The Martian Chronicles

My latest read for my PhD examinations was The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. The book is a 1950 work of speculative fiction (i.e., it falls in the sci-fi, fantasy, or future category). In it a string of missions take humans to Mars, where they eventually kill off its inhabitants by accident with chicken pox and colonize the planet. Then the usurpers watch on their horizon as an atom bomb blows up Earth. Nice.

Bradbury called his book a "half-cousin to a novel" and "a book of stories pretending to be a novel," because the vignettes form a series of chronological short stories, often with unrelated characters. An imaginative creator of another world, Bradbury also provides a commentary on humanity. The best part for me: he gets a humorous (if sicko) last word against those who oppose comic books, fairies, trolls, Edgar Allen Poe, and munchkins.