“The Martian Chronicles” by Ray Bradbury was both a haunting and thrilling experience. The book is a collection of stories narrated in chronological order of mankind’s invasion of Mars.

The stories read like a dystopian invasion story, except men from Earth are the ones invading a foreign land. Bradbury’s ability to weave stories together with a common theme telling of this colonization, first confronting the foreign and then re-creating life from Earth on Mars because the lack of familiarity and the differences cause fear.

There were so many ideas Bradbury introduces about the complication of colonizing another planet, inhabiting a new place completely foreign and “other” and how these scenarios could play out were so convincing and plausible that the outcomes are almost sickening.

While Bradbury published this brilliant work twenty years before astronauts from the U.S. even landed on the Moon, his foresight into the future was uncanny. This is an important book to consider before we endeavor future trips to planets deeper in space beyond Earth.

– Jason