It was exactly 10 years ago, 1999, that the heat of a rocket ship on its way to Mars turned the dark Ohio winter into summer. The First Expedition landed men on Mars but it would be three expeditions later before the men of Earth would fully inhabit the red planet and make it their own. Eventually, they would come with their families, build homes and cities on the dead Martian sands, and create new histories that would replace their own and those of the Martian lives they destroyed.

Or so Ray Bradbury imagined it when he was writing The Martian Chronicles a half-century ago in 1949 (it was published in 1950). Just a few years before, World War II created a lasting, worldwide fear of nuclear apocalypse. While wars of the past had ended one empire or another, Hiroshima and Nagasaki made us believe in the destruction of human civilization itself. Where could we escape? By 1949, most of our own planet had been mapped, and the dreams of explorers past fulfilled. So, the people of Earth directed their hopes skyward. Outer space took on the Utopian qualities once embodied by the Artic and the deep seas. Space travel was hope. Science fiction its manual.