Mark Watney is having a very bad time of it. Says the protagonist of Andy Weir’s 2011 novel, The Martian, on being stranded alone on the red planet: “If the oxygenator breaks down, I’ll suffocate. If the water reclaimer breaks down, I’ll die of thirst. If the Hab breaches, I’ll just kind of explode. If none of those things happen, I’ll eventually run out of food and starve to death.”

He forgot to mention being killed by a turf-protecting Martian, a possibility that plays out early on in Ray Bradbury’s pioneering story cycle, The Martian Chronicles. Published in 1950, a dark and bellicose time in this country’s history, it is made up of magazine stories tied together by interstitial text, short passages that led Bradbury to call the thing “a book of stories pretending to be a novel.” Novel or story collection, The Martian Chronicles proceeds from an entirely reasonable premise: Humans are fast destroying Earth, and now they’re outward bound, looking for a new place to live.

That’s exactly the sort of thing that, toward the end of his life, Stephen Hawking was encouraging earthlings to do, noting the environmental and climatic apocalypse that was coming. But Bradbury adds a murderous twist. When the first humans land, in that then-distant year of 1999, they arrive at a settlement that looks very much like a suburban development back home. They don’t have much time to wonder about the place, for one Martian they encounter proclaims them to be “hallucinations with time and spatial persistence,” shooting them in order to scare them into dissolving. They don’t. Instead, they lie dead in the sand of Mars, very real corpses.

The next couple of missions don’t end any better for the earthlings, who expect to be greeted as liberators or at least get the keys to the city. But then 2001 rolls around, about a third of the way into the book, and the next astronauts now arrive at a “dead, dreaming world,” its inhabitants wiped out by an errant smidge of chicken pox left behind by some member of those first three missions. An earthling might suffer from shingles later in life, but as for the Martians—who, Bradbury lets slip, themselves arrived from Earth a long time before—the virus “burnt them black and dried them out to brittle flakes.”

It’s an ugly way to go, and one crew member laments the fact that so trivial a thing could destroy an advanced civilization, apparently not knowing much about the arrival of Europeans to the Americas and the role of disease in clearing the way for conquest. Whatever the case, a few Martians are left, strangers in their own strange land. One, surveying his now-dead city, says presciently to the victorious humans, “How do you know that those temples are not the temples of your own civilization one hundred centuries from now, tumbled and broken?”

It’s a good question, for nuclear war has broken out back on Earth, hastening its demise. With nowhere left to turn, the newcomer earthlings are now the new Martians. And if that’s not a timely scenario….

Gregory McNamee is a contributing editor.