The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, adapted for the BBC

 The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury, adapted for the BBC

As in his better known masterpiece, Fahrenheit 451, the astounding Ray Bradbury offers a bleak, pessimistic- or is it realistic?- view of the future, wherein our planet would face catastrophic war, with the result that life on Mars might be not just better, but perhaps the only alternative.

The perspective that Mars represents the future is shared by some of the luminaries of this age, Elon Musk being one of the formidable entrepreneurs bent on developing the means to travel, land and colonize that planet.

In the future predicted in The Martian Chronicles, one first mission to the planet has been unsuccessful and another one lands on the Red Planet, without problems, but the crew finds soon that the first team was killed by the...Martians.

Not only was the planet inhabited- or should one say, will have been?- but looking at their achievements, the fantastic cities they will have built are "as nothing that humans ever constructed".

The man leading this mission is Captain Wilder- played by the wondrous Derek Jacobi- and in his team, one the one side we have Spender, a determined, obstinate woman and on the other,  Parkhill and other, more brutal, unsophisticated, rude, perhaps even primitive members, coming from the military ranks.

Spender is soon aghast at what happens to this phenomenal Martian civilization, with splendid works, made of silver and other precious materials, with fantastic skill.

She is also disgusted, outraged by the behavior of the men that vomit, make all sorts of vicious noises and disrespect what they find on Mars, while the rebel woman is in awe, mesmerized by the lost culture, especially after she discovers that the cause of the extinction of the Martians is...chickenpox , brought in by humans.

She explains with what would prove prophetic accuracy to the captain that people from Earth would exploit the planet in the same irresponsible manner they did on Earth and hence she wants to prevent that.

She starts by killing members of her group and is facing the captain who tries to persuade her to give up- why cover this civilization she admires in blood? - and he has a point also when he says that, given that she killed comrades, she has lost the moral authority to preach about values, what other humans should do.

Spender is killed in the confrontation, the captain having had no other choice, but the prediction that the "money men" would be sent to this planet to take out the minerals and all that can be extracted comes true.

It can be argued that there is nothing wrong with using minerals, resources from Mars, only Ray Bradbury is correct in stating, through his characters, that mankind has abused planet Earth, in extracting oil, coal and everything else and then burning it , we have brought about Climate Change- denied by idiots like the Donald - which is endangering the world we live in and which looks like becoming uninhabitable for our descendents.

The Martian Chronicles deals with the stories of the crew, a couple of the colonists and some children who try to escape a dangerous, possibly dead Earth, in this adaptation for the BBC, Radio 4.

The colonists we learn about, have arrived on e planet to...sell chili dogs, somewhere in the middle of nowhere, in the opinion of the woman, but close to where a lot of action would be, in the view of the man.

There are some creatures that appear and it is not clear what they are - vermin? It that is the answer, the male partner points out that they have to deal with it without letting anyone know about it, for rats or anything of the kind mean the death of a food business...

Furthermore, they have the Best Chili Dogs in the Galaxy!

The other story that is surely taking more space in the original material, and less in an abridged version, of only a little over fifty minutes, is that of Hathaway and his family.

He is saved and he brings the two members of this visiting team to his family, wife and two children, only there are very suspicious aspects about them.

The captain had known them and the wife is his age and looks too much younger and the children, who should be in their thirties, look like teenagers.

As one of the visitors  pretends to need something from the spacecraft, he calls for more intelligence, using maybe some distant future version of Alexa or Siri and finds three mounds where the graves are.

He calls his partner out and they find the shed of this Martian, where they understand what happened:

He has lost his family years ago, probably killed by a virus, and he used his skills and the tools to recreate a...family.

Artificial Intelligence in the distant, or maybe near future.

Earth suffers from devastating war, the orders are to shoot any rocket and this covers a civilian craft which has children and a teacher on board.

Alhamdulillah, the captain disobeys this gruesome mission and the children arrive on the Red Planet.

Will they be the hope for a post apocalyptic mankind?

The Martians settled after Armageddon?