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Scientific journal

In academic publishing, a scientific journal is a periodical publication designed to further the progress of science by disseminating new research findings to the scientific community. These journals serve as a platform for researchers, scholars, and scientists to share their latest discoveries, insights, and methodologies across a multitude of scientific disciplines. Unlike professional or trade magazines, scientific journals are characterized by their rigorous peer review process, which aims to ensure the validity, reliability, and quality of the published content. With origins dating back to the 17th century, the publication of scientific journals has evolved significantly, playing a pivotal role in the advancement of scientific knowledge, fostering academic discourse, and facilitating collaboration within the scientific community.

, it is estimated that over 28,100 active scientific journals are in publication, covering a broad spectrum of disciplines from the general sciences, as seen in journals like Science and Nature, to highly specialized fields. These journals primarily publish peer-reviewed articles, including original research, review articles, and perspectives, each serving distinct purposes within the academic landscape. The advent of electronic publishing has further expanded the reach and accessibility of scientific journals, enabling more efficient dissemination and retrieval of information, while also addressing challenges related to cost and copyright.

Scientific journals not only contribute to the dissemination and archival of scientific knowledge but also play a critical role in the academic and research careers of scientists. They are instrumental in keeping researchers informed about the latest developments in their field, supporting the integrity of research through reproducibility and replicability, and influencing the direction of future research endeavors.

Scientific journals
There are thousands of scientific journals in publication, with one estimate from 2012 indicating that there were 28,100 that were active, and many more have been published at various points in the past (see list of scientific journals). Most journals are highly specialized, although some of the oldest journals such as Science and Nature publish articles and scientific papers across a wide range of scientific fields. Scientific journals contain articles that have been peer reviewed, in an attempt to ensure that articles meet the journal's standards of quality and scientific validity.

Although scientific journals are superficially similar to professional magazines (or trade journals), they are actually quite different. Among other things, scientific journals' papers' authors are experts who must cite everything (and have a bibliography). They also deal with research, and are peer reviewed. Meanwhile, trade journals are aimed at people in different fields, focusing on how people in these fields can do their jobs better. They additionally cover information related to work, and include tips and advice for improving performance, but they are not scholarly.

Articles in scientific journals
Articles in scientific journals are mostly written by active scientists such as students, researchers, and professors. Their intended audience is others in the field (such as students and experts), meaning their content is more advanced and sophisticated than what is found regular publications. They have different purposes, depending on the type. Articles with original research are meant to share it with others in the field, review articles give summaries of research that has already been done, and perspective articles give researchers' views on research that their peers performed.

Each article has several different sections, including the following:

 * The title;
 * Information about the author(s);
 * The abstract, which is a one-paragraph summary of the article;
 * The introduction, including a background, why the research was done, research on this topic that has been done before, and (possibly) a hypothesis;
 * The methodology or method, which includes the way the research was done, details concerning the study's sample, measures for assessment, and the procedure;
 * Findings or results, which summarize what the study found;
 * Conclusion, comments, or discussion, which both explain how the results answered the questions that were posed, as well as areas that could be researched in the future;
 * A list of works that the article's author cited.

Scientific journal articles are not usually read casually like a person would read a magazine. Whereas magazine articles can be read in a more casual manner, reading an article in a scientific periodical requires a lot more concentration. Reading an article in a scientific journal usually entails first reading the title, to see if it was related to the desired topic. If it was, the next step is to read the abstract (or summary or conclusion, if the abstract is missing), to see if the article is worth reading. Then, if it seems like reading it would be worthwhile, the reader would then read the whole article.

Publishing research results is an essential part of helping science to advance. If scientists are describing experiments or calculations, they should also explain how they did them so that an independent researcher could repeat the experiment or calculation to verify the results, or so that they could evaluate whatever the research article's findings were. Each such journal article also becomes part of the permanent scientific record.

Scope
Articles in scientific journals can be used in research and higher education. Scientific articles allow researchers to keep up to date with the developments of their field and direct their own research. An essential part of a scientific article is citation of earlier work. The impact of articles and journals is often assessed by counting citations (citation impact). Some classes are partially devoted to the explication of classic articles, and seminar classes can consist of the presentation by each student of a classic or current paper. Schoolbooks and textbooks have been written usually only on established topics, while the latest research and more obscure topics are only accessible through scientific articles. In a scientific research group or academic department it is usual for the content of current scientific journals to be discussed in journal clubs. Public funding bodies often require the results to be published in scientific journals. Academic credentials for promotion into academic ranks are established in large part by the number and impact of scientific articles published. Many doctoral programs allow for thesis by publication, where the candidate is required to publish a certain number of scientific articles.

Wording
Articles tend to be highly technical, representing the latest theoretical research and experimental results in the field of science covered by the journal. They are often incomprehensible to anyone except for researchers in the field and advanced students. In some subjects this is inevitable given the nature of the content. Usually, rigorous rules of scientific writing are enforced by the editors; however, these rules may vary from journal to journal, especially between journals from different publishers. Articles are usually either original articles reporting completely new results or reviews of current literature. There are also scientific publications that bridge the gap between articles and books by publishing thematic volumes of chapters from different authors. Many journals have a regional focus, specializing in publishing papers from a particular geographic region, like African Invertebrates.

History
In the 17th century, scientists wrote letters to each other, and included scientific ideas with them. Then, in the mid-17th century, scientists began to hold meetings and share their scientific ideas. Eventually, they led to starting organizations, such as the Royal Society (1660) and the French Academy of Sciences (1666). In 1665, the French Journal des sçavans and the English Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society began systematically publishing research results. Over a thousand, mostly ephemeral, were founded in the 18th century, and the number has increased rapidly since then.

Peer review did not begin until the 1970s, and was seen as a way of enabling researchers who were not as well-known to have their papers published in journals that were more prestigious. Though it was originally done by mailing copies of papers to reviewers, it is now done online.

Publishing process
The authors of scientific articles are active researchers instead of journalists; typically, a graduate student or a researcher writes a paper with a professor. As such, the authors are unpaid and receive no compensation from the journal. However, their funding bodies may require them to publish in scientific journals. The paper is submitted to the journal office, where the editor considers the paper for appropriateness, potential scientific impact and novelty. If the journal's editor considers the paper appropriate, the paper is submitted to scholarly peer review. Depending on the field, journal and paper, the paper is sent to 1–3 reviewers for evaluation before they can be granted permission to publish. Reviewers are expected to check the paper for soundness of its scientific argument, including whether the author(s) are sufficiently acquainted with recent relevant research that bears on their study, whether the data was collected or considered appropriately and reproducibly, and whether the data discussed supports the conclusion offered and the implications suggested. Novelty is also key: existing work must be appropriately considered and referenced, and new results improving on the state of the art presented. Reviewers are usually unpaid and not a part of the journal staff—instead, they should be "peers", i.e. researchers in the same field as the paper in question.

Standards and impact
The standards that a journal uses to determine publication can vary widely. Some journals, such as Nature, Science, PNAS, and Physical Review Letters, have a reputation of publishing articles that mark a fundamental breakthrough in their respective fields. In many fields, a formal or informal hierarchy of scientific journals exists; the most prestigious journal in a field tends to be the most selective in terms of the articles it will select for publication, and usually will also have the highest impact factor. In some countries, journal rankings can be utilized for funding decisions and even evaluation of individual researchers, although they are poorly suited for that purpose.

Reproducibility and replicability
For scientific journals, reproducibility and replicability of the scientific results are core concepts that allow other scientists to check and reproduce the results under the same conditions described in the paper or at least similar conditions and produce similar results with similar measurements of the same measurand or carried out under changed conditions of measurement. While the ability to reproduce the results based only on details included in the article is expected, verification of reproducibility by a third party is not generally required for publication. The reproducibility of results presented in an article is therefore judged implicitly by the quality of the procedures reported and agreement with the data provided. However, some journals in the field of chemistry such as Inorganic Syntheses and Organic Syntheses require independent reproduction of the results presented as part of the review process. The inability for independent researches to reproduce published results is widespread, with 70% of researchers reporting failure to reproduce another scientist's results, including more than half who report failing to reproduce their own experiments. Sources of irreproducibility vary, including publication of falsified or misrepresented data and poor detailing of procedures.

