Ray Bradbury 18 min read

On his eightieth birthday, after twenty years of silence, the phone rings in a dead Martian town, and the voice on the line says, impossibly, 'This is Barton.'

Ray Bradbury's 1949 story is a haunting, lyrical tale of loneliness and identity in the ruins of a colonized Mars. Poetic, eerie, unmistakably Bradbury. Read it for a beautiful, unsettling story about an old man, an empty world, and a caller who cannot possibly exist.

In its time

Published in 1949, during the 1940s, the golden age begins.

Reading it

18 min read (a short story, a single idea, delivered and gone).

Illustrated by

Hannes Bok