The Martian Chronicles, Ray Bradbury

Martians were people like us, so to speak. They had cities and villas, feelings and philosophy, a way of living true to the world and themselves. Telepathy eased it up, as well as a tens of thousands year-old civilization. Then men arrived from Earth, one rocket and one crew at a time. They arrived with their American way of life, their newly found atom power already brewing new wars on Earth. And the Martians disappeared, leaving behind themselves the epitome of their civilization for us to discover, for the few ones to be able to. And Mars worked it through, changing earthlings from within, making them the new Martians.

That had been thirty days ago, and he had never glanced back. For looking back would have been sickening to the heart. The weather was excessively dry; it was doubtful if any seeds had sprouted yet. Perhaps his entire campaign, his four weeks of bending and scooping were lost. He kept his eyes only ahead of him, going on down this wide, shallow valley under the sun, away from First Town, waiting for the rains to come.
Clouds were gathering over the dry mountains now as he drew his blanket over his shoulders. Mars was a place as unpredictable as time. He felt the baked hills simmering down into frosty night, and he thought of the rich, inky soil, a soil so black and shiny it almost crawled and stirred in your fist, a rank soil from which might sprout gigantic beanstalks from which, with bone-shaking concussion, might drop screaming giants.

Ray Bradbury belongs to the Golden Age of science fiction, a period when the new scientific power was slowly permeating through the Western culture, challenging humanity with its capability to destroy the world, yet not accompanied with a philosophy to sustain it. We somehow outlived it, piling up megatons of destruction to no avail, unleashing new dangers upon our biosphere, exhausting it while keeping an eye on Mars as a new frontier.

There is no hard science in Ray Bradbury's poetic stories, rather a deep sense of loss for the good old days, a wisdom seeping through his characters who have to evolve to become what they ought to be before it is too late, to find their balance and their place in the world before destroying it.

The Martian Chronicles (Harper Perennial Modern Classics editions, 2011, first published in 1950, 288 pages), written by Ray Douglas Bradbury (1920-2012), American writer also well-known for Farenheit 451.