Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is not science fiction.

Yes, this collection of interconnected stories—sort of a Martian Winesburg, Ohio—concerns aliens, spaceships, and the colonization of Mars. But there’s precious little science to be found. Bradbury himself famously said that the only scientific fact to be found in his work is in the title of Fahrenheit 451: paper does indeed burn at 451 degrees. If it’s a hard sci-fi consideration of the topic of Martian colonization you’re looking for, you’d be better off with Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogy, a classic in its own right. Scientifically speaking, Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles is full of absurdities—little attention is paid to the realities of space travel, and when his Earthlings arrive on Mars they find the air perfectly breathable, the climate perfectly amenable.

But it doesn’t matter, because we don’t read Ray Bradbury for facts or hard science.

We read him to learn how to dream.

A Martian woman trapped in a loveless marriage falls in love with an Earthling in telepathic visions. A group of expeditioners are overjoyed to land on Mars, only to discover that the local Martians are so preoccupied with their everyday lives to notice the historic accomplishment. An Earthling and Martian meet each other across time, each appearing to the other as a phantasm. A priest discovers a strange species that has transcended corporeality and sin. A Poe enthusiast moves to Mars to recreate the House of Usher. A husband and wife reunite with their dead son, little caring that he seems to be an alien creature who takes the form of the person they most desire to see.

In story after story, Bradbury does something odd and inimitable. While his contemporaries in the golden age of science fiction were busy dreaming up the places that scientific progress might take humanity, he was up to something different: Peeling away the specificities of the genre one by one, until what was left was pure imagination, pure emotion—pure myth.

Put another way, Bradbury’s Mars isn’t really Mars. It’s a place of the subconscious, of the imagination. It’s a slipstream landscape, a place of projections and apparitions, and in Bradbury’s hands it becomes the blank canvas upon which humans paint their dreams, their nightmares, their greatest hopes, and their deepest fears.