The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction book by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by refugee humans from a troubled Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel, containing Bradbury stories originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. For publication, the stories were loosely woven together with a series of short, interstitial vignettes. Bradbury has credited Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath as influences on the structure of the book. He has called it a "half-cousin to a novel" and "a book of stories pretending to be a novel."

Like Isaac Asimov's Foundation series, The Martian Chronicles follows a "future history" structure. The stories, complete in themselves, come together as episodes in a larger sequential narrative framework.

The book was published in the United Kingdom in 1951 under the title The Silver Locusts, with slightly different contents: the story "The Fire Balloons" was added, and the story "Usher II" was removed to make room for it.

In 1979 NBC commissioned a miniseries adaptation in partnership with BBC, The Martian Chronicles. The adaptation was written by Richard Matheson and was directed by Michael Anderson. The series star was Rock Hudson as 'Wilder', with Darren McGavin as 'Parkhill', Bernadette Peters as 'Genevieve Selsor', Roddy McDowall as 'Father Stone', and Barry Morse as 'Hathaway'. Bradbury found the miniseries "just boring."

From Wikipedia