I, Mars

About the book

Emil Barton has spent decades alone on Mars when a telephone suddenly breaks a long silence on his eightieth birthday. The caller identifies himself as Barton too, but speaks with the confidence of youth. The apparent impossibility is rooted in machinery and recordings left by the younger man, whose words now encounter an experience they could not foresee. Bradbury makes conversation itself the source of distress: familiar speech offers the form of companionship while emphasizing the distance between past hope and present isolation. The Martian setting supplies emptiness on a planetary scale, but the emotional center is a single person's changed relation to his own voice. This individual short story is presented under the title I, Mars, preserving that version's frame and wording.

• Isolation
• Aging and memory
• Mechanical companionship

Why read it

A simple exchange of voices turns an immense science-fiction setting into an intimate confrontation with time.

English story text titled I, Mars