Mars Is Heaven!

"Mars Is Heaven!"

Author	Ray Bradbury
Country	USA
Language	English
Genre(s)	Science fiction short story
Published in	Planet Stories
Media type	Print (Magazine)
Publication date	1948

"Mars Is Heaven!" is a science fiction short story by Ray Bradbury originally published in 1948 in Planet Stories. "Mars Is Heaven!" was among the stories selected in 1970 by the Science Fiction Writers of America as one of the best science fiction short stories published before the creation of the Nebula Awards. As such, it was published in The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929–1964. It also appears as the sixth chapter of The Martian Chronicles, retitled "The Third Expedition".

Plot summary

It is the 1960s and the first spaceship from Earth is landing on Mars. The crew are shocked to discover a Rockwellian small town, eerily similar to those they left on Earth. The strangely familiar people in the town believe it is 1926. Crew members soon discover old friends and deceased relatives in the town. Those who had been ordered to stay behind and guard the rocket abandon their posts in order to join the reunions and festivities.

Members of the crew split up to spend the night in the homes of their lost comrades and relatives. The ship's captain, John Black, remains skeptical, and realizes in the middle of the night that the entire situation may have been contrived by telepathic aliens to lower the Earthmen's guards. Before he can warn the others or reestablish a guard on the spaceship, he is proved right as he and the entire staff of the ship are killed by those who they think are their family members.

Adaptations in Other Media

"Mars Is Heaven!" was adapted as a radio drama for numerous anthology series including Escape (June 2, 1950), Dimension X (July 7, 1950 & January 7, 1951), Think (1953), X Minus One (May 8, 1955) and Future Tense (July 1976). It was also adapted to the EC comic book Weird Science #18 (March–April 1953) by Al Feldstein and Wally Wood. It was also adapted as an episode of the television series Ray Bradbury Theater (July 20, 1990) starring Hal Linden and Paul Gross. It was also translated into Bengali by Satyajit Ray, a friend of Bradbury's, with permission from the author. This version can be found in the book Braziler Kalo Bagh O Onanyo (The Brazilian Cat & Others).

External links

Mars Is Heaven! title listing at the Internet Speculative Fiction Database
Dimension X - Single Episodes Complete series of radio show Dimension X episodes from Internet Archive.

Ray Bradbury

Bibliography

Novels	The Martian Chronicles (1950) Fahrenheit 451 (1953) Dandelion Wine (1957) Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962) The Halloween Tree (1972) Death Is a Lonely Business (1985) A Graveyard for Lunatics (1990) Green Shadows, White Whale (1992) From the Dust Returned (2001) Let's All Kill Constance (2002) Farewell Summer (2006)

Short stories	"The Scythe" (1943) "The Lake" (1944) "Frost and Fire" (1946) "The Million Year Picnic" (1946) "The Small Assassin" (1946) "I See You Never" (1947) "Fever Dream" (1948) "The Fruit at the Bottom of the Bowl" (1948) "The Long Years" (1948) "Mars Is Heaven!" (1948) "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed" (1949) "The Exiles" (1949) "Marionettes, Inc." (1949) "The Long Rain" (1950) "The Rocket" (1950) "There Will Come Soft Rains" (1950) "The Veldt" (1950) "Ylla" (1950) "Embroidery" (1951) "The Fog Horn" (1951) "Here There Be Tygers" (1951) "The Pedestrian" (1951) "The April Witch" (1952) "A Sound of Thunder" (1952) "The Wilderness" (1952) "The Flying Machine" (1953) "The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind" (1953) "The Meadow" (1953) "The Murderer" (1953) "Sun and Shadow" (1953) "All Summer in a Day" (1954) "The Dragon" (1955) "The Aqueduct" (1979) "Banshee" (1984) "The Toynbee Convector" (1984) "Is That You, Herb?" (2003)

Collections	Dark Carnival (1947) The Illustrated Man (1951) The Golden Apples of the Sun (1953) The October Country (1955) A Medicine for Melancholy (1959) The Day It Rained Forever (1959) The Small Assassin (1962) R Is for Rocket (1962) The Machineries of Joy (1964) The Autumn People (1965) The Vintage Bradbury (1965) Tomorrow Midnight (1966) S Is for Space (1966) Twice 22 (1966) I Sing the Body Electric (1969) Ray Bradbury (1975) Long After Midnight (1976) The Fog Horn & Other Stories (1979) The Last Circus and the Electrocution (1980) The Stories of Ray Bradbury (1980) The Fog Horn and Other Stories (1980) Dinosaur Tales (1983) A Memory of Murder (1984) The Toynbee Convector (1988) Classic Stories 1 (1990) Classic Stories 2 (1990) The Parrot Who Met Papa (1991) Selected from Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed (1991) Quicker Than the Eye (1996) Driving Blind (1997) Ray Bradbury Collected Short Stories (2001) One More for the Road (2002) Bradbury Stories: 100 of His Most Celebrated Tales (2003) The Cat's Pajamas: Stories (2004) A Sound of Thunder and Other Stories (2005) The Dragon Who Ate His Tail (2007) Summer Morning, Summer Night (2007) A Pleasure to Burn (2010) The Collected Stories of Ray Bradbury (2011, 2014)

Plays	The Meadow (1947) The Flying Machine: A One-Act Play for Three Men (1953) The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit and Other Plays (1972) Pillar of Fire and Other Plays (1975) The Martian Chronicles (1986) The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1986) Fahrenheit 451 (1986) Dandelion Wine (1988) The Veldt (1988)

Adaptations	It Came from Outer Space (1953) Moby Dick (1956 screenplay) "I Sing the Body Electric" (1962) The Picasso Summer (1969) The Illustrated Man (1969) The Martian Chronicles (1980 miniseries) The Electric Grandmother (1982) Something Wicked This Way Comes (1983) Bradbury 13 (radio series, 1983-84) The Ray Bradbury Theater (TV series, 1985-86, 1988-92) The Halloween Tree (1993) Dandelion Wine (1997) The Wonderful Ice Cream Suit (1998) A Sound of Thunder (2005) Ray Bradbury's Chrysalis (2008) The Whispers (2015)

Miscellaneous	The Mummies of Guanajuato (1978) Zen in the Art of Writing (1990) It Came from Outer Space (2003 book)

Related	Spaceship Earth Bradbury Landing Ray Bradbury Award "Fuck Me, Ray Bradbury"

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