Types of articles

There are several types of journal article; the exact terminology and definitions vary by field and specific journal, but often include:
 * Letters (also called communications, and not to be confused with letters to the editor) are short descriptions of important current research findings that are usually fast-tracked for immediate publication because they are considered urgent.
 * Research notes are short descriptions of current research findings that are considered less urgent or important than Letters.
 * Articles are usually between five and twenty pages and are complete descriptions of current original research findings, but there are considerable variations between scientific fields and journals—80-page articles are not rare in mathematics or theoretical computer science.
 * Supplemental articles contain a large volume of tabular data that is the result of current research and may be dozens or hundreds of pages with mostly numerical data. Some journals now only publish this data electronically on the Internet. Supplemental information also contains other voluminous material not appropriate for the main body of the article, like descriptions of routine procedures, derivations of equations, source code, non-essential data, spectra or other such miscellaneous information.
 * Review articles do not cover original research but rather accumulate the results of many different articles on a particular topic into a coherent narrative about the state of the art in that field. Review articles provide information about the topic and also provide journal references to the original research. Reviews may be entirely narrative, or may provide quantitative summary estimates resulting from the application of meta-analytical methods.
 * Data papers are articles dedicated to describe datasets. This type of article is becoming popular and journals exclusively dedicated to them have been established, e.g. Scientific Data and Earth System Science Data.
 * Video papers are a recent addition to practice of scientific publications. They most often combine an online video demonstration of a new technique or protocol with a rigorous textual description.

The formats of journal articles vary, but many follow the general IMRAD scheme recommended by the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors. Such articles begin with an abstract, which is a one-to-four-paragraph summary of the paper. The introduction describes the background for the research including a discussion of similar research. The materials and methods or experimental section provides specific details of how the research was conducted. The results and discussion section describes the outcome and implications of the research, and the conclusion section places the research in context and describes avenues for further exploration.

In addition to the above, some scientific journals such as Science will include a news section where scientific developments (often involving political issues) are described. These articles are often written by science journalists and not by scientists. In addition, some journals will include an editorial section and a section for letters to the editor. While these are articles published within a journal, in general they are not regarded as scientific journal articles because they have not been peer-reviewed.

Electronic publishing
Electronic publishing is a new area of information dissemination. One definition of electronic publishing is in the context of the scientific journal. It is the presentation of scholarly scientific results in only an electronic (non-paper) form. This is from its first write-up, or creation, to its publication or dissemination. The electronic scientific journal is specifically designed to be presented on the internet. It is defined as not being previously printed material adapted, or retooled, and then delivered electronically.

Electronic publishing will likely continue to exist alongside paper publishing for the foreseeable future, since whilst output to a screen is important for browsing and searching, it is not well suited for extensive reading. Formats suitable both for reading on paper, and for manipulation by the reader's computer will need to be integrated. Many journals are electronically available in formats readable on screen via web browsers, as well as in portable document format PDF, suitable for printing and storing on a local desktop or laptop computer. New tools such as JATS and Utopia Documents provide a 'bridge' to the 'web-versions' in that they connect the content in PDF versions directly to the World Wide Web via hyperlinks that are created 'on-the-fly'. The PDF version of an article is usually seen as the version of record, but the matter is subject to some debate.

Electronic counterparts of established print journals already promote and deliver rapid dissemination of peer-reviewed and edited, "published" articles. Other journals, whether spin-offs of established print journals, or created as electronic only, have come into existence promoting the rapid dissemination capability, and availability, on the Internet. In tandem with this is the speeding up of peer review, copyediting, page makeup, and other steps in the process to support rapid dissemination.

Other improvements, benefits and unique values of electronically publishing the scientific journal are easy availability of supplementary materials (data, graphics and video), lower cost, and availability to more people, especially scientists from non-developed countries. Hence, research results from more developed nations are becoming more accessible to scientists from non-developed countries.

Moreover, electronic publishing of scientific journals has been accomplished without compromising the standards of the refereed, peer review process.

One form is the online equivalent of the conventional paper journal. By 2006, almost all scientific journals have, while retaining their peer-review process, established electronic versions; a number have moved entirely to electronic publication. In a similar manner, most academic libraries buy the electronic version and purchase a paper copy only for the most important or most-used titles.

There is usually a delay of several months after an article is written before it is published in a journal, making paper journals not an ideal format for announcing the latest research. Many journals now publish the final papers in their electronic version as soon as they are ready, without waiting for the assembly of a complete issue, as is necessary with paper. In many fields in which even greater speed is wanted, such as physics, the role of the journal at disseminating the latest research has largely been replaced by preprint databases such as arXiv.org. Almost all such articles are eventually published in traditional journals, which still provide an important role in quality control, archiving papers, and establishing scientific credit.

Cost
Many scientists and librarians have long protested the cost of journals, especially as they see these payments going to large for-profit publishing houses. To allow their researchers online access to journals, many universities purchase site licenses, permitting access from anywhere in the university, and, with appropriate authorization, by university-affiliated users at home or elsewhere. These may be quite expensive, sometimes much more than the cost for a print subscription, although this may reflect the number of people who will be using the license—while a print subscription is the cost for one person to receive the journal; a site-license can allow thousands of people to gain access.

Publications by scholarly societies, also known as not-for-profit-publishers, usually cost less than commercial publishers, but the prices of their scientific journals are still usually several thousand dollars a year. In general, this money is used to fund the activities of the scientific societies that run such journals, or is invested in providing further scholarly resources for scientists; thus, the money remains in and benefits the scientific sphere.

Despite the transition to electronic publishing, the serials crisis persists.

Concerns about cost and open access have led to the creation of free-access journals such as the Public Library of Science (PLoS) family and partly open or reduced-cost journals such as the Journal of High Energy Physics. However, professional editors still have to be paid, and PLoS still relies heavily on donations from foundations to cover the majority of its operating costs; smaller journals do not often have access to such resources.

Based on statistical arguments, it has been shown that electronic publishing online, and to some extent open access, both provide wider dissemination and increase the average number of citations an article receives.

Copyright
Traditionally, the author of an article was required to transfer the copyright to the journal publisher. Publishers claimed this was necessary in order to protect authors' rights, and to coordinate permissions for reprints or other use. However, many authors, especially those active in the open access movement, found this unsatisfactory, and have used their influence to effect a gradual move towards a license to publish instead. Under such a system, the publisher has permission to edit, print, and distribute the article commercially, but the authors retain the other rights themselves.

Even if they retain the copyright to an article, most journals allow certain rights to their authors. These rights usually include the ability to reuse parts of the paper in the author's future work, and allow the author to distribute a limited number of copies. In the print format, such copies are called reprints; in the electronic format, they are called postprints. Some publishers, for example the American Physical Society, also grant the author the right to post and update the article on the author's or employer's website and on free e-print servers, to grant permission to others to use or reuse figures, and even to reprint the article as long as no fee is charged. The rise of open access journals, in which the author retains the copyright but must pay a publication charge, such as the Public Library of Science family of journals, is another recent response to copyright concerns.

title: Scientific journal


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The Martian Chronicles

The Martian Chronicles is a science fiction fix-up novel, published in 1950, by American writer Ray Bradbury that chronicles the exploration and settlement of Mars, the home of indigenous Martians, by Americans leaving a troubled Earth that is eventually devastated by nuclear war.

Synopsis
The book projects American society immediately after World War II into a technologically advanced future where the amplification of humanity's potentials to create and destroy have miraculous and devastating consequences. Events in the chronicle include the apocalyptic destruction of Martian and human civilizations, instigated by humans, though there are no stories with settings at the catastrophes. The outcomes of many stories raise concerns about the values and direction of America of the time by addressing militarism, science, technology and war-time prosperity that could result in a global nuclear war (e.g., "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "The Million-Year Picnic"); depopulation that might be considered genocide (e.g., "The Third Expedition", "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright" and "The Musicians"); racial oppression and exploitation (e.g., "Way in the Middle of the Air"); ahistoricism, philistinism, and hostility towards religion (e.g., "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright"); censorship and conformity (e.g., "Usher II"). On Bradbury's award of a Pulitzer Prize Special Citation in 2007, the book was recognized as one of his "masterworks that readers carry with them over a lifetime".

