Ray Bradbury (1920–2012) was an iconic, award-winning US writer of speculative fiction who became internationally beloved due mainly to his lyrical, deeply humane short stories as well as The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951), the classic novel about censorship Fahrenheit 451 (1953), and Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), which had a direct influence on Neil Gaiman and Stephen King. Many of his fictions were turned into movies or adapted for television. Bradbury himself wrote for television and film, receiving an Emmy Award and his own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame. Bradbury also received a National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush and the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, and was inducted into the Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame in 1999. An asteroid has also been named in his honor.
Bradbury discovered science fiction in 1937 and began publishing his fanzine Futuria Fantasia in 1939. He would, all his life, be fond of the genre community but had startlingly eclectic and wide-ranging approaches to writing fiction that took him far afield and endeared him to a broad general audience. After a number of early stories that showed promise, the famous Bradbury style began to take shape: poetic, evocative, consciously symbolic, with strong nostalgic elements and a leaning toward the macabre—his work was always as much fantasy and horror as science fiction. This darkness served Bradbury well, as it balanced the more sentimental aspects of his writing and helped him create more layered and interesting work.
Bradbury’s most iconic work is probably the mosaic novel The Martian Chronicles, which was made into a television miniseries and, in the Spanish edition, features an introduction by Jorge Luis Borges. Bradbury once said that John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath was the inspiration behind the structure of the book. Evocative and closely interwoven, the stories are linked by recurring images and themes. The stories tell of the repeated attempts by humans to colonize Mars, of the way they bring their old prejudices with them, including expectations that settlement on Mars could safely replicate their experience of California suburban life, and of their repeated, ambiguous meetings with the shape-changing Martians.
The mood of The Martian Chronicles is of loneliness and nostalgia; a pensive regret suffuses the book. This approach would prove too un-science-fictional for some critics, and the book received a mixed reception in the genre community. Although Damon Knight listed The Martian Chronicles as one of the top science fiction books of 1950, L. Sprague de Camp thought Bradbury’s style was too literary, claiming Bradbury must have been influenced by Ernest Hemingway and William Saroyan. Bradbury himself said he was heavily influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs. What is clear is the maturity of the work, dealing in subtle and deft fashion with complex themes and issues.
“September 2005: The Martian” was first published as a stand-alone short story in Super Science Stories in November 1949.