Dean Poling

Reading Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” was an odd experience.

The novel/short story collection is set in the future.

At least it was when “The Martian Chronicles” was published in 1950.

Now, the majority of its action is set in a past that never happened.

Chapters such as the first one “Rocket Summer” also have date headers, such as “January 1999: Rocket Summer” or “June 2003: Way in the Middle of the Air” or “September 2005: The Martian.”

A few of the chapters are still set in the future, such as “October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic.”

But all of the action was set in a murky, uncertain future way back in the late 1940s when Bradbury was writing these stories and in 1950 when they were published in one book.

How easy it is to dream of such possibilities set in such a distant future. Given the book’s mix of ambitious and tragic possibilities, a future-past reader could both hope and dread the promises of Bradbury’s fictional look down the road.

But to a reader now, the book is set in a past that never was and never will be. January 1999, the book’s opening, was 24 years ago. Not only did we Earth residents not arrive at Mars then, we still haven’t literally sent humans to Mars two decades later.

And while Earth may one day send people to Mars, we know, or at least our science has so far indicated, there are no Martians there to greet or repel us.

And if there is some remote, so far unseen life on Mars, it does not live in sprawling cities on the planet’s landscape, its lifestyles and emotional characteristics are not similar to ours and it’s doubtful it will be able to mimic us to look and act human.

At least, not on Mars.

The future in “The Martian Chronicles” is not the past we’ve lived.

The book joins other once and future stories such as “Blade Runner” – a 1982 movie based on a 1968 book with a story set in 2019. Watching “Blade Runner” now, we know we don’t have flying cars but we also aren’t using pay phones to call people.

Or “Back to the Future: Part II,” a 1989 movie set in the then-distant future of 2015. More flying cars that don’t exist but the movie does include drones, flat-screen TVs, hand-held devices and other items that had become part of the technological landscape by 2015.

So, why watch an old movie or read an old book set in a future that is not only past but also completely wrong in what will/did happen?

Because it’s not so much about the future or the past. It’s about the timeless quality of now.

Bradbury didn’t see himself as Nostradamus. Ray Bradbury did not view himself as prognosticator of future events. He was a storyteller who told stories about people like you and me but set in fantastic situations.

He wanted to entertain and possibly enlighten. He shined a timeless light on the human condition.

“The Martian Chronicles” is filled with stories about pride, jealousy, grief, racism, prejudice, ambition, self-annihilation, good, evil and the gradations of grey that fill all of the spaces in between. All told within a framework of rockets, Martians and the future.

“The Martian Chronicles” tells stories about things that are as old as the Bible, as palpable as events we face today and as certain as long as humanity continues in the centuries to come.

In one part of “The Martian Chronicles,” an Earth immigrant meets a Martian. It is assumed the Earth man is of the “now” and the Martian is of the “past.” They can communicate with each other, see each other, but they are as ephemeral as phantoms to one another.

They each try convincing the other that his time is real and now, while the other is a thing of either the future or the past. The human says the Martian civilization is gone, replaced by Earth settlements. The Martian argues the Martian civilization thrives and there is no such things as Earth settlements.

The Martian says to the human: “Let us agree to disagree. What does it matter who is Past or Future, if we are both alive, for what follows will follow, tomorrow or in 10,000 years. How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken? You do not know. Then don’t ask. But the night is very short. …”

Short for all of us here or on Mars. In the Future or the Past. Or Now.

Dean Poling is an editor with The Valdosta Daily Times and editor of The Tifton Gazette.