Fix-up structure
The Martian Chronicles is a fix-up novel consisting of published short stories along with new short bridge narratives in the form of interstitial vignettes, intercalary chapters, or expository narratives. The published stories were revised for consistency and refinement.

The Martian Chronicles may at first appear to be a planned short story cycle; Bradbury did not write The Martian Chronicles as a singular work – rather, its creation as a novel was suggested to Bradbury by a publisher's editor years after most of the stories had already appeared in many different publications (see publication history and original publication notes under Contents). In responding to the suggestion, the 29-year-old Bradbury was shocked by the idea that he had already written a novel and remembers saying: "Oh, my God... I read Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson when I was 24 and I said to myself, 'Oh God, wouldn't it be wonderful if someday I could write a book as good as this but put it on the planet Mars.'". (See the Influences section on literary influences affecting the works's structure.)

Chronicle structure
The Martian Chronicles is written as a chronicle, each story presented as a chapter within an overall chronological ordering of the plot. Overall, it can be viewed as three extended episodes or parts, punctuated by two apocalyptic events. Events in the book's original edition ranged from 1999 to 2026. As 1999 approached in real life, the dates were advanced by 31 years in the 1997 edition. The summary that follows includes the dates of both editions.

 * The first part covering two and a half years, from January 1999/2030 to June 2001/2032, consists of seven chapters about four exploratory missions from the United States, during which humans and Martians discover each other. The efforts of Martians to repel the human explorers ends in catastrophe when chicken pox brought to Mars by humans kills almost all Martians. Two of the chapters are original works for the fix-up.
 * The second part covers four and a half years, from August 2001/2032 to December 2005/2036, and consists of sixteen chapters in the first edition and seventeen in the 1997 edition. It is about the human colonizers of Mars, including human contact with the few surviving Martians, the preoccupation of the emigrants with making Mars like America on Earth, and the return of all settlers but seven to Earth as war on Earth threatens. All of the settlers are from the United States, and the settlements are administered by the United States government. A global war on Earth ensues, and contact between Mars and Earth ends. Eleven of the chapters are original works for the first edition and thirteen for the 1997 edition.
 * The third part, covering six months from April 2026/2057 to October 2026/2057, is three chapters about the remaining Martian settlers and the occurrence and aftermath of global nuclear war on Earth that eliminates human civilization there, and the few humans who manage to flee Earth and settle on Mars. None of the chapters are original works for the fix-up.

Publication history
The creation of The Martian Chronicles by weaving together previous works was suggested to the author by New York City representatives of Doubleday & Company in 1949 after Norman Corwin recommended Bradbury travel to the city to be "'discovered'". The work was subsequently published in hardbound form by Doubleday in the United States in 1950. Publication of the book was concurrent with the publication of Bradbury's short story, "There Will Come Soft Rains" that appeared in Collier's magazine. The short story appears as a chapter in the novel, though with some differences. The novel has been reprinted numerous times by many different publishers since 1950.

The Spanish language version of The Martian Chronicles, Crónicas Marcianas, was published in Argentina concurrently with the U.S. first edition, and included of all the chapters contained in the U.S. edition. The edition included a foreword by Jorge Luis Borges.

The book was published in the United Kingdom under the title The Silver Locusts (1951), with slightly different contents. In some editions the story "The Fire Balloons" was added, and the story "Usher II" was removed to make room for it.

The book was published in 1963 as part of the Time Reading Program with an introduction by Fred Hoyle.

In 1979, Bantam Books published a trade paperback edition with illustrations by Ian Miller.

As 1999 approached, the fictional future written into the first edition was in jeopardy, so the work was revised and a 1997 edition was published to advance all of the dates by 31 years (with the plot running from 2030 to 2057 instead of 1999 to 2026). The 1997 edition added "November 2033: The Fire Balloons" and "May 2034: The Wilderness", and omitted "Way in the Middle of the Air", a story considered less topical in 1997 than 1950.

The 1997 edition of Crónicas Marcianas included the same revisions as the U.S. 1997 edition.

In 2009, the Subterranean Press and PS Publishing published The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition that included the 1997 edition of the work and additional stories under the title "The Other Martian Tales". (See The Other Martian Tales section of this article.)

Contents
Bradbury culled the table of contents for The Martian Chronicles "Chronology" with each item formatted with the date of the story followed by a colon followed by the story title. The title of each chapter in the first edition was the corresponding line in "Chronology". In the 1997 edition, chapter titles omitted the colons by printing the date and the story title on separate lines. The chapter titles that follow are formatted consistent with the "Chronology". The years are those appearing in the first edition followed by the year appearing in 1997 edition.

Publication information concerning short stories published prior to their appearance in The Martian Chronicles is available in Ray Bradbury short fiction bibliography.

Publication history
First appeared in  The Martian Chronicles. Not to be confused with the short story of the same name published in 1947.

Plot
"Rocket Summer" is a short vignette that describes the rocket launch of the first human expedition to Mars on a cold winter day in Ohio.

Publication history
First published as "I'll Not Ask for Wine" in Maclean's, January 1, 1950.

Plot
Ylla, an unhappily married Martian, who, like all Martians, has telepathy, receives an impression of the human space traveler Nathaniel York. Ylla sings the 17th century song "Drink to Me Only with Thine Eyes" (with lyrics from the poem "To Celia" by Ben Jonson), in English she doesn't understand. She has a romantic dream involving him, in which he takes her back to Earth. Her jealous husband, Yll, kills York and her memories fade.

Publication history
First published as "The Spring Night" in The Arkham Sampler, winter 1949.

Plot
An idyllic Martian summer night is disrupted when Martian adults and children spontaneously start to sing the words from English poems and children's rhymes they don't understand, including Lord Byron's "She Walks in Beauty" and "Old Mother Hubbard". The music, poems and rhymes emanate from astronauts aboard the Second Expedition's spaceship heading towards Mars. The Martians are terrified and sense that a terrible event will occur the next morning.

Publication history
First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1948.

Plot
The Second Expedition encounters members of a Martian community not far from their landing site. The Earth explorers, mistaken for delusional Martians, find themselves locked up in an insane asylum.

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
A man named Pritchard believes he is entitled to be in the crew of the Third Expedition because he is a taxpayer. He doesn't want to be left on Earth because "there's going to be an atomic war."

Publication history
First published as "Mars is Heaven!" in Planet Stories, fall 1948. The original short story was set in 1960. The story in  The Martian Chronicles  contains paragraph about medical treatments that slow the aging process, so that the characters can be traveling to Mars in 2000 but still remember the 1920s.

Plot
The Third Expedition find themselves lulled into a collective hallucination by the Martians and then killed by them. The ending leaves it ambiguous whether this was the plan of the Martians all along, or, given the telepathic origins of the hallucination and the way it was molded to their expectations and desires, Captain John Black accidentally willed it into being by coming to believe the hallucination was a trap for those perceived as invaders.

Publication history
First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, June 1948.

Plot
Jeff Spender, a crew member with the Fourth Expedition, becomes repelled by the others' ugly American attitude as they explore a dead Martian city and begins to kill the others for their disrespect of the ruins.

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
"The Settlers" is a vignette that describes the "Lonely Ones", the first settlers of Mars, single men from the United States who are few in number.

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
A tall tale concerning Benjamin Driscoll, who Johnny Appleseed-like, is an emigrant who is threatened to be returned to Earth because he has difficulty breathing due to the thin Martian atmosphere. Driscoll believes Mars can be made more hospitable by planting trees to add more oxygen to the atmosphere. Referencing this story, Driscoll Forest is a place named in "The Naming of Names".

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
A vignette describing the arrival of ninety thousand American emigrants to Mars.

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
"Night Meeting" is the story of Tomás Gomez, a young Latino construction worker on Mars, who drives his truck across an empty expanse between towns to attend a party, and his encounters along the way with an elderly gas station owner and a Martian who appears to him as a phantom. They each regard each other as a dream.

