We’re back with the fourth installment of our literary mixtape, Voyages to Mars! The Perseverance Rover is on its way to the Red Planet and space agencies around the world hope that someday in the not too distant future, humans will join it. Mars is a popular destination for humans in sci-fi literature. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, published a few years before the world’s first satellite was even launched (!), remains one of the most influential stories of human settlement on Mars ever published. In two selections from the Chronicles  – “The Settlers” and “The Green Morning” – Bradbury considers what the motivation for settling Mars might be, what those first human settlers might be like, and how they might transform Mars into something more in line with life as we know it on Earth.

About Voyages to Mars: On July 30, 2020 NASA’s Perseverance Rover launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida to Jezero Crater, Mars. To accompany Percy on seven-month journey, we’re compiling a literary mixtape of Martian-themed sci-fi set to music by DJ Kid Koala. Voyages to Mars is made possible by the support of the Secretary of the Smithsonian and the Smithsonian Orlando Regional Council.

THE SETTLERS and THE GREEN MORNING from THE MARTIAN CHRONICLES © 1950, renewed 1977 by Ray Bradbury; Broadcast by permission of Don Congdon Associates, Inc. on behalf of Ray Bradbury Literary Works LLC.