.When I was in 4th grade I was in an advanced class for gifted learners. These days, I’m not sure if I actually was gifted or if I was just an undiagnosed autist whose neurodivergent way of thinking and obsessing over facts and details about specific topics was mistaken for genius. But I digress. In that year, my class was assigned to do book reports from a list of early 20th century classics of various genres. Because my dad was a '50s kid who grew up on Star Trek and the Twilight Zone and similar old sci-fi, I was strongly interested in any fiction having to do with space travel or the future. Ray Bradbury’s “The Martian Chronicles” was on the list and that was the book I wanted to read, but we weren’t able to get a copy at the library, and since my parents didn’t have the disposable income to buy a copy, I had to go with my second choice. Which was “A Wrinkle In Time”, which I still think is a great book to this day, and I gave a copy of it to my about-to-be-a-teenager nephew last Christmas and he loved it.
But I’m digressing again. Last year during my self-imposed six-month period of social isolation, I was doing a lot of reading, mainly on religious topics, but I’d bought enough used books from Thriftbooks that I’d earned a free paperback. And as I was thinking about what I might like to read, Bradbury came to mind, and I found a copy of The Martian Chronicles on their website and ordered it. It was an old copy. The pages were yellowed. The cover was cracked and fragile. It literally started falling apart while I was reading it and I had to throw it away once I was done. The copy I had had the stories with the original dates, where the colonization takes place in the early 2000s, as opposed to the later revision that pushed everything ahead another 30 years, because Bradbury decided that would make it more relevant.
I would like, at this time, to offer the review of the book that I might have been able to give 35 years ago, if I had had the maturity and cultural literacy to do so. I’ve been tossing and turning this book around in my head for nearly a year at this point, and I still don’t really know what to make of it, because it’s either one of two things; a clumsy cash-in with poorly written characters and visible disdain for the reader, or the most brilliant satire of American civilization that I have ever read.
I am not, in this review, going to pick on the bad science in the book. Ray Bradbury describes Mars as having a breathable atmosphere, near-Earth gravity, warm if not hot air, flowing rivers and seas, and fertile soil, with Earth distinctly visible in the sky as a green orb, and reachable by rocket ship in a short period of time. He was writing before mankind had ever even been to space, let alone sent probes to Mars. The real Mars isn’t anything like that. I’m not gonna hold that against him. I’m willing to assume that his stories are set in a universe where Mars is indeed fertile and habitable. I’m also not going to pick on him too much about the inconsistencies between some of the stories, because the novel is a fix-up of short stories that were initially written as standalones, with a few short pieces to bridge them.
Now then, let’s get into it. I’m not going to individually critique every single story in the book, just touch on the ones I think are significant.
“Rocket Summer”. Bradbury clearly had a very fanciful idea of what a rocket launch would look or feel like.
“Ylla”. This is the only real look we get at what Martian society looks like before the arrival of the Earthmen. It’s an interesting little piece, with their civilization clearly being in decline in a Wellsian sense, yet still being post-scarcity enough that they want for nothing. The description of the Martians as being contagiously telepathic, to the point where they involuntarily assume the forms that other people imagine them as having, is probably the most interesting thing about them, and I wish Bradbury had done more with it. The relationship between Ylla and her husband, however, is disgusting and all too human. He’s a jealous bastard who goes off and murders the first human astronauts to set foot on Mars because his wife had the audacity to have a dream about them. There’s probably something to be said there about the state of heterosexual marriage in America in the mid-20th century.
“The Summer Night”. This short piece expands upon the theme of the Martians being contagiously telepathic, suddenly finding themselves singing old English nursery rhymes, and it’s one of my favorite pieces in the whole book! If only he’d stuck to this topic. Alas…
“The Earth Men”. This one is just clumsily written and probably my least favorite installment. These four soldiers just land their capsule in the Martian countryside, on the outskirts of a city, and march into town expecting to be greeted as heroes and given a ticker-tape parade just for showing up. Their captain is an utter bozo who signs a paper committing all four of them to a mental institution without bothering to read it, even though the telepathic nature of Martian language means he can perfectly understand everything that’s being said to him and all the words on the document being shown to him. He literally doesn’t know what the word “euthanasia” means. Not that the Martian psychiatrist whose care they wind up in knows any better either, he unilaterally decides that the landing vessel and the captain’s three crewmates are all psychic emanations, shoots them all dead, and then kills himself once he realizes that the ship didn’t dematerialize after he killed them. Perhaps this story is a commentary on the egotism of scientific types who think they know it all? If it is, it isn’t presented well.
