, and a culture that repeats the mistakes of the world it left behind. The Martians are present as ruins and as memory more often than as a living society, which is what gives the colonisation its haunted quality, and the ending closes the circle by leaving the survivors free to begin again.