Boucher and McComas praised Chronicles as "a poet's interpretation of future history beyond the limits of any fictional form".[11] In his "Books" column for F&SF, Damon Knight listed The Martian Chronicles on his top-ten science fiction books of the 1950s.[12] Algis Budrys called it "a beautiful Bradbury collection which owes part of its charm to the loose connecting passages", and an exception to the many poor-quality fixups of the 1950s.[2] L. Sprague de Camp, however, declared that Bradbury would improve "when he escapes from the influence of Hemingway and Saroyan", placing him in "the tradition of anti-science-fiction writers [who] see no good in the machine age".