SOURCE: "The Expedition of the Planet of Paranoia," in Extrapolation, Vol. 22, No. 2, 1981, pp. 171-85.

In this excerpted essay, Plank offers a variety of interpretations of Bradbury's "April 2000: The Third Expedition," lending insight into other stories collected in The Martian Chronicles.

Ray Bradbury's most famous book is not a book; The Martian Chronicles (1950) are chronicles in outward appearance only. Rather they are individual stories strung on a chronological line, glued together here and there with smudges of connective tissue. They were clearly written independently, and many of them were originally published separately. The book purports to relate events that took place between January 1999 and October 2026, but many of them could have taken place—as far as they could have taken place at all—at different times and in a different sequence. This is particularly true of the first three expeditions from Earth to Mars. All three of them are...