The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

Brilliant. This is Bradbury's short stories about the settlement and life on Mars written and published from the forties up to the seventies, but set between 1999 (as he envisioned it fifty or so years earlier) to 2026. Some of the stories are bitter-sweet, some troubling, some beautiful, and some scary; all capture truths about humanity. You see, the Martian Chronicles are not really about the red planet, but about the blue. About earth, and about America and the world forty to seventy years ago. Some values may have changed but many things that Bradbury observed back then may be even more true now.