Death-Wish by Ray Bradbury Episode #185
Ray Bradbury | February 13, 2024-
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Death-Wish by Ray Bradbury Episode #185
Ray Bradbury
DEATH-WISH
Episode #185 · Written by Ray Bradbury · Narrated by Scott Miller
Albert Steinbeck has spent years wandering a dead Mars in pursuit of a single object no one can explain and no one has ever kept. The hunt gives his days motion and his failures an excuse, allowing him to move endlessly through ruined cities without ever choosing a different life.
Death-Wish tightens its grip not through spectacle, but through pressure. As the search closes in, the story shifts from pursuit to confrontation, forcing Steinbeck to face what the Bottle actually represents to him—and what might be left once the chase ends.
Ray Bradbury builds tension through atmosphere and restraint, letting silence, distance, and obsession do the work. The story listens like a confession stretched across a barren world, where desire becomes both compass and trap.
First published in Planet Stories, Death-Wish belongs to Bradbury’s early period of emotionally driven science fiction, where Mars is less a frontier than a mirror. The planet’s ruins echo the inner lives of the men who drift through them.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Ray Bradbury’s fiction appeared in magazines including Planet Stories, Weird Tales, Astounding, and The Saturday Evening Post, long before his novels reached a wider audience. His early Mars stories helped define a poetic, psychological approach to science fiction that stood apart from hardware-driven space tales.
Best known for works such as The Martian Chronicles, Fahrenheit 451, and dozens of classic short stories, Bradbury consistently explored characters stalled between longing and action. Death-Wish distills that tension into one of his most intimate and unsettling narratives.
LISTEN TO THE STORY
Listen to Death-Wish by Ray Bradbury — a haunting vintage science fiction story where a lifelong search on Mars leads to a dangerous moment of choice.
RELATED STORIES
Mars has always been the most familiar of alien worlds, close enough to imagine and distant enough to remain dangerous. Vintage science fiction turned the red planet into a testing ground for human ambition—an empty frontier, a dying world, or a civilization older and stranger than Earth itself.
These stories send explorers, settlers, soldiers, and scientists across the void to a place where survival is never guaranteed. Thin air, vast deserts, and abandoned cities create a landscape that is both harsh and haunting.
Whether the planet is home to ancient Martians, fragile colonies, or the last hope after Earth’s decline, Mars stories are about adaptation.
- Dwellers in Silence by Ray Bradbury
- Death-Wish by Ray Bradbury
- Defense Mech by Ray Bradbury
- The Visitor by Ray Bradbury
- The One Who Waits by Ray Bradbury
- The Crystal Egg by H. G. Wells
- Never on Mars by John Wyndham
- Return of a Legend by Raymond Z. Gallun
- Message From Mars by Clifford D. Simak
- The Monsters Came By Night by Robert Silverberg
- The Martians and the Coys by Mack Reynolds
- A Zloor For Your Trouble by Mack Reynolds
- The Weapon by Isaac Asimov
- Arm of the Law by Harry Harrison
- Monster by William Morrison
- Fee of the Frontier by H. B. Fyfe
- A Message From Our Sponsor by Henry Slesar
- Two Weeks in August by Frank M. Robinson
- Duel on Syrtis by Poul Anderson
- We're Off to Mars by Joe Gibson
- Death Walks on Mars by Alan J. Ramm
- The Old Timer by Richard R. Smith
- Trainee for Mars by Harry Harrison
- The Hermit of Mars by Stephen Bartholomew
- Martian Homecoming by Frank Belknap Long
- Lake of Fire by Frank Belknap Long
- The Hated by Frederik Pohl
- The Old Martians by Rog Phillips
- The Martian Shore by Charles L. Fontenay
- Madmen of Mars by Erik Fennel
- Martians Never Die by Lucius Daniel
- What's He Doing in There? by Fritz Leiber
- Don't Look Now by Henry Kuttner
- Jonah of the Jove-Run by Ray Bradbury
- The Goggles of Dr Dragonet by Fritz Leiber
- The Foxholes of Mars by Fritz Leiber
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