“The Taxpayer”. A man demands to be let aboard the third rocket to Mars because nuclear war is coming soon and he wants to escape it. This piece is pretty good, but its inclusion makes clear the fundamental flaw in the book in the context of what comes later.
“The Third Expedition”. I first read this when I was a teenager, in The Science Fiction Hall Of Fame, Vol. 1, 1929-1964, a paperback compilation of short stories considered to be the greatest such tales prior to the introduction of the Nebula awards, under the title “Mars Is Heaven!” As a standalone, it’s a very well-executed piece of horror fiction. As a part of the Martian Chronicles, however, it has problems, and this is the first point where I really find myself mentally yelling at the author.
The crew of the vessel landing on Mars find themselves in an idyllic small town in Ohio as it would have been in the 1920s. Disembarking, the crew find the town to be populated by their deceased family members and conclude that they’ve arrived in Heaven, and retire to their family’s homes for the night - but as it turns out, this is another psychic projection by the Martians, derived from the captain’s memories of the town he grew up in, and the Martians, who by now have come to fear and distrust the Earthlings, proceed to murder them in their sleep.
Like I said, it works as a standalone. When you try to shoehorn it into a single narrative, however? It breaks down. The standalone, according to the copy of the Sci-Fi Hall of Fame that I have in my possession, is set in 1960, where it makes sense that the ship’s captain could have grown up in early 20th century Ohio. The novel version is supposed to take place in either 2000 or 2031 depending on which version you’re reading. The captain would have to be in either his seventies or nearly a hundred to make it work. There’s a brief mention of anti-aging technology to explain how he can be captaining a spaceship at that extreme old age. This is never mentioned again in the novel and the implications of its existence are left unaddressed. The crew of the Third Expedition are grossly irresponsible in the novel version in a way that they aren’t in the standalone. In the standalone, man has never been to Mars before and has no idea what to expect, so the idea that it could host the afterlife is at least plausible. The novel versions of the characters know full well that the first two Martian expeditions were lost with all their crew, and they have no idea why - and yet, when they see these people out the portholes who appear to be their dead loved ones, they immediately abandon their posts, disregarding their rank and responsibilities, to hang out with what turn out to be alien murderers. It’s a bitter and harsh depiction of American soldiers (and the astronauts in this story so far are DEFINITELY depicted as military types) to show them being so reckless and irresponsible. But then again…
“And the Moon Be Still As Bright”. The Fourth Expedition lands and finds that the natives have almost all died of chickenpox presumably contracted from one of the first three expeditions. I guess that’s a reverse War of the Worlds and a parallel to Europeans introducing smallpox to the New World, and it conveniently absolves the Earthmen of any responsibility to get the natives out of the way before they start colonizing. This is the first story that starts to get really silly, IMO, because upon landing on Mars and establishing that they’re safe, the explorers’ reaction is to get drunk and throw a hootenanny. The meat of the story is about a single crewmember who objects to his crewmate’s dismissive attitudes towards the now-dead Martians, kills several of them, and goes native, which is honestly an interesting little narrative, but the work necessary to bring it about is clumsy and unrealistic (he manages to learn how to speak and read Martian in a single week by studying their books, having no idea how the language was spoken or any comparison to living languages? Not likely. We still can’t even read Linear A.) Still one of the better stories in the collection.
“The Settlers”, “The Green Morning”, “The Locusts”, “The Shore”, “Interim”, “The Naming of Names”, “The Musicians”, “The Old Ones”. Gonna lump these together because they’re all pretty short interludes about the humans beginning to settle Mars. This is where Bradbury really settles into the parallel with the conquest of the west. People setting up towns and farms and introducing terran flora to the Martian wilderness. The last of these is particularly morbid, with its description of young boys on a daytime adventure, sandwiches and orange soda in their backpacks, playing in the homes of the dead Martians and using their bones as musical instruments before “firemen” come to burn them up. That’ll come up again later. This is one of the more idyllic parts of the novel. It presents this idealized version of the American frontier where it’s nobody’s fault that the natives aren’t there anymore. The settlers have arrived on what is truly a vacant land and set about making it their own, with wooden houses and churches and telephone wires, rebuilding early 20th century America on foreign soil. At the same time, there’s a desperation mixed in with the hope.
