The Martian Chronicles

Poetic science fiction.

Being set in the future and involving space travel, Mars and futuristic technology makes this fit into the science fiction genre, but Bradbury is a writer of literature. This is beautiful writing and Bradbury is an artist with a mastery of the language.

Mars could be another dimension, or fairy land, it does not really matter, Bradbury has concocted an alternate reality to explore psychological ethos. If Heinlein is the science fiction ideologist / sociologist, and Clarke the science fiction anthropologist, and Asimov the science fiction theologist; then Bradbury is the science fiction psychologist.

Martian Chronicles is a chronological set of short stories tied together around the theme of Earth colonization of Mars, but it is really about the human psyche and a study of what is best and worst about us.