Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition" Slipcased Signed Limited First Edition No. 201 of 1,000 [Sealed]

Personally signed by the great Ray Bradbury.

SIGNED LIMITED FIRST EDITION NO. 201 OF 1,000

Subterranean Press / PS Publishing 2009. Ray Bradbury "The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition" Signed Limited Edition No. 201 of 1,000. Signed by the author on the special limitation numbered page. Hardcover book with no dust-jacket as issued. Slipcased. "First Edition" as stated on the copyright page. 

Large octavo. Quarter bound with cloth and marble boards, housed in gilt stamped slipcase.

Includes material new to this edition. Collection of closely linked stories about the exploration and colonization of the planet Mars. A masterpiece of 20th Century science fiction. Issued as part of the Easton Press "Masterpieces of Science Fiction" series. Originally slated for publication by Hill House.

It was acquired by the current publishers. The signature leaf has the Hill House logo.

With original introductions and afterwords by :

• John Scalzi
• Joe Hill
• Marc Scott Zicree
• Richard Matheson

The Martian Chronicles, a seminal work in Ray Bradbury's career, whose extraordinary power and imagination remain undimmed by time's passage, is available from Simon & Schuster for the first time.

In The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury, America’s preeminent storyteller, imagines a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor— of crystal pillars and fossil seas—where a fine dust settles on the great empty cities of a vanished, devastated civilization. Earthmen conquer Mars and then are conquered by it, lulled by dangerous lies of comfort and familiarity, and enchanted by the lingering glamour of an ancient, mysterious native race. In this classic work of fiction, Bradbury exposes our ambitions, weaknesses, and ignorance in a strange and breathtaking world where man does not belong.

The Martian Chronicles

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).

Ray Bradbury

Ray Douglas Bradbury (August 22, 1920 – June 5, 2012) was an American author and screenwriter. One of the most celebrated 20th-century American writers, he worked in a variety of genres, including fantasy, science fiction, horror, mystery, and realistic fiction.

Bradbury is best known for his novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and his short-story collections The Martian Chronicles (1950), The Illustrated Man (1951) and The October Country (1955). Other notable works include the coming of age novel Dandelion Wine (1957), the dark fantasy Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) and the fictionalized memoir Green Shadows, White Whale (1992). He also wrote and consulted on screenplays and television scripts, including Moby Dick and It Came from Outer Space. Many of his works were adapted into television and film productions as well as comic books. Bradbury also wrote poetry which has been published in several collections, such as They Have Not Seen the Stars (2001).

The New York Times called Bradbury "An author whose fanciful imagination, poetic prose, and mature understanding of human character have won him an international reputation" and "the writer most responsible for bringing modern science fiction into the literary mainstream".