And if the phone rings, he doesn't pick it up. When she proposes marriage, he runs away to another city, where he lives happily alone. When they finally meet, he finds her disgustingly fat, obnoxious, loud, and shallow. He begins dialing phone numbers in a desperate attempt for human contact and manages to get in touch with a woman, who he begins to fall in love with (based on their brief phone conversation). A man wakes up to find that he's been left on Mars by accident after most of the Martian colony has gone back to Earth.

Adam and Eve Plot: Subverted in 'The Silent Towns'.

20 Minutes into the Future: In 'Mars Is Heaven!', the United States vessel XR-53 became the first Earth ship to land on Mars on April 20, 1987.

A film adaptation is rumored to be in the works as of 2013. ' There Will Come Soft Rains', though set on Earth, is part of the same future history, and is included in some versions of the book.Ī miniseries adaptation was made in 1979, which Bradbury called 'just boring,' although it was nominated for a Hugo Award. The stories were revised in 1997 to push it back to 2030. (The stories, written in the 1940s and 1950s, depict the planet as habitable and - initially - inhabited.)Īs originally written, the sequence begins with the first manned expedition to Mars in the distant future year of 1999.

The Martian Chronicles is a series of short stories by Ray Bradbury collected into a single book (published in the UK as The Silver Locusts), describing episodes from a future history in which Earth sends several manned expeditions to, and eventually colonizes, the planet Mars.

The earthmen ray bradbury