The fearless Tomás Gomez reflects a common Mexican attitude toward death, which Bradbury understood. Prior to the publication of The Martian Chronicles in 1950, two of his short stories relating to the Day of the Dead were published in 1947 — "El Día de Muerte" set on the Day of the Dead in Mexico City and "The Next in Line" that was published in his book Dark Carnival about a visit to catacombs in a Mexican village which terrifies the American protagonist. Both stories were likely inspired by his learning about Mexican death rites during his own frightful experience on a 1945 trip to Mexico that included a visit in Guanajuato where he viewed mummies.

Plot
This vignette characterizes two successive groups of settlers as American emigrants who arrive in "waves" that "spread upon" the Martian "shore" – the first are the frontiersmen described in "The Settlers", and the second are men from the "cabbage tenements and subways" of urban America.

Publication history
The story first appeared as "…In This Sign" in Imagination, April 1951 after publication of the first (1950) edition of The Martian Chronicles and so, was included in the U.S. edition of The Illustrated Man and in The Silver Locusts. The story was included in the 1997 edition of The Martian Chronicles, though it appeared in earlier special editions – the 1974 edition from The Heritage Press, the September 1979 illustrated trade edition from Bantam Books, the "40th Anniversary Edition" from Doubleday Dell Publishing Group and in the 2001 Book-of-the-Month Club edition.

Plot
"The Fire Balloons" is a story about an Episcopal missionary expedition to cleanse Mars of sin, consisting of priests from large American cities led by the Most Reverend Father Joseph Daniel Peregrine and his assistant Father Stone. Peregrine has a passionate interest in discovering the kinds of sins that may be committed by aliens reflected in his book, The Problem of Sin on Other Worlds. Peregrine and Stone argue constantly about whether the mission should focus on cleansing humans or Martians. With the question unanswered, the priests travel to Mars aboard the spaceship Crucifix. The launch of the rocket triggers Peregrine's memories as a young boy of the Fourth of July with his grandfather.

After landing on Mars, Peregrine and Stone meet with the mayor of First City, who advises them to focus their mission on humans. The mayor tells the priests that the Martians look like blue "luminous globes of light" and they saved the life of an injured prospector working in a remote location by transporting him to a highway. The mayor's description of the Martians triggers Peregine's endearing memories of himself launching fire balloons with his grandfather on Independence Day.

Peregrine decides to search for and meet Martians, and he and Stone venture into the hills where the prospector encountered them. The two priests are met by a thousand fire balloons. Stone is terrified and wants to return to First City while Peregrine is overwhelmed by their beauty, imagines his grandfather is there with him to admire them, and wants to converse with them, though the fire balloons disappear. The two priests immediately encounter a rock slide, which Stone believes they escaped by chance and Peregrine believes they were saved by Martians. The two argue their disagreement, and during the night while Stone is sleeping, Peregrine tests his faith in his hunch by throwing himself off a high cliff. As he falls, Peregrine is surrounded by blue light and is set safely on the ground. Peregrine tells Stone of the experience but Stone believes Peregrine was dreaming, so Peregrine takes a gun which he fires at himself and the bullets drop at his feet, convincing his assistant.

Peregrine uses his authority to have the mission build a church in the hills for the Martians. The church is for outdoor services and is constructed after six days of work. A blue glass sphere is brought as a representation of Jesus for the Martians. On the seventh day, a Sunday, Peregrine holds a service in which he plays an organ and uses his thoughts to summon the Martians. The fire balloons, who call themselves the Old Ones, appear as glorious apparitions to the priests and communicate the story of their creation, their immortality, their normally solitary existences, and their pure virtuousness. They thank the priests for building the church and tell them they are unneeded and ask them to relocate to the towns to cleanse the people there. The fire balloons depart, which fills Peregrine with such overwhelming sadness that he wants to be lifted up like his grandfather did when he was a small child. The priests are convinced and withdraw to First Town along with the blue glass sphere that has started to glow from within. Peregrine and Stone believe the sphere is Jesus.

Bradbury said he consulted a Catholic priest in Beverly Hills while he developed the plot for "Fire Balloons". In an interview, Bradbury recalled part of a day-long conversation: "'Listen, Father, how would you act if you landed on Mars and found intelligent creatures in the form of balls of fire? Would you think you ought to save them or would you think they were saved already?' 'Wow! That's a hell of a fine question!' the father exclaimed. And he told me what he would do. In short, what I make Father Peregrine do."

Interpretation of "The Fire Balloons" has been called "ambiguous" because its meaning can be dramatically different due to the context set by the stories that accompany it. Its first appearance in the U.S. in 1951 was as a stand-alone story as "... In This Sign" and in The Illustrated Man that was concurrent with its first appearance in The Silver Locusts in the U.K. which included all of The Martian Chronicles stories with Martian characters. Within The Silver Locusts and the 1997 edition of The Martian Chronicles the strategy used by Martians in "The Fire Balloons" is implicit – they use their telepathic powers to peacefully keep settlers away from their mountains. As in "Ylla" the Martians understand Father Peregrine's fond memories of his grandfather and the Fourth of July celebrations they shared together involving fire balloons before and after the Crucifix lands on Mars. As in "The Earth Men", an elaborate, imaginary world is constructed, though in "The Fire Balloons" it is for the priests to convince them to cleanse humans of sin in First City. The appearance of Martians as fire balloons ends with the chapter.

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles. Not to be confused with the short horror story or "Time Intervening," which is also under that title.

Plot
A vignette describing how the Tenth City are built by colonists

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
Young boys defy their parents and habitually play in and among the otherwise unpopulated ruins of indigenous Martian towns where they perished in their homes. The Firemen methodically incinerate the remnants of Martian civilization and the bones of the Martians. The boys play amongst the relics and make Martian bones into musical instruments.

Publication history
First appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, November 1952. The story appears in the 1974 edition of The Martian Chronicles by The Heritage Press, the 1979 Bantam Books illustrated trade edition, and the 1997 edition of The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
In Independence, Missouri, a woman, Janice Smith, expects a telephone call at midnight from her fiancée Will on Mars. He has already purchased a home on Mars identical to her home on Earth. His response after the long delay due to the distance to Mars is incomplete due to natural interference so, she only hears him say "love". Smith contemplates being a pioneer as the women before her, and then falls asleep for the last time on Earth.

Publication history
First appeared in the first edition of The Martian Chronicles and not included in the 1997 edition. The work later appeared in the July 1950 issue of Other Worlds Science Stories after five major magazines rejected the manuscript drafted in 1948.

Bradbury explained that the drafting of "Way in the Middle of the Air" was a common way he used writing to address his emotional state affecting him at a moment. He recalled in a 1962 interview that he was so upset about the circumstances of African-Americans in the United States that "I put them in rocket ships and send them off to Mars, in a short story, to rid myself of that tension".

Publication of "Way in the Middle of the Air" in 1950 was groundbreaking for a science fiction story even though the work is considered limited by providing only the viewpoint of white Americans. According to Isiah Lavender III, "Bradbury is one of the very few authors in [science fiction] who dared to consider the effects and consequences of race in America at a time when racism was sanctioned by the culture." Even with the story's limitations, Robert Crossley suggested that it might be considered "the single most incisive episode of black and white relations in science fiction by a white author."

Plot
"Way in the Middle of the Air" is the story about Samuel Teece, a white racist hardware store owner in an unnamed town in the Jim Crow era American South of 2003, and his efforts to dissuade the African-Americans in the town area from emigrating to Mars. Teece and a group of white men sit on the porch of his hardware store when they see a flood of black families and others marching into town with their belongings. One of the men tells Teece that the entire community has decided to leave for Mars. Teece is incensed and declares that the governor and militia should be contacted because the migrants should have notified everyone in advance before departing.

As the migrants pass the store, Teece's wife, accompanied by the wives of other men on the porch, asks her husband to come home to prevent their house servant, Lucinda, from leaving. Mrs. Teece says she couldn't convince Lucinda from leaving after offering an increase in pay and two nights a week off, and said she didn't understand her decision because she thought Lucinda loved her. Teece restrains himself from beating his wife, and orders her to go back home. She obeys, and after she's gone he takes his gun out and threatens to kill any migrant who laughs. The march continues quietly through town toward the rocket launch site.

