Right, there’s a range of ways to do it, and The Martian Chronicles went for the more elaborate end in adding collection-specific previously unpublished content.
Pet peeve: I hate, hate, hate the term fix-up. Nevertheless, it’s now the term to describe this extremely common form of early and now classic compilations. I, Robot is probably the most famous (and notorious, since Asimov really didn’t think of continuity until after WWII stories) but Clifford Simak’s City has a better set of interpolations to ease the transitions. The reason for false advertising is that experience told publishers that novels almost always massively outsold short story collections - still true - so they tried to slap a “novel” label on everything they possibly could.*
The Martian Chronicles is a short story collection. Period. Calling it a novel was a pure publishing ploy, and leads to reactions like @Smapti’s. The stories were not intended to create a coherent future. “The Million-Year Picnic” was the first story from the collection to be published: no wonder it’s wildly out of step with everything that precedes it in the book.
Bradbury is his own genre, but if you must classify him do so as a horror writer who hated science and the modern world. One of his best stories, “All Summer in a Day,” looks like sf, as it’s set on Venus, and is a riff on the same subject as Asimov’s “Nightfall,” but it’s repurposed horror. So are many of the stories in The Martian Chronicles, which portray seeming utopias that prove to be nightmares.
The sunniest story is “Way in the Middle of the Air.” Looking at it askance today is like looking at Huck Finn and not finding it sufficiently modern. The story was a jaw-droppingly savage attack on racism in 1950. Stories about racism then were essentially taboo in genre; sf writers needed to use aliens or robots in allegories to write about the subject. This story was never published in a magazine; it’s original to the book. My guess is that no editor then would touch it. That Doubleday, his book publisher, would is commendable. Strom Thurmond’s racist Dixiecrat Party had managed to win four states in 1948, after all, and it might not sell at all in the South with this story. The potency of Bradbury as a name was equally iffy. He was still a minor name with a meager if growing rep in mainstream as a short story writer. And this would be his first “novel.” (Dark Carnival, a true collection of short stories, had been published by small genre press Arkham House in 1947.) Try looking at the story and the rest of the book through 1950 eyes, if you can. It’s remarkable.
For example, Christie’s The Big Four is a fix-up of several Poirot short stories
Yes, that’s listed in the link in my my post #8 as one example of a fix-up. Fix-ups arguably began in the mystery genre rather than the science fiction and fantasy genres. In that link it lists 10 books which could be considered fix-ups from before it began being done in the science fiction genres.
SO many authors have done this, and I think it’s a product of how stories were written in the past: authors (like Bradbury) sold short stories to magazines. Those were preserved as collections (“R is for Rocket”, “The Golden Apples of the Sun”, “A Medicine for Melancholy” et al), sometimes with a tenuous over-arching “theme” (like “The Illustrated Man”).
Those collections can be uneven, but not stupid. The stories don’t contradict each other like the Martian Chronicles.
But a number of authors have tried the cosmic shoehorn. Larry Niven tried to fit dozens of stories into his future history of “Known Space”.
There are other examples from Sci-Fi, and plenty from classic literature: back in 1919, Sherwood Anderson took stacks of his stories and set them all in “Winesburg, Ohio”.
But don’t expect those collections to be as coherent as a fully-thought-out novel. If Ray (or some marketing intern at his publisher) hadn’t tried to sell it as a novel, and instead called it… “RED, WITH A CHANCE OF CANALS: Random Stories Set on Mars”, then I’d like it better.
I feel lucky that I grew up devouring Bradbury’s short stories, which meant that I never expected any story in a collection to affect the others. I could enjoy “The Veldt” without needing the next story to have a cop saying “Well, Sarge, since we now have Smart Rooms that eat the owners…”
So I just enjoyed (or was disappointed by) each story on its own.
It has its moments. “Usher II” and “There Will Come Soft Rains” and “The Martian” are standouts. “Night Meeting” is interesting. “The Third Expedition / Mars is Heaven!” is good, it just gets dragged down by being included in this particular compilation. The bridging vignettes are mostly well written and memorable. It just doesn’t work for me as an overall piece.
Yeah, and like I said I’m not picking on the science, because it’s just a plot device to explore themes of colonialism and civilizational collapse.
A notable exception being CS Lewis’ Space trilogy, where Mars is an Edenic utopia because Original Sin never occurred there, while Venus is an ocean planet with floating islands and a pre-Knowledge-of-Good-and-Evil population.
It’s still presented as being a single narrative, though, even if (most of) the stories in it weren’t originally intended as such.
I read “All Summer in a Day” in sixth grade. Still haunts me.
It’s a good story. It’s just depressing that Bradbury thought the south would still be like that half a century later, and the way the African-Americans are depicted comes off as patronizing now. It makes sense that later editions leave it out, because the issues it addresses were no longer relevant after a certain point, and the fact that EVERYONE on Mars eventually heads back to Earth makes their victory ring hollow.
The Martian Chronicles, as collected, has a kind of a plot even if some of the stories are kind of contradictory, as mentioned in the OP. The stories in Illustrated Man don’t build. But it’s just a matter of definition, I suppose.
Ah, Bradbury. English teachers love him.
Not my cup of tea though, I’m a hard-SF fan.
I’d agree that the Chronicles are really just a story collection, not a coherent novel. And despite some occasional slanting, I certainly wouldn’t call it a brilliant satire. In the way that, say, Gulliver’s travels is.
