Literary Speculation


For literary speculation I chose a book I happen to just be slowly reading throughout the semester in my free time, The Martian Chronicles.
While being strictly science fiction it managed take normal tropes associated with the genre and made them into something new.

The format of the book is what really sets it apart from many others. The syfy short story isn’t anything new but the collection found in the Martian Chronicles work both as individual stories and as a bunch of works as a whole all centered around the slow colonization of Mars. This multi short story approach makes for quick reads that can be truly digested and then later put together without having to stop halfway through the story. Also the writing doesn’t seem to focus of scientific details but just the narrative itself. Nothing about what’s going happening on Mars is truly explained. One specific story that I liked that really stood out to me was “Night Meeting”. Basically what happens is a man goes on a drive into the old runes of mars and somehow runs into a single Martian. The strange thing is that they have been seemingly extinct for sometime. As they have a conversation they both start to realize that they are not seeing the same thing. The old man sees runes while the Martian sees a festival going on in the same place the man are looking. They come to the conclusion that the Martian is talking to him from the past and has long since died.

Every story was thought provoking and took an interesting approach to syfy.  


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