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My favorite chapter in "The Martian Chronicles". I will never forget it.

The Martian Chronicles is my favorite book of all time. I saw him speak at UCLA in 2007 or 2008 and I'll never forget his emphasis on love and being creative. Sad day. Science fiction and literature has lost one of it's greats.

They are sort of corny and 1950s but I have always liked Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles."

The Martian Chronicles is SF, maybe not Hard SF, but SF.
That's where the limit between SF and fantastic is blury, but in that regard Dick is sometimes more fantasy, or not so science (consider Time Out of Joint for instance, probable inspiration for the Truman Show).

I loved The Martian Chronicles, though I found it difficult to enjoy much of the rest of his writing. But his skill was undeniable, his influence is still huge, and you can find touches of his style in many other authors' work.

RIP

The Martian Chronicles is worth reading, especially as an allegory.

Really just about anything by Bradbury is a good read. We read that one in high school, Fahrenheit 451. I liked it so much that my mother also bought me The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, both of which are collections of related short stories and are very good.

On the topic of Mars, may I suggest The Martian Chronicles by R.Bradbury. It's on the other end of the spectrum from hard SciFi - more like lyrical and poetic SciFi.

I read and enjoyed Bradbury's short stories as a teenager, but his novels made no connection with me. I found them boring.

A few years ago, I started reading science fiction again and reread The Martian Chronicles. The degree to which it's themes about family and community connected was stunning.

Ray Bradbury was one of my favorite authors as a child. The depth and complexity of his stories truly enlightened me about good Sci-Fi.

Most students in the US probably read Fahrenheit 451 in high school, but I enrolled in a literature course at the Naval Academy that focused on science fiction. The Martian Chronicles was a main text for the class. IIRC, the professor had a very special connection to Bradbury, but rather than get it completely wrong, I'll just state that I think the professor (who was a USAF officer) was the curator of a collection of his works.

I might try and re-read 451. I think his words will be even more powerful and prescient now.

Blindsight was great.

The Martian Chronicles and The City and the Stars both reliably produce a kind of satisfying melancholy, if that makes sense, at least for me. Not unlike To the Lighthouse, actually. Might not quite be what you're looking for, but... similar-ish?

There's a short story collection called Beyond Flesh that has some solid horror moments of the sort you're looking for, I think.

The Martian Chronicles is more like a concept album, but with short stories instead of songs, than a novel. There are some connections here and there but the vibe is always more important than the details or any broader narrative, as far as linking the stories together.

Fair warning: To the Lighthouse is a (gently!) stream-of-consciousness work of Modernist fiction, and the entire middle act is mostly a description of a vacation home aging for a time, largely absent any people. It's also one of my favorite books, but it's, ah, subtle, I guess. Think a series of impressionist paintings of everyday life, nature, and empty rooms, but in book form.

I hadn't thought about it a lot but on reflection that "satisfying melancholy" effect is one of my most treasured feelings I can get from fiction. There's something childlike about it that really appeals to me—and now that I think about it, a lot of the big children's classic films, especially of 80s, went for this in a big way. Almost everything by Don Bluth. The Neverending Story. That kind of thing. Might be why I make that association.

Just scanned my shelves looking for more. The short stories of Dinesen, a bit? The Call of the Wild, but I think that might just be a "me" thing. It's a lot more common in poetry, where you can read through an anthology for any famous poet and probably encounter it many times, than in fiction. Possibly it's more common in bodies of literature outside of English—I'm thinking especially of Russian and French—where I'm even less well-read than I am in English. I just don't know.

The lesson here: if you have a tendency toward perfectionism, like me, fight it. Produce things, a lot of things. Let your abilities develop by actually producing. Don't try to make One Great Thing. You're probably wrong about which thing is your One Great Thing anyway.

I was just reading the new introduction that Ray Bradbury wrote for The Martian Chronicles. It came together from a bunch of "asides" that he wrote just for fun -- he wasn't taking them very seriously. Then an editor saw them and suggested that they formed a whole story.

> It's actually a pretty decent movie, but it's a drama, not sci-fi. It uses "science" purely as an aesthetic device without actually exploring any scientific effects.

Fair assessment, but I beg to differ on your definition of "sci-fi"; I find it quite restrictive. You can say the same for Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles". Mars might as well be Narnia as he just uses the notion of it being an alien planet to set-up tension and make a point about human behavior. It's more philosophical/psychological than scientific but I'd still call it sci-fi.

I guess you are entitled to expect a harder integration of science from a 2011 sci-fi film but I think "Another Earth" definitely takes from established, if outdated, cues in the genre.

But potaytos and potahtos. We can differ in opinion.