“Night Meeting”. I’m really not sure what to make of this one. This story sort of diverges from the mostly realist depiction of Mars the rest of the stories give us and takes a dive into magical realism. A young Mexican driving a truck across an ancient highway encounters a Martian who lived hundreds of thousands of years ago, and neither of them believes the other is real as they compare descriptions of the times they live in and the ancient lonely highway they were both travelling along. I liked this as a standalone, but it’s hard to see how it fits into the greater narrative.
Later editions than the one that I have read include at this point stories called “The Fire Balloons” and “The Wilderness”. I have not read these and therefore cannot comment.
“Way in the Middle of the Air”. This is simultaneously one of the best stories in the book and one of the worst stories in the book. It depicts a group of black people in the Deep South building a rocket on which to depart to Mars on their own, and the desperate attempt of an old white racist to stop one of them from leaving. It’s saddening that Bradbury believed that 60 years in the future from when he was writing that the south would still be living under Jim Crow. It’s inspiring that the black folks in the story are successful in their mission and manage to rescue the man that the racist tries to stop, but the way they’re depicted is also patronizing and depicts them as simple and childlike. I guess it was probably progressive for its time, but today it just feels cringewortthy. I understand that this story is omitted from more recent editions of the novel than the one I read. That’s probably for the best.
“Usher II”. I LOVE this one. It works well as a companion piece to Fahrenheit 451, and I’m not sure if Bradbury intended them to be set in the same timeline, but it certainly makes sense. It’s a fun little Poe pastiche. Our protagonist builds a 1:1 replica of the House of Usher, invites the self-righteous moral censors who have banned the reading of fiction for fear of corrupting public morality, and proceeds to murder them in a variety of ways derived from Poe’s stories. It’d work just as well as a standlone, and it doesn’t really need to be set on Mars, but its being set on Mars establishes something important - civilization on Earth is decadent and in decline, and probably going to collapse pretty soon, and people are fleeing to Mars in hopes ot getting away from it to start over.
“The Martian”. This is another one of the good ones, where we get to see a slice of life in the Earthmen’s pioneer towns. A lone Martian survivor wanders towards a settler’s farm looking for food - and because they’re contagiously telepathic he finds himself assuming the form of their dead son. All goes well until they insist on taking him to town with them, where, surrounded by the thoughts of countless other people who’ve lost loved ones, he finds himself involuntarily shifting from form to form to try to please everyone until he winds up dead. Probably the best tragedy in the book, and the most meaningful commentary it manages to present about the relationship between the American pioneers and the natives.
“The Off Season”. This, IMO, is where the novel really goes tits-up. We’re reunited with Sam Parkhill, a secondary member of the fourth expedition in “And the Moon Be Still As Bright”, who’s opened a hot dog stand on the highway in anticipation of the arrival of millions of more pioneers from Earth. Sam is, to put it lightly, an utter garbage trash piece of shit excuse for a human being. He’s dumber than a sack of hammers, he’s abusive to his wife to the point that she says she honestly wouldn’t be surprised if he murdered her, he’s a gutter racist whose response to a Martian survivor approaching him with a peace offering is to kill them in cold blood, and after he spends an extended period of time trying to run away and shoot at the Martians who are trying to communicate important news to him, the impression he gets from their telling him that Mars now belongs to him is to start prepping tons of food for his restaurant even though it’s gonna be days before anyone shows up and he has no way of knowing how much business to expect.
Then he looks up in the sky and the Earth explodes. (I promised I wouldn’t pick on the science.)
“The Watchers”, “The Silent Towns”, “The Long Years”. This is where it gets silly. Nuclear war has broken out on Earth. The entire continent of Australia is somehow vaporized instantly. (I PROMISED I wouldn’t pick on the science. Bradbury didn’t know what nuclear war would realistically look like.) You’d think the millions of Americans who had managed to settle on Mars would breathe a sigh of relief, since having escaped to another planet means they’re safe from the devastation being wreaked on their homeworld.
WRONG. They all abandon Mars and go back to Earth to join the war effort.
