Ray Bradbury, The Martian Chronicles

As a teenager, I read hundreds of sci-fi and fantasy novels (not all of them masterpieces, I realize in retrospect). All fantasy novels essentially owe a debt to J.R.R. Tolkien's pioneering masterpieces The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings; so too, much of science fiction owesa debt to Ray Bradbury and his short stories and novels, including The Martian Chronicles, but also the harrowing and wonderful Something Wicked This Way Comes and, perhaps most famously, Fahrenheit 451.

What these works all share in common is, perhaps, the hallmark of the genre -- a penchant for looking at humanity as if from the outside, an estrangement in time or place or species that allows us to see ourselves anew.

The Martian Chronicles was originally published as a series of short stories in a number of publications, and does not have the scope or cohesion of this proper novels. Still, a series of themes run throughout them. The narratives are set in a future which seems, now, rather like our own past, as if the 1940s (when it MC was written) were pushed into the future, without the intervening years having occurred. It is a quaint future, for all of its sudden violence, which highlights how, no matter what we predict about the future, we are always, in essence, wrong.