The Martian Chronicles | Musings of the Monster Librarian

We’re getting a little stir-crazy at home, already. School, initially intended to be closed through April 13 due to the coronavirus outbreak, will now be closed til May 1, and frankly, I’m not sure the three of us are going to make it. There are a lot of jokes out there about introverts finally getting the alone time they need, but even my daughter, who can happily disappear for hours under blankets, texting her friends, watching videos, and reading in various formats, is upset about missing school. There are, I think, very few people who don’t ever want any other people around. It must be something that catches writers’ imagination, though, because there are many stories and books out there about a single individual, or maybe a small group, left alone after the end of the world as we know it. I’ve seen a bunch of lists for books about pandemics or their aftermath that suggest the same books more than once (The Last Man by Mary Shelley, Station Eleven by Emily St. James Mandel, The Stand by Stephen King, A Journal of the Plague Year by Daniel Defoe, The Andromeda Strain by Michael Crichton, to name a few). These are not so much books about pandemics as they are about isolation (or escape from) others, and I’m going to try and offer a few you might not have found on other lists.

1984 by George Orwell. The only thing that’s more disturbing than the way the members of society are set up against each other in this book is that things were about a million times more poisonous in the Soviet Union. No one can trust anyone else; it’s social distancing as a lifestyle. I recently read the middle-school novel The Story That Cannot Be Told, by J. Kasper Kramer, which, while not entirely historically accurate, described the paranoia involved in just living daily life in Romania before Ceausescu was overthrown, which turned families, even parents and children who loved each other, against themselves in a way you don’t really see in 1984 as Winston is alienated from everyone around him and has no family.

Allison Hewitt Is Trapped by Madeline Roux. This is Roux’s first book, from before she switched to YA fiction, and it starts with bookstore employee Allison Hewitt, trapped in the break room at the bookstore with her coworkers after zombies take over. blogging her story. Thank goodness for the escapism of the Internet, right? This novel actually started as an experiment in fiction, with the entries actually published as a blog, when the publisher noticed and offered Roux a contract.

The Decameron by Giovanni Bocaccio. Seven young women and three young men are escaping the plague of 1348 together in a house outside Florence, Italy. Over the course of 10 days, each individual tells 10 stories, for a total of 100 stories, some tragic, some comic, some erotic. There are worse ways to spend your time when you’re keeping your distance from potentially deadly disease. Bocaccacio wrote for the common man, which in his time meant he wrote in Italian instead of Latin. There are translations out there that will make it easier on you that the version you can download for free, if you want to check it out.

Hollow Kingdom: A Novel by Kira Jane Buxton takes on the point of view of an intelligent animal, one who doesn’t really fit in anywhere: S.T., a tame crow. Something has happened to his human, and maybe all the humans; they seem ill, are disintegrating, and have developed a taste for raw meat. The animals, without opposable thumbs, are mostly trapped inside their owners’ houses. It’s kind of like The Secret Life of Pets with a lot less cutesy animation and a lot more unattached body parts, violence, foul language, and junk food.

I Am Legend by Richard Matheson. This book was awarded Vampire Novel of the Century by the Horror Writers Association in 2012. and shows the damage people take when they are really, truly, distanced from each other.

Kingdom of Needle and Bone by Mira Grant. Dr. Isabella Gauley’s niece was the index case for Morris’ disease, which appears to be measles at first, but eventually compromises the infected person’s immune system. The only way to keep people from getting infected is for them to go into a permanent quarantine before they get the disease. Based on the content of this novella, I’m going to go out on a limb and say that Mira Grant has strong opinions about vaccination and affordable healthcare.

The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury. There’s so much back and forth of humans and Martians trying to connect, distance themselves, or both, in this book, but the standout story on social distancing (although not the best story in the book) is “The Silent Towns”, in which a man who believes he is the last man on Mars after the colonists have abandoned it, discovers there is also a woman on Mars… but upon meeting her, decides he’d rather live alone.

It’s a bummer that the library is closed, but you can probably find these as ebooks through Overdrive, Libby, or Hoopla in the library’s digital collections. If not, you can always consider buying them! If you click on the image, it should take you to Amazon and, if you order from there, the site might actually make some money! Enjoy!

Today I learned that Ray Bradbury had died.

From the day I snagged a library copy of Fahrenheit 451 (due to a school board election in which one candidate ran on the platform of removing it from the curriculum), Ray Bradbury had me hooked. It’s funny how his short stories sneaked in to the most unusual of places. I found “The Flying Machine” and “A Sound of Thunder” in my middle school English textbook, and my junior year, after reading “The Fall of the House of Usher”, my American Lit teacher stuck a photocopy of “Usher 2000” in my hands. There were anthologies edited by Martin Greenberg that had his stories within, and somewhere in my days as the librarian for the science fiction society I belonged to in college, I acquired a used hardcover copy of three of his anthologies bound together- The Illustrated Man, The Martian Chronicles, and Dandelion Wine. I just read a short essay on Bradbury criticizing him for not having written anything of note since the 1960s, but I completely disagree- although these are probably still my favorite stories, I love his writing for making me think.

I heard Bradbury speak once, on a double bill with Douglas Adams. I have to say that Douglas Adams, as much as I love his writing, was not a great speaker. Bradbury, however… Even in a wheelchair, mere days after a stroke, he was compelling and fascinating. Age, and even illness, did not stop his agile mind. Just this year, I discovered the “official” graphic novel of Fahrenheit 451, with an introduction by Bradbury, where he wrote about how, as time passed, he had been able to reflect and recognize the origins of the book. Which has, ironically, been the target of censors many times, including his own publishers. If not for libraries, this book could never have been written- it’s a true dime novel, written on a typewriter in the basement of a library, at the cost of ten cents per half hour. You can find it at your library and check it out today, knowing that libraries have not only defended the book, but also allowed for its creation in the first place.

Bradbury resisted having his books come out as ebooks, but they did recently come out in that forrm. If you’ve never read his work now is an excellent time to start, and you have all kinds of choices. A giant of literature, with the talent to create compelling, disturbing, and sometimes terrifying visions of the future present, he will be missed.