Teece sees a black man, Belter, and threatens to horsewhip him because Belter owes him fifty dollars. Belter tells Teece that he forgot about the debt, and Teece tells Belter that he shouldn't leave because his rocket will explode but Belter responds that he doesn't care. Teece calls Belter "Mister Way in the Middle of the Air" taken from the lyrics of the negro spiritual "Ezekiel Saw the Wheel" about a vision of the prophet Ezekiel that occurred in the sky. After Belter begs Teece to let him depart for Mars, an old man among the migrants passes his hat around and quickly collects fifty dollars in donations from other migrants and gives it to Belter, who gives it to Teece and leaves. Teece is enraged and waves his gun at the migrants and threatens to shoot their rockets down one by one. The men on Teece's porch ponder the reason for the mass migration mentioning advances in civil rights like elimination of the poll tax, some states enacting anti-lynching laws, "all kinds of equal rights", and that the wages of black men are nearly on par with white men.

After almost all of the migrants have passed through town, Silly, Teece's seventeen year old black employee, comes to the porch to return Teece's bicycle Silly uses for deliveries. Teece shoves Silly off the machine and orders Silly to go inside the hardware store and start working. Silly doesn't move and Teece pulls out a contract he says Silly signed with an "X" that requires the boy to "give four weeks notice and continue working until his position is filled". Silly says he didn't sign a contract and Teece responds by saying he will treat the boy well. Silly asks one of the white men on the porch if one of them will take his place and Grandpa Quartermain volunteers so Silly can leave. Teece claims Silly as his and says he'll lock the boy in the back room until the evening. Silly starts to cry and then three other men on the porch tell Teece to let Silly go. Teece feels for the gun in his pocket and then relents. Silly cleans out his shed at the store on orders from Teece and departs the store in an old car. As Silly leaves, he asks Teece what he is going to do at night when all the black people are gone. After the car drives away, Teece figures out that Silly was asking about lynchings Teece participated in, and gets his open-top car to chase down Silly and kill him. Quartermain volunteers to drive, and in their pursuit a tire goes flat after running over cast off belongings that migrants abandoned onto the road. Teece returns to his store where men are watching rockets shooting up into the sky. Teece refuses to watch and proudly comments that Silly addressed him as "Mister" to the very end.

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles. (Not to be confused with the short story "The Naming of Names", first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1949, later published as "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed".)

Plot
"The Naming of Names" is a short vignette about the names of places on Mars being given American names that memorialize the crews of the four exploratory expeditions, or "mechanical" or "metal" names, which replace the Martian names that were for geographic features and things in nature.

The vignette also describes tourists who visit Mars and shop, and describes the next wave of emigrants as "sophisticates" and people who "instruct" and "rule" and "push" other people about.

Publication history
First published as Carnival of Madness in Thrilling Wonder Stories, April 1950. In 2010, Los Angeles artist Allois, in collaboration with Bradbury, released illustrated copies of "Usher" and "Usher II". The story also appeared in the 2008 Harper Collins/ Voyager edition of The Illustrated Man.

Plot
"Usher II" is a horror story and homage to Edgar Allan Poe about the wealthy William Stendahl and the house he built to murder his enemies. The story begins with Stendahl's meeting with Mr. Bigelow, his architect, to perform a final check-out for the completion of his newly built house. Stendahl reads Bigelow architectural specifications taken directly from the description of the House of Usher from the text of Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher". Stendahl is satisfied and refers to the house as, The House of Usher. The owner is angered that Bigelow doesn't know anything of or about Poe and sends him away. Bigelow's ignorance is innocent because for decades, anything "produced in any way suggesting ... any creature of the imagination" has been outlawed, including books, many of which were confiscated and burned in the Great Fire thirty-five years earlier, including Stendahl's own fifty thousand book library.

Stendahl is visited by Mr. Garrett, an investigator of Moral Climates, who immediately tells Stendahl that he will have his place dismantled and burned later that day. Stendahl tells Garrett that he spent a huge sum of money for the house and invites the investigator inside for additional information for his investigative report. During the tour, Garrett experiences an automated horror fantasy world, and finds the place "deplorable" as well as a work of genius. Garrett is met by a robot ape that Stendahl demonstrates is a robot and then orders it to kill Garrett. Stendahl has his assistant Pikes, who he regards as the greatest horror film actor ever when such films were made, construct a robot replica of Garrett to return to Moral Climates to delay any action affecting the house for forty-eight hours. Stendahl and Pikes send invitations out to their enemies for a party later that evening.

About thirty guests arrive at Stendahl's party. Upon greeting them, he tells them to enjoy themselves because the house will soon be destroyed, though Pikes interrupts and shows Stendahl the remnants of Garrett, which are the parts of a robot. They first panic and then Stendahl figures the real Garrett will come to visit since they sent a robot back, and very soon Garrett appears and informs Stendahl that the Dismantlers will arrive in an hour. Stendahl tells Garrett to enjoy the party and offers him some wine that is politely refused. Garrett and Miss Pope then observe Miss Blunt being strangled by an ape and her corpse being stuffed up a chimney. Another laughing Miss Blunt comforts Miss Pope by telling her that what she saw killed was a robot replica of herself. Stendahl serves Garrett wine which he drinks. Garrett watches additional killings performed in a similar manner that he remembers from Poe's "The Premature Burial", "The Pit and the Pendulum", and one other from "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Stendahl serves Garrett more wine which is consumed and asks the investigator if he would like to see what is planned for him. Garrett agrees and is treated as the character Fortunato from Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado". After Stendahl and Pikes have disposed of all their guests, they leave in a helicopter and, from above, watch the house break apart like the one in Poe's story.

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
"The Old Ones" is a short vignette that describes the last wave of emigrants to Mars – elderly Americans. The title does not refer to the Martians in "The Fire Balloons".

Publication history
First published in Super Science Stories, November 1949.

Plot
"The Martian" is the story about an elderly married couple, LaFarge and Anna, who encounter a Martian who wants to live with them as their fourteen-year-old son, Tom, even though Tom died of pneumonia many years before. On a rainy night, Lafarge mentions his grief for Tom to Anna, who asks him to "forget him and everything on Earth". They go to bed but before they can sleep they respond to a knock at their front door and find a boy who looks like Tom there. Anna is afraid but LaFarge thinks of the boy as Tom. Anna tells the boy to leave and asks her husband to lock the door, but LaFarge tells the boy that he can enter the house if he wants to and shuts the door unlocked. The next morning, LaFarge finds the boy bathing in the canal adjacent to his house while his wife treats the boy as her son with no discernible sign of concern or doubt. LaFarge asks the boy to give his true identity and guesses he is a Martian. The boy asks to be accepted and not to be doubted, and then runs away. Anna becomes distressed as she sees the boy running away, and LaFarge asks his wife if she remembers anything about Tom's death. Anna responds that she doesn't know what he's talking about.

The boy returns late in the afternoon and makes an agreement with LaFarge on not asking any more questions. The boy says he was almost "trapped" by a man living in a tin shack by the canal after he ran away. After the boy leaves LaFarge to prepare for suppertime, Saul in a canal boat tells LaFarge that Nomland, the man living in the tin shack known to have murdered a man named Gillings on Earth, said Nomland saw Gillings that afternoon and tried to lock himself in the jail, and when he couldn't, went home and shot himself dead only twenty minutes earlier. LaFarge asks the boy what he did during the afternoon, and the boy responds, "Nothing" and LaFarge stops the questioning.

LaFarge, Anna, and the boy leave the house on a canal boat over fearful objections of the boy. The boy falls asleep in the boat and talks in his sleep about "changing" and "the trap" which the couple don't understand. Soon after they arrive in the town and start to meet numerous people, the boy runs off. Anna is distressed and Tom reassures her that the boy will return before they leave. The couple buys theater tickets and return to the canal boat late at night when the entertainment ends, but the boy is not there. LaFarge goes into town to find the boy and meets Mike who tells him that Joe Spaulding and his wife found their daughter, Lavinia, on Main Street while buying their theater tickets. LaFarge goes to the Spaulding's house and finds Lavinia, though he calls her Tom, and asks Lavinia to come back to him and Anna. LaFarge makes a fatherly commitment and Lavinia leaves with LaFarge, though the departure is detected and her father shoots at them and misses. As they flee, LaFarge sends the boy off in a different direction to rendezvous at the canal boat where Anna awaits. As the boy runs through town his appearance changes to a figure that is recognizable to each person who sees him. The boy makes it to the boat where LaFarge and Anna await, but Joe Spaulding has a gun and stops their departure. The boy steps off the boat and Spaulding takes his wrist while all the people around him claim the boy is theirs. As the crowd argues, the boy sickens and screams as his appearance changes rapidly and uncontrollably from one recognizable figure to a person in the crowd to another, and then dies. It starts to rain again. LaFarge and Anna return home and go to bed. At midnight, LaFarge hears something at the door, opens it to a rainy night and watches the empty yard for five minutes before locking the door shut.

