“The Wheel” a previously unpublished Martian bridge by Ray Bradbury

In last week’s post about the new, sold-out, expanded, limited, signed, 750-page The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition (2009), by literary giant Ray Bradbury, I blogged about the historical “They All Had Grandfathers.” This week, I’m highlighting “The Wheel,” a bridge which, according to Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury (2005), was “excised” from the working manuscript of The Martian Chronicles before that work was first published in 1950.

“The Wheel” (2009) is a short bridge that describes how “the black people” missed Mars and ended up landing upon Venus, where “they were happy.” Here is the opening line:

THEY SANG on their way. They sang Joshua Saw the Wheel, and they sang Go Down, Moses, and they sang a lot of other songs. They sang songs of all kinds, but they missed Mars....

“The Wheel” is the twelfth of Bradbury’s "Other Martian Tales" and if reincorporated back into The Martian Chronicles, it would, presumably, be placed after the racially-charged chapter “Way in the Middle of the Air” (June 2003/2034). Interestingly, “Way in the Middle of the Air” was scrubbed from the 2006 William Morrow/Harper Collins reprinting of The Martian Chronicles and is only included in The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition (2009) as an "other Martian tale."