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Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" Signed Limited Edition w/COA [Sealed]

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Item #:
143-144
Condition:
New
Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" Signed Limited Edition w/COA [Sealed]
Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" Signed Limited Edition w/COA [Sealed]
Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" Signed Limited Edition w/COA [Sealed]
Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" Signed Limited Edition w/COA [Sealed]
Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" Signed Limited Edition w/COA [Sealed]
Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" Signed Limited Edition w/COA [Sealed]
Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" Signed Limited Edition w/COA [Sealed]

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Personally signed by the great Ray Bradbury directly into the book.


"Bradbury is an authentic original." -Time magazine

Easton Press 1989. Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles" Signed Limited Edition. Signed by the author. Full genuine leather. This leather bound collector's edition has been personally hand signed by the great Ray Bradbury and is an heirloom you can cherish with your family for generations to come. Very rare at only 1,200 produced in this collector's edition. This is an over-sized deluxe edition. Scarce, even more so in the original Very Fine sealed condition.


From the Easton Press series, "The Masterpieces of Science Fiction". Photos are of the actual item you will receive.

Boldly signed in red ink on a special title page:

This leather-bound
Collector's Edition of
The Martian Chronicles
is personally signed by
Nebula award-winning author
Ray Bradbury.


Introduction by Damon Knight. Nine full page color illustrations and numerous other black and white illustrations by Joseph Mugnaini. "By any measure this work is a major landmark, both in SF and as literature."

Ray Douglas Bradbury is an American mainstream, fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 and The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury is widely considered one of the greatest and most popular American writers of speculative fiction of the twentieth century. Ray Bradbury's popularity has been increased by more than 20 television shows and films using his writings.

Features

Includes the classic Easton Press qualities:

* Premium Leather
* Silk Moire Endleaves
* Distinctive Cover Design
* Hubbed Spine, Accented in Real 22KT Gold
* Satin Ribbon Page Marker
* Gilded Page Edges
* Long-lasting, High Quality Acid-neutral Paper
* Smyth-sewn Pages for Strength and Durability

 

Book Description

The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel, containing Bradbury stories originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. For publication, the stories were loosely woven together with a series of short, interstitial vignettes. Bradbury has credited Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as influences on the structure of the book. He has called it a "half-cousin to a novel" and "a book of stories pretending to be a novel". As such, it is similar in structure to Bradbury's short story collection, The Illustrated Man, which also uses a thin frame story to link various unrelated short stories.

Like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, The Martian Chronicles follows a "future history" structure. The stories, complete in themselves, come together as episodes in a larger sequential narrative framework. The overall structure is tripartite, punctuated by two catastrophes: the near-extinction of the Martians and the parallel near-extinction of the human race. The first third (January 1999-April 2000) details the attempts of the Earthmen to reach Mars, and the various ways in which the Martians keep them from returning. In the crucial story And the Moon be Still as Bright, it is revealed by the fourth exploratory expedition that the Martians have all but perished in a plague caused by germs brought by one of the previous expeditions.

This unexpected development sets the stage for the second act (December 2001-November 2005), in which humans from Earth colonize the deserted planet, occasionally having contact with the few surviving Martians, but for the most part preoccupied with making Mars a second Earth. However, as war on Earth threatens, most of the settlers pack up and return home. A global nuclear war ensues, cutting off contact between Mars and Earth. The third act (December 2005-October 2026) deals with the aftermath of the war, and concludes with the prospect of the few surviving humans becoming the new Martians, a prospect already adumbrated in And the Moon be Still as Bright, and which allows the book to return to its beginning.

The book was published in the United Kingdom under the title The Silver Locusts, 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. In the Spanish language version, the stories were preceded by a prologue by Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges.

A 1997 edition of the book advances all the dates by 31 years (thus running from 2030 to 2057), includes The Fire Balloons and replaces Way in the Middle of the Air (a story less topical in 1997 than in 1950) with the 1952 short story The Wilderness, dated May 2034 (equivalent to May 2003 in the earlier chronology).


VERY FINE GUARANTEED. As New (Sealed). The condition is of the highest quality without any discernible flaws.
Publisher:
Easton Press
Edition:
Signed Limited Edition of 1200
Binding:
Full genuine leather
Title:
The Martian Chronicles
Author:
Ray Bradbury