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
"The Luggage Store" is a short dialogue between Father Peregrine and the elderly owner of a luggage store. The proprietor tells Peregrine that he heard on the radio that there will be a war on Earth, looks at Earth in the night sky, and tells the priest he finds the news incredible. Peregrine changes the proprietor's mind by telling him that news of war is unbelievable because Earth is so far away. The shop owner tells the priest of the hundred thousand new emigrants expected in the coming months and Peregrine comments that the travelers will be needed on Earth and that they'll probably be turning back. The proprietor tells the priest that he'd better prepare his luggage for a quick sale after which the priest asks if the owner thinks all the emigrants on Mars will return to Earth. The owner believes so because the emigrants haven't been on Mars for long, except for himself because he is so old. Peregrine tells the shopkeeper that he's wrong about staying on Mars. The owner is convinced again by the priest, and Peregrine buys a new valise to replace his old one.

Publication history
First published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, December 1948.

Plot
"The Off Season" is the story of former Fourth Expedition crewman Sam Parkhill, who is a character in "—And The Moon Be Still As Bright", and his wife Elma, and their encounters with Martians as they prepare to open the first hot dog stand on Mars, which is decorated with glass Sam broke off old Martian buildings. The Parkhills hope to become wealthy because one hundred thousand new emigrants are expected to arrive to establish Earth Settlement 101 nearby, though Elma points out that the new inhabitants will be Mexican and Chinese nationals. The couple is unaware that Earth is on the brink of global war because their radio is broken.

During the evening, the Parkhills are approached by a Martian they spoke to earlier that day. The Martian learns the Parkhills don't know about the situation on Earth and as the Martian says he wants to show Sam a bronze tube that appears in the Martian's hand. Sam shoots the Martian dead with a gun believing the tube is a weapon. However, Elma discovers the tube contains a document written with Martian hieroglyphics neither of them understand. As Sam tells Elma that the Earth Settlement will protect him from Martians, Elma sees twelve Martian sand ships approaching and Sam believes the Martians want to kill him. Sam takes Elma onto a Martian sand ship he purchased at an auction and learned to operate, and takes off to a town for protection. As Sam's sand ship sails, a young woman appears on the ship's tiller bench. The woman, a vision, tells Sam to return to the hot dog stand. Sam refuses and tells the women to get off his ship. The vision argues that the ship isn't his and claims it as part of the Martian world. Sam shoots the vision and it vanishes after breaking into crystals and vaporizing. Elma is disappointed in Sam and asks him to stop the ship, but Sam refuses. In frustration and to display his might, Sam destroys the crystal ruins of a Martian city by shooting them as the sand ship passes by, though Elma is unimpressed and then falls unconscious.

As Sam readies to shoot up another Martian city, three sand ships catch up with him. Sam shoots at them and one ship disintegrates and vaporizes along with its crew. As the two other ships approach Sam's, he gives up by stopping his ship. A Martian calls him, and Sam explains himself and surrenders by throwing down his gun. The Martian tells him to retrieve his gun and return to the hot dog stand where they want to explain something without harming him. Elma wakes up on the journey back.

Back at the hot dog stand, the Martian Leader tells the Parkhills to ready it for operation and to have a celebration. The Leader produces the scrolls which he explains are grants to Sam that sum to half of the entire planet. Sam asks the Leader for an explanation for the gift but the Martians announce their departure and tell him to "prepare" and repeat that the land is his. Sam believes the Martians were telling him the rockets with the new emigrants are arriving, so Sam and Elma start preparing hot dogs. As they prepare food, Sam thinks of the hungry emigrants to feed and botches recitation of Emma Lazarus' poem "The New Colossus" which is on a plaque at the Statue of Liberty in Sam's hometown, New York City. Elma looks at Earth in the night sky and sees an explosion on the planet that gains Sam's attention. Elma tells Sam she believes no customers will be coming to the hot dog stand for a million years.

In "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright", the bodies of dead Martians are corpses. Sam Parkhill's shooting of the Martians dead at his hot dog stand and on his sand ship are illusions projected by one or more Martians somewhere else.

Publication history
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles. Not to be confused with the 1945 short story of the same name.

Plot
"The Watchers" is a short vignette about the concerns of the Martian colonists, who are all Americans, about reports of war on Earth. At nine o'clock in the night sky, they view an explosion that changes the color of Earth, though, three hours later the color returns to normal. At two o'clock in the morning, colonists receive a message that war had begun, that a stockpile of nuclear weapons "prematurely" detonated destroying the Australian continent, and that Los Angeles and London had been bombed. The message said "come home" repeatedly without explanation. The proprietor of a luggage store, who is a character in "The Luggage Store", sells out of stock early in the morning, as colonists prepare to return to Earth.

Publication history
First published in Charm, March 1949.

Plot
"The Silent Towns" is a story about thirty year old Walter Gripp, a miner who lived in a remote mountain shack and walked to the town of Marlin Village every two weeks to find a wife. On his December visit Gripp finds the town abandoned and happily helps himself to money, food, clothing, movies, and other luxuries, but soon realizes he's lonely. As he walks to return to his shack, Gripp hears a phone ringing in an abandoned house but he can't reach it soon enough to communicate with the caller. He hears a telephone ringing in another house and misses the call and realizes he expects the caller to be a woman. In the abandoned home, he obtains a colony telephone directory and starts calling the listed numbers in alphabetal order but stops after contacting a woman's automated message service. Gripps tries his luck with telephone exchanges and government and public institutions, and then places where he thinks a woman would take herself. Gripp calls the biggest beauty parlor in New Texas City and reaches Genevieve Selsor but is cut off. He finds a car and drives a thousand miles to the Deluxe Beauty Salon, fantasizing about Selsor along the way. Gripp can't find Selsor there and believes she drove to Marlin Village to find him, so he returns and finds Selsor at a beauty parlor holding a box of cream chocolates.

Gripps finds the twenty-seven-year old physically unattractive and suffers while they watch a Clark Gable movie together after which she pours perfume into her hair. They return to the beauty parlor and Selsor declares herself as "last lady on Mars" and Gripp as the last man and presents him with a box containing a wedding dress. Gripp flees, driving across Mars to another tiny town to spend his life happily alone and ignoring any phone he hears ringing.

Publication history
First published in Maclean's, September 15, 1948.

Plot
"The Long Years" is the story of the last days of the life of Hathaway, the physician/geologist crewman from the Fourth Expedition's story "—And the Moon Still Be As Bright". At night during a windstorm, Hathaway visits four graves on a hill away from his family's hut and asks the dead for forgiveness for what he's done because he was lonely. As he returns to the hut, he spots a rocket approaching. He tells the family of the "good news" of a rocket arrival in the morning. He goes to the nearby ruins of New New York City and sets it ablaze as a location for the rocket to land. Hathaway returns to the hut to serve wine to his family in celebration. He reminisces about missing all the rockets evacuating colonists from Mars when the Great War started because he and his whole family were doing archaeological work in the mountains. As his wife and three children drink their wine it all just runs down their chins.

In the morning, the family prepares to greet whoever is in the rocket ship, including a great breakfast. As the rocket lands, Hathaway suffers an angina attack while running toward it. He recovers and continues on. Wilder, who was captain of the Fourth Expedition, emerges, sees Hathaway and greets him. Wilder explains that he's been on a twenty-year mission to the outer solar system; reports that he surveyed Mars before landing and found only one other person, Walter Gripp, who decided to stay on Mars, Wilder ponders with Hathaway the fate of Earth; and agrees to take Hathaway and his family on his return to Earth. Hathaway compliments Wilder on his promotion to lead the twenty-year mission so that Wilder would not slow the development of Mars. Wilder orders his crew out of the spaceship to join Hathaway's family.

