The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

If you've met me in real life and had an extended conversation for me, you probably know about my love for Fahrenheit 451. So when the coursera course, entitled Science Fiction and Fantasy (course is over, by the way. I made all but two assignments. Waiting for grading now), assigned The Martian Chronicles as a reading assignment, I was over the moon.

The Martian Chronicles is, according to Bradbury, a book of stories pretending to be a novel (the quote is probably paraphrased). It's basically a collection of short stories in the same world, at different times - a world in which humans have travelled to Mars and colonised it.

Not that the colonisation went smoothly. Because you see, Martians are real.

To sum up my feelings about the book, I find it beautiful and strangely sad. Most of the stories do not have happy endings, but I do feel that it was possibly the best ending there could be. Let's just say that The Martian Chronicles does not fill me with hope about humankind.

And oddly enough, the saddest story for me was the second last one, about a house. For some reason, I found a semi-sentient house who was lonely the saddest story in the whole book. Feel free to draw inferences about what that means for me.

I definitely recommend this collection to anyone who's even thinking about reading Bradbury or Science Fiction. It's a great read, and the individual stories are fairly short, so it's possible to savour this in small doses.