The book hoarding of recent years hasn’t come to much. Empty moments lead elsewhere, or nowhere at all. I still don’t know which rabbit trail to follow as I don’t have a solid theory to work from over which genres or topics or styles of writing appeal to adult me in written form. Best guess is I probably still like horror like I did as a teenager, but I read synopses about someone’s broken family or blah blah murder ghost blah and I’M BORED ALREADY. I asked for horror, not Karen/Kyle Had A Feeling.
Of recent years, I’ve been liking sci-fi in movies/TV more than most things. The Myst series were already my favorite books. I went through a little “best of” phase of sci-fi books when I was in my early 20s and enjoyed them all okay. So maybe I do that and see how it goes. I read Project Hail Mary last year, and while it didn’t have my darker sensibilities due to the self-censoring narrator, it went to some places that were nice to “experience”. But even then, I didn’t keep going. I hoarded the info and nothing more.
Recently I was on social media and saw a poorly credited Ray Bradbury quote that was intent on making a statement about today, reflected from some past view. I skimmed over it, continued on with life. But the quote popped up again. It piqued my curiosity this time. What was the context, here? Why was anyone saying that at any time ever? Where’s the rest of the thought?
Soon I grabbed The Martian Chronicles and started reading.
The book is organized as short stories with an overall connecting plot. It was likely written in the later 40s and published in 1950, so it reeks of everything circa that time, with an eye on a future in space. In it, Earth is approaching its final days and is sending missions to Mars to colonize it, initially unaware that it’s already populated. Enough science has happened since 1950 to make the potential of believability go to shit (plus I’m pretty sure they could have spectrum-analyzed Mars by 1950 to know it didn’t have enough oxygen for humans to breathe), but it’s easy enough to set aside the reality of the thing and look at it like any fantasy idea, especially in contrast to what’s going on with Earth in the background.
The book touches on some heavy topics. Racism, colonization (think giving native americans smallpox blankets and “manifest destiny”), relationship abuse, nuclear war, dealing with death, and humans being fucking trash. There’s also a story transparently about hating on religious capitalism and censorship in media/art where all the censors get murdered (it’s a fun one). My brain personally lit up at the gas station story, of how simple it was, yet revealing this huge mind-bending thing. And it’s barely touched on elsewhere, and given no explanation in the first place, because fuck you that’s why. Why, why not, who cares, it happened, here’s the next thing, lol f u.
It didn’t take long into reading before I had my regularly scheduled existential crisis. This was written no later than 1950. That was 73 years ago. My oldest parent was 5 when this was published. My grandparents were collectively approximately 25. And this isn’t even original, when funneled down to ideas put into writing before. Somewhere down the line some relative was probably reading The Time Machine. Before that, I don’t have titles offhand, but I’m sure 200 or 500 years ago they had ghost stories, stories of corruption, stories about crossing into unknown places or meeting strange foreigners, stories of humanity meeting its end. Maybe they were a little simpler than Game of Thrones or The Odyssey, going much further back, but I’m sure they existed. Because that’s humans being humans, and the stories are a product of that.
I got to thinking about how we, as a species, are living a perpetual broken record. Every so many years we hit the rewind button and do the same essential shit over again, on perpetual repeat until the tape gets trapped in the VCR. The stories are essentially the same because we are what we are. People continue to be corrupt and corruptible. We were always at war with Eurasia, no wait it’s East Asia, fuck I forget which. Oh well, hit the automatic response button to fight against whatever the blurry faraway monster is this week. Might as well forget the past in favor of whatever now looks like, even if I knew the past I’d know that now is yesterday in new clothes. Be kind rewind.
The overall book is an exaggeration of a series of thoughts about war and immigration, but nevertheless hits on the sore points of how we’re mammals just doing the mammal thing trying to survive and perpetuate through the illusions of love and home.
Technically, it had good story-telling, but needed a little work in the description department and some of the characters were a little too similar to each other. It reads akin to teenage level, meaning it’s very easy to read (the short stories make it extra easy) but the content is probably a bit too much for the sensitive given the amount of death going on, so college level makes more sense, and college aged and older are more likely to be able to contextualize the setting and understand that RB was trying to make a statement about people after WWII. In short, would recommend, just not to a 12 year old or someone who can’t handle bleak content akin to Black Mirror. Genre is not hard sci fi at all, but a more floral version of sci fi mixed with western themes, horror, drama, fantasy. One story in it is only tangentially sci-fi as it takes place on Earth and sounds like a normal thing except for what’s going on in the background.
Back to the reality of my situation. Do I keep reading sci-fi? I don’t know. This is evidently a well-known “best of” book, so perhaps I lucked out and further in will just make me angry that people are boring. Perhaps it’ll be time for a detour or a new thing entirely, soon. Don’t know. Maybe it turns out I’m fine with the Sex And The City of novel-kind after all. Humans be humaning.