On their way to the family hut, Hathaway updates Wilder on the Fourth Expedition's crewmen. Hathway tells Wilder that he visits Jeff Spender's tomb annually to pay his respects, and about Sam Parkhill's hot dog stand which was abandoned a week after opening to return to Earth. Wilder observes Hathaway in physical distress and has his physician crewman check Hathaway. Hathaway tells Wilder that he has stayed alive just to await rescue and now that Wilder has arrived he can die. The doctor gives him a pill and then says what he just spoke was "nonsense". Hathway recovers and continues on to the family hut.

At the hut, Hathaway introduces his family to the crew. Wilder is struck by how young Hathaway's wife appears, given that he met her decades earlier, and he compliments her on her youthfulness. Wilder asks John, Hathaway's son, his age, and John answers twenty-three. Crewman Williamson tells Wilder that John is supposed to be forty-two. Wilder sends Williamson off to investigate on the pretense of checking up on their rocket. Williamson returns to report that he found the graves of Hathaway's wife and children, and that the gravestones said that they died of an unknown disease during July 2007/2038.

As breakfast ends, Hathaway stands and toasts the crew and his family, and as soon he is done he collapses and knows that he will soon be dead. Wilder wants to call the family in to see Hathaway, but Hathaway stops him. Hathaway says they won't understand and wouldn't want them to understand, and then dies. Wilder converses with Hathaway's wife and concludes that she and the children are all androids, created by Hathaway to keep him company after his wife and children died. The crew buries Hathaway in his family's graveyard.

As Wilder prepares to depart, Williamson asks Wilder about what should be done about the android family and specially asks whether they should be deactivated. Wilder rejects taking them to Earth and says deactivation never crossed his mind. Wilder hands Williamson a gun and tells the crewman that if he can do anything it is better than anything he can do. Williamson goes into the hut and returns to Wilder reporting that he pointed the gun at an android daughter, who responded by smiling, and that he felt shooting them would be "murder". Wilder speculates the androids could operate for up to two more centuries. The rocket departs, and the android family continues on with its endless routines, that includes, for no reason at all, the android wife nightly looking up at Earth in the sky and tending a fire.

Publication history
First published in Collier's, May 6, 1950, and revised for inclusion in The Martian Chronicles.

Plot
An unoccupied, highly automated house of the McClellan family that stands and operates intact in a California city that is otherwise obliterated by a nuclear bomb, and its destruction by a fire caused by a windstorm. The story marks the end of the United States as a nation. The story also commemorates the United States' atomic bombing of Hiroshima on August 5, 1945 (US time) during World War II. The title of the story was taken from Sara Teasdale's anti-war poem "There Will Come Soft Rains" originally published in 1918 during World War I and the 1918 Flu Pandemic.

Publication history
First published in Planet Stories, summer 1946.

Plot
"The Million-Year Picnic" is the story of William Thomas, a former governor of the state of Minnesota and Alice, his wife, and three sons, who traveled to Mars to escape war under the parents' pretense that the family is taking a fishing trip. Alice is not noticeably pregnant with a girl. The family enjoys a warm Martian summer day in and along water-filled canals traveling in a power boat prepared for an encampment. William is troubled by the war on Earth and does his best to keep the children entertained though he mutters his concerns as stray thoughts his children don't completely comprehend. William draws the boys' attention on fish, the ancient Martian cities they pass by, and on finding Martians – the latter, William assures the boys that they will find. While boating in a canal William and his wife listen to a broadcast on their atomic radio and are jolted by what they hear. William remotely detonates the family's rocket that causes a great sound, throttles the boat faster to drown out the noise and collides with a wharf and stops. No damage is done and William laughingly tells everyone he just exploded their rocket. The boys instantly think it is part of a game. William tells the boys he did it to keep their location secret, and the boys think it is still part of a game. William listens in on the atomic radio again and hears nothing for a couple of minutes. He tells the family, "It's over at last" and the children fall silent. William boats down the canal where they pass six Martian cities and asks the family to choose the best one. They all choose the last one and William declares that it will be their new home. The boys are saddened to tears about missing Minnesota but the father tells the boys that the Martian city is theirs and the boys become filled with a sense of adventure. The family walks through their new city and William tells the family that they will be joined by Bert Edward's family that includes four girls. He tells his son Timothy that he destroyed the rocket to prevent them from returning to Earth and to leave no trace for "evil men" from Earth to find them.

The family settles around a campfire and William explains how he purchased the rocket when the Great War started and hid it in case he needed to escape Earth, as Edwards did too. The father burns in a campfire a variety of documents, including government bonds, he brought to Mars to burn "a way of life". While he burns his papers, he tells his sons that Earth has been destroyed, that interplanetary travel has ended, that people grew too dependent on technology and couldn't manage its war time use, and that the way of life on Earth "proved itself wrong" through its own self-destruction. He warns his sons that he will tell them the last point everyday until they really understand it. William finishes burning his papers, saving a map of Earth for last. William takes the family to the canal and tells the children that they will be taught what they need to learn and that they are going to see Martians. William stops at the canal and points to the family's reflection in the water.

Fascination with Mars, the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs, and comics
Bradbury's fascination with Mars started when he was a child, including depictions of Mars in the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs' The Gods of Mars and John Carter, Warrior of Mars. Burroughs' influence on the author was immense, as Bradbury believed "Burroughs is probably the most influential writer in the entire history of the world." Bradbury said that as a child, he memorized all of John Carter and Tarzan and repeated the stories to anyone who would listen. Harold Foster's 1931 series of Tarzan Sunday comics had such an impact on his life that "The Martian Chronicles would never have happened" otherwise.

Literary influences
Ray Bradbury referred to The Martian Chronicles as "a book of stories pretending to be a novel". He credited a diverse set of literary influences that had an effect on the structure and literary style of The Martian Chronicles, among them Sherwood Anderson, William Shakespeare, Saint-John Perse, and John Steinbeck, as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs, particularly the Barsoom stories and John Carter of Mars books.

Bradbury was particularly inspired by plot and character development in Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio that helped him write "vivid and real" stories that improved his earlier writings that were "lifeless robots, mechanical and motionless". The author said the stories took their form as combinations of component "Martian pensées" which were "Shakespearian 'asides,' wandering thoughts, long night visions, predawn half-dreams" honed in a manner inspired by the perfection of Saint-John Perse.

The combination of separate stories to create The Martian Chronicles as "a half-cousin to a novel" was a suggestion of Doubleday editor Walter Bradbury (no relation to the author), who paid Ray Bradbury $750 for the outline of the book. The author only then realized such a book would be comparable to his idea of Winesburg, Ohio. For his approach to integrating previous work into a novel, Bradbury credited Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as influences on the structure of the work. Winesburg, Ohio is a short story cycle, and The Grapes of Wrath separates narrative chapters with narrative expositions that serve as prologues to subsequent narrative chapters. The idea of using short vignettes, intercalary chapters, and expository narratives to connect the full-length Chronicle stories, their role in the overall work, and the literary style used to write them, Bradbury said were "subconsciously borrowed" from those in The Grapes of Wrath, which he first read at age nineteen, the year the novel was published.

Reception
Upon publication, The Paris Review noted that "The Martian Chronicles ... was embraced by the science-fiction community as well as critics, a rare achievement for the genre. Christopher Isherwood hailed Bradbury as 'truly original' and a 'very great and unusual talent'." Isherwood argued that Bradbury's works were "tales of the grotesque and arabesque", and compared them to the works of Edgar Allan Poe, writing that Bradbury "already deserves to be measured against the greatest master of his particular genre." Writer and critic Anthony Boucher and critic J. Francis McComas praised Chronicles as "a poet's interpretation of future history beyond the limits of any fictional form". The writer L. Sprague de Camp, however, declared that Bradbury would improve "when he escapes from the influence of Hemingway and Saroyan", placing him in "the tradition of anti-science-fiction writers [who] see no good in the machine age". Still, de Camp acknowledged that "[Bradbury's] stories have considerable emotional impact, and many will love them".

A decade of after its publication, Damon Knight in his "Books" column for F&SF listed The Martian Chronicles on his top-ten science fiction books of the 1950s.