Ray Douglas Bradbury, what were you smoking? I know World War II was still fresh in your mind, and you imagined war as being about millions of infantrymen in trenches and fortifications shooting at each other with rifles. You clearly understand the devastating power of nuclear weapons, though! A million soldiers can’t stop a single nuke. And yet, your characters’ reaction to this apocalyptic catastrophe is “Well, I guess I better enlist”. But you don’t just have the men of Mars go off to fight. EVERYONE leaves! EVERYONE! The entire population of Martian settlers pack up their bags and go back to Earth to fight in the war. Everyone! The pioneers who wanted to stake a claim of their own like their grandparents did - back to Earth to fight in the war. The free-minded intellectuals who fled the censorious government that had banned Poe - back to Earth to fight in the war.The poor blacks from the south who were fleeing literal lynch mobs - back to Earth to fight in the war. The guy who begged and pleaded to be let on the rocket to Mars so he could get away from the war - back to Earth to fight in the war!
This part of the story honestly baffles me. It seems like Bradbury abruptly changed his mind about the kind of story he wanted to tell, and took a hard right turn from a parable about the American conquest of the Old West into a story about the aftermath of nuclear war and decided to shoehorn it into the ongoing narrative he was already in the middle of. I guess one could draw a parallel between the sudden extinction of the Martians at the conclusion of the book’s first act and the nuclear war at the end of the second, but the execution is clumsy as hell, and I long for a timeline in which the third act of the book is instead about how the Martian colonists press on en masse after Earth has gone.
Instead, we get a story where, out of presumably millions of colonists, there are only SEVEN people left on the planet - a family of archaeologists who were off doing field research, a gold prospector who was in the country and didn’t have access to a radio, and a chubby girl who’s glad that everyone else left because now nobody will fat-shame her. “The Silent Towns”, which revolves around said prospector finding himself alone, hearing a ringing telephone, and driving a thousand miles to find the caller only to discover that he doesn’t find her attractive, is just kinda gross. It’s brought up in this story that mankind has somehow developed food preservation techniques that allow fresh meat and vegetables to stay edible for decades, which just raises more questions as to why everybody abandoned Mars. Even if you assume that they couldn’t raise their own livestock or grow their own plants in the Martian soil, they can clearly survive off preserved food indefinitely. “The Long Years”, in which one of the remaining archaeologists outlives the rest of his family, replaces them with robots, and lives to meet an astronaut returning from a survey of the outer solar system, is a little better.
“There Will Come Soft Rains”. This I had read as a standalone before I read it as part of the novel. This is THE standout piece from the entire work that deserves to be celebrated. This one should’ve been in the Sci-Fi Hall of Fame instead of “Mars Is Heaven!” It describes what we’d now call a “smart house”, powered by AI, continuing to go through its daily routine, even though the city it’s in has been nuked and the family that lived in it are dead. It’s a foundational piece of post-apocalyptic fiction… but it REALLY doesn’t belong in the Martian Chronicles, IMO. It’s set on Earth, for one. The book sets its events in either 2026 or 2057 depending on which version you read, which is 21 years after the war described in “The Off Season” broke out, but it depicts the house as if the California town it stands in had only been bombed recently - the family dog is still alive and confused, and there’s still an ample supply of fresh bacon that the house is frying up for its now-deceased inhabitants. It seems like Bradbury managed to simultaneously overestimate AND underestimate what nuclear war would be like, considering how long it seems to drag on for in spite of his descriptions of how destructive it would be.
“The Million Year Picnic”. This is the conclusion of the novel, and it’s also clumsy. A mom, dad, and their three sons take a seemingly innocent rocket trip to Mars, which the parents present as being an ordinary family vacation as if Earth hasn’t been suffering from nuclear war for 20 years. They listen to the radio as the last transmissions from Earth stop and dad tells them that human civilization is over forever. Lucky for them that their neighbors and their daughters also happened to rocket to the same part of Mars! It’s an Adam and Eve ending where their kids are gonna be the progenitors of the new human race on Mars.
My overall impression is that not all of the stories in this book belong in one novel. It’s confused about what kind of story it’s trying to tell. Is it about the conquest of the west and the relationship between American pioneers and the Native Americans? Is it about scientific advance and its potentials for both good and evil? Is it about civilizational collapse and what comes in its aftermath? It seems like, over the course of writing these stories, Bradbury changed his mind about what themes he wanted to explore, and forcing them into a single narrative produced an incoherent mishmash.
It definitely has a satirical aspect to it. Bradbury doesn’t seem to think much of the common American man. The soldiers on the early Mars expeditions are nincompoops who get themselves killed because they lack any kind of discipline or sense