SOURCE: Mogen, David. “The Martian Chronicles.” In Ray Bradbury, pp. 82-93. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1986.

In the following essay, Mogen discusses the critical reaction to Ray Bradbury's best-known work, The Martian Chronicles, and views the book as a thematically-linked group of stories.

Bradbury's best-known and most powerful treatment of the space frontier theme is The Martian Chronicles, the book that first established his reputation, whose overall design evokes in a unique way the ambiguous poetry in his vision of the frontier process. In many respects Bradbury's finest single achievement, The Martian Chronicles lyrically dramatizes relationships between his most potent images: Green Town (actually Green Bluff in this book), an idealized image of an Edenic American past; and Mars, representing the ambivalent promise of Edenic New Worlds in the space age future. As Eric Rabkin points out in “To Fairyland by Rocket: Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles,” Bradbury's new frontier is...