By September 1979 more than three million copies of The Martian Chronicles had been sold.

Continued popularity of The Martian Chronicles
On November 28, 1964, the NASA spacecraft Mariner 4 flew by Mars and took the first close-up pictures of the Martian surface that were far different than those described by Ray Bradbury. In spite of direct visual and scientific information since then that indicate Mars is nothing like Bradbury's descriptions in The Martian Chronicles, the novel remains a popular work of "classic short stories", "science fiction", and "classic fiction anthologies and collections" as indicated by the Amazon book store best seller lists. In an introduction to a 2015 edition of the work, Canadian astronaut and former International Space Station commander Chris Hadfield speculated on the continuing popularity of the work, attributing it to beautiful descriptions of the Martian landscape, its ability to "challenge and inspire" the reader to reflect on humanity's history of related follies and failures, and the popular idea that someday some people will come to accept Mars as being their permanent home. Bradbury attributed the attraction of readers to his book because the story is a myth or fable rather than science fiction. He said "... even the most deeply rooted physicists at Cal-Tech accept breathing the fraudulent oxygen atmosphere I have loosed on Mars. Science and machines can kill each other off or be replaced. Myth, seen in mirrors, incapable of being touched, stays on. If it is not immortal, it almost seems such."

Bradbury Landing on Mars
The August 6, 2012, Martian landing site of Curiosity, NASA's Mars Rover, was named Bradbury Landing in honor of Ray Bradbury on August 22, 2012, on what would have been the author's 92nd birthday. On naming it, Michael Meyer, NASA program scientist for Curiosity, said: "This was not a difficult choice for the science team. Many of us and millions of other readers were inspired in our lives by stories Ray Bradbury wrote to dream of the possibility of life on Mars."

Theater
A stage production of "Way in the Middle of the Air" was produced at the Desilu Studios Gower Studios, Hollywood, California in 1962.

The debut of a theater adaptation of The Martian Chronicles was at the Cricket Theater (The Ritz) in Northeast Minneapolis in 1976.

Film
MGM bought the film rights in 1960 but no film was made.

In 1988, the Soviet Armenian studio Armenfilm produced the feature film The 13th Apostle, starring Juozas Budraitis, Donatas Banionis, Armen Dzhigarkhanyan, based on The Martian Chronicles. The film was directed by Armenian actor and screenwriter, Suren Babayan.

The Uzbek filmmaker Nozim To'laho'jayev made two films based on sections from the book: 1984's animated short There Will Come Soft Rains (Russian: Будет ласковый дождь) and 1987's full-length live action film Veld (Russian: Вельд), with one of the subplots based on The Martian.

In 2011 Paramount Pictures acquired the film rights with the intention of producing a film franchise, with John Davis producing through Davis Entertainment.

Music
The Martian Chronicles was adapted as a full-length contemporary opera by composer Daniel Levy and librettist Elizabeth Margid. This is the only musical adaptation authorized by Bradbury himself, who turned down Lerner and Loewe in the 1960s when they asked his permission to make a musical based on the novel. The work received its initial readings from the Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater in 2006, and was presented in workshop form in the inaugural season of the Fordham University Lincoln Center Alumni Company in 2008. The "Night Meeting" episode was presented at Cornelia Street Cafe's "Entertaining Science" series on June 9, 2013. The entire work was presented as a staged reading with a cast of Broadway actors at Ars Nova NYC on February 11, 2015. Three scenes were presented as a workshop production with immersive staging, directed by Carlos Armesto of Theatre C and conducted by Benjamin Smoulder at Miami University, Oxford OH on September 17–19, 2015.

In 2001 a Danish melodic metal band Royal Hunt released a concept album called "The Mission," based on "The Martian Chronicles."

Radio
The Martian Chronicles was adapted for radio in the science fiction radio series Dimension X. This truncated version contained elements of the stories "Rocket Summer", "Ylla", "–and the Moon Be Still as Bright", "The Settlers", "The Locusts", "The Shore", "The Off Season", "There Will Come Soft Rains", and "The Million-Year Picnic".

"—and the Moon Be Still as Bright" and "There Will Come Soft Rains" were also adapted for separate episodes in the same series. The short stories "Mars Is Heaven" and "Dwellers in Silence" also appeared as episodes of Dimension X. The latter is in a very different form from the one found in The Martian Chronicles.

A very abridged spoken word reading of "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "Usher II" was made in 1975 with Leonard Nimoy as narrator.

A BBC Radio 4 adaption, produced by Andrew Mark Sewell as an hour-long programme and starring Derek Jacobi as Captain Wilder, was broadcast on June 21, 2014, as part of the Dangerous Visions series.

Television miniseries
In 1979 NBC partnered with the BBC to commission The Martian Chronicles, a three-episode miniseries adaptation running just over four hours. It was written by Richard Matheson and was directed by Michael Anderson. Rock Hudson starred as Wilder, Darren McGavin as Parkhill, Bernadette Peters as Genevieve Selsor, Bernie Casey as Jeff Spender, Roddy McDowall as Father Stone, and Barry Morse as Hathaway, as well as Fritz Weaver. Bradbury found the miniseries "just boring".

Television adaptations of individual stories
The cable television series The Ray Bradbury Theater adapted some individual short stories from The Martian Chronicles including "Mars is Heaven", "The Earthmen", "And the Moon Be Still as Bright", "Usher II", "The Martian", "Silent Towns", and "The Long Years". Video releases of the series included a VHS tape entitled Ray Bradbury's Chronicles: The Martian Episodes  with some editions with three episodes and others with five.

Comic books
Several of the short stories in The Martian Chronicles were adapted into graphic novel-style stories in the EC Comics magazines, including "There Will Come Soft Rains" in Weird Fantasy #17, "The Long Years" in Weird Science #17, "Mars Is Heaven" in Weird Science #18, "The Million-Year Picnic" in Weird Fantasy #21 and "The Silent Towns" in Weird Fantasy #22.

In 2011, Hill & Wang published Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: The Authorized Adaptation as a graphic novel, with art by Dennis Calero.

Video games
The Martian Chronicles adventure game was published in 1996.

The Other Martian Tales
The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition published in 2009 by Subterranean Press and PS Publishing contains the 1997 edition of The Martian Chronicles with an additional collection of stories under the title The Other Martian Tales, which includes the following:
 * "The Lonely Ones" (Startling Stories, July 1949, reprinted in Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales)
 * "The Exiles" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Winter/Spring 1950, reprinted in The Illustrated Man)
 * "The One Who Waits" (The Arkham Sampler, summer 1949, reprinted in The Machineries of Joy)
 * "The Disease" (previously unpublished)
 * "Dead of Summer" (previously unpublished)
 * "The Martian Ghosts" (previously unpublished)
 * "Jemima True" (previously unpublished)
 * "They All Had Grandfathers" (previously unpublished)
 * "The Strawberry Window" (Star Science Fiction Stories #3, ed. Frederik Pohl, Ballantine, 1954, reprinted in A Medicine for Melancholy)
 * "Way in the Middle of the Air"
 * "The Other Foot" (New Story, March 1951, reprinted in The Illustrated Man)
 * "The Wheel" (previously unpublished)
 * "The Love Affair" (The Love Affair, Lord John Press 1982, reprinted in The Toynbee Convector)
 * "The Marriage" (previously unpublished)
 * "The Visitor" (Startling Stories, November 1948, reprinted in The Illustrated Man)
 * "The Lost City of Mars" (Playboy, January 1967, reprinted in I Sing the Body Electric)
 * "Holiday" (The Arkham Sampler, Autumn 1949)
 * "Payment in Full" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, February 1950)
 * "The Messiah" (Welcome Aboard, spring 1971, reprinted in Long After Midnight)
 * "Night Call, Collect" (Super Science Stories, April 1949 as "I, Mars", reprinted in I Sing the Body Electric)
 * "The Blue Bottle" (Planet Stories, Fall 1950, reprinted in Long After Midnight)
 * "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" (Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1949, reprinted in A Medicine for Melancholy)

The Other Martian Stories also includes the 1964 and 1997 The Martian Chronicles screenplays, and essays by John Scalzi, Marc Scott Zicree, and Richard Matheson.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: The Martian Chronicles