Yeah. I should have checked the link first. Sorry
I’ve always wondered why Bradbury didn’t included “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” in TMC. It was published a year before TMC, and TMC included stories published even earlier. It might be hard to fit in the chronology of TMC, but the continuity of the fixup is shot anyway, so no great harm.
There you go. TMC was already being finalized when DTWaGE was published. It was too late in TMC’s production cycle to incorporate.
And given DTWaGE still fresh and ongoing sales potential as a stand alone, I bet there were strong economic arguments that including it within TMC would harm sales of both.
In fact, I got my copy of The Martian Chronicles as a prize for a school essay contest, where we were writing about “All Summer in a Day”. The story really resonated with me, from my own experiences of being bullied, and I guess that’s what made my essay award-winning.
At the time he wrote, likely 1948-49, Thurmond and the Dixiecrats were going strong, Truman had barely ordered desegregating the military, it was 31/32years since Birth of a Nation and 27/28 since Tulsa, and Bradbury had grown up in the 20s and 30s. One can see how he would see it as plausible that it would take a LONG time to get over it, not foreseeing (absent outright revolution) what soon did happen. Also, well, he had a point he wanted to make about his “here and now”.
Indeed. He did make a kind of sequel to it, in which the displaced Black community on Mars did not return to Earth and then has to deal with what to do about white survivor refugees, The Other Foot , that was published very shortly afterward and included in the Illustrated Man collection.
Again, very much a “work of its time” since he basically was taking the issues of the 30s and 40s and what-iffing them in a universe where Mars migration is a plot device.
…
(On the topic of fix-ups we’d be remiss to not mention (included in the upthread link) the first one I encountered, Asimov’s I, Robot which is contemporary to The Martian Chronicles and also makes use of rearranging the stories into in-universe-chronological order, but has a single consistent narrative framing device from start to end of an interview with a “witness to history”.)
I wasn’t familiar with the term “fix-up” but there’s a prime example of it in the novel “Other Days, Other Eyes” by the Irish writer Bob Shaw. He once wrote a beautiful short story titled “Light of Other Days” that was widely acclaimed and that I highly recommend, centered around the idea of “slow glass” – glass which takes light years to pass through and which therefore acts as a sort of window into the past. The story was such a hit that his publisher demanded more of the same, so he wrote two more short stories along the same theme, which weren’t nearly as good.
Then he strung all three stories together with very minimal changes, added a lot of text to bridge them together, and turned it into the above-mentioned novel. It’s not a terrible novel, but not great, either. The centerpiece of it all is that original short story.
As for Ray Bradbury, I’ve read some of his work but not a lot. Never read “The Martian Chronicles”. I did read “The Illustrated Man” and :Fahrenhet 451" a very long time ago. Bradbury was as much about fantasy and horror as about sci-fi, and many of his writings are deeply nostalgic.
One example of that is the novel “Farewell Summer”, a semi-autobiographical account of the joys of young kids in the early 20th century, in a small town as summer was coming to an end. It was a story about how they became obsessed about the clock tower on the town hall, believing that if they could somehow stop that clock, time itself would stop, and their childhood summer would live forever.
There’s also “October Country”, a series of 19 old short stories, mostly in a horror genre but with many of the same underlying themes and nostalgic introspection.
It’s even more depressing that the South is still like that.
Dandelion Wine is also basically a trip down nostalgia lane. That’s another one I couldn’t finish, not because of being depressing (it mostly isn’t, though it has some dark bits), but because basically nothing happens, it’s all just slice-of-life.
Niven with Known Space which started to hit real issues beginning with Ringworld. Heinlein with Future History and the eventual decision to split his works into basically three different timelines. Asimov tried it and I think the attempt to link up the Robot series into the Foundation series (another basically fix-up novel) with the Empire series failed miserably, as did his later works bringing in the Zeroth Law. Others I’m sure as well but those other two came to mind first.
Philip Jose Farmer did something even vaster - the Wold Newton universe. He has many characters created by many authors in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries linked together. You can read about it here:
My thought exactly.
The idea that the end of institutional racism and segregation and all the rest is somehow entrenched in the USA today is simply nuts.
I would like to hope we can turn back the current tide of increasing white racist extremism, but I’m not very optimistic it’ll start getting better until at least a decade or two of getting much, much worse.
Carper’s Law: The Future is Never About the Future. It Is Always About Today.
Bradbury could have set the story in 3100 without a single change. He was writing about 1950. All future years in science fiction are mere excuses to throw in stuff like spaceships with some plausibility. What else in that story screamed a fifty-year advance?
The Civil Rights era occurred in the 50s and 60s. The current administration is firing black generals, erasing black history, trying to redo the voting system to limit black voting, and sending out memes depicting the only black president and his wife as apes. This is 2026. Much has changed, but that aspect of America lingers.
For Us the Living, Heinlein’s first novel unpublished until long after his death, includes parts of the Future History series also. Remember that some of the non-Future History stuff was published in Astounding under a penname.
A. E. van Vogt’s first story, “Black Destroyer” and some others were fixed-up and published with lots of changes as Voyage of the Space Beagle.
Lots of apparently fixed up novels may have been novels from the start, but published in sf magazines as standalone short stories which was easier to do than getting the novel serialized in the magazine. That’s still happening today.