Martian Chronicles

It's so weird; I absolutely loved this but can't exactly tell what it was I loved! It was so eerie... I guess that's exactly the point, though! A few months ago I read "Fahrenheit 451" and loved the concept and world-building but found the writing to be very slow and quite boring. Therefore, when I ran into this in my local library I was quite sceptical. And since sci-fi isn't my usual genre - although I do really enjoy it whenever I read it - I wasn't sure I should risk reading this book. I'm so glad I did, though! This was so unexpectedly awesome! Like, where had it been all this time? I mean, it was SO weird and just unusual that it automatically clicked. The writing was unexpectedly lyrical, the atmosphere was very unsettling and spooky in a very sophisticated, I would call it, way and the plot was just ... unbelievable! Each human trip to Mars went terribly wrong in a very peculiar way, so it was FULL of plot-twists, but each plot-twist was different from the others! It was just surprise, surprise, surprise every other page. Like, Bradbury. can you show some mercy to my sensitive soul, please? I almost had a heart attack - or 26 - with all the revolutionary plot twists. I just couldn't take it! So innovative and brilliant! Every rule you thought time or space, or logic for that matter, had to obey... yeah, they don't exist here. And, just like that, here you go, a full book that is just completely over human perception and capability. It's, sincerely, a whole new world! Now, apart from all the above, can I just talk about the completely honest depiction of human brutality and the underlining environmental message of this book? We, Earth men, have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things." HOW. TRUE. AND. WORRYING. IS. THAT? Although the book uses some doses of humour, the outcry against imperialism and human greed is clear and hella important! Bradbury shows how mankind always wants to own more and more and more and destroys whoever looks or thinks differently! How we distance ourselves from art and how that makes us even more terrifying beasts, how we misinterpret faith and religion and use it to justify our prejudice! So many important messages. And the most amazing, as I see it, is that a book written in the 1950s is even more relevant today, with all the messages about the importance of living in peace with nature, while we're facing the climate emergency. Especially this next part, about how people change nature to fit their wishes really got to me: “Ask me, then, if I believe in the spirit of the things as they were used, and I'll say yes. They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.” Such a masterpiece! It left me astonished! I recommend this to everyone, no matter how much out of your comfort zone it seems!