I, Mars

Alone on Mars for sixty years, Emil Barton has learned how to survive silence.

What he never learned was how to escape himself.

On his eightieth birthday, a telephone rings for the first time in decades. The voice on the line is young, confident, cruel—and unmistakably his own. A recording made long ago, when Barton was stranded on Mars as a young man, now speaks back across time. As more voices begin to call—copies of himself scattered across abandoned Martian cities—the line between memory, machinery, and madness begins to collapse.

In I, Mars, Ray Bradbury delivers a haunting psychological science-fiction tale about isolation, identity, and the terrifying persistence of the past. Set against the silent red landscapes of Mars, this mid-century classic explores what happens when technology refuses to let loneliness end—and when the future becomes trapped in an endless conversation with its own younger self.

First published in Super Science Stories in 1949, I, Mars remains a chilling meditation on time, regret, and the cost of waiting too long to go home.