It’s a blend of specific tonal qualities one rarely encounters in science fiction, despite Bradbury’s fame and influence. Bradbury’s fixup novel has a mix of “classic” speculation, bucolic small-town details, and a kind of wistful nostalgia that frequently goes sideways into ghost-story territory. It’s impossible to talk about The Strange without comparison to Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles. When bandits steal the last recording of her mother’s voice, Annabelle embarks on a quest for justice: accompanied by her faithful kitchen robot and a rough cast of gunslingers and spaceship pilots, she soon finds herself in the thick of the strange transformations gripping Mars. Set shortly after a mysterious Silence has fallen over Earth-a complete stop in all messages and ships from the home planet-the novel is narrated by Annabelle Crisp, a young girl at the time of these events. Colonized by Americans, among others, this is a distinctly frontier-like Mars, with most of the main characters of Texan extraction. Nathan Ballingrud’s The Strange is set on Mars in the early 20th century-not a scientifically accurate Mars, but one more like Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles or earlier planetary romance, with a breathable atmosphere and signs of earlier civilizations.
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