Mars was a distant shore, and the men spread upon it in waves. Each wave different, and each wave stronger. Bradbury's Mars is a place of hope, dreams, and metaphor. Of crystal pillars and fossil seas, where a fine dust settles on the great, empty cities of a silently destroyed civilization. It is here the invaders have come to despoil and commercialize, to grow and to learn. First a trickle, then a torrent, rushing from a world with no future toward...

Ray Bradbury's novel Fahrenheit 451 is an enduring masterwork of twentieth-century American literature—a chilling vision of a dystopian future built on the foundations of ignorance, censorship, and brutal repression. The origins and evolution of Bradbury's darkly magnificent tale are explored in A Pleasure to Burn, a collection of sixteen selected shorter works that prefigure the grand master's landmark novel. With classic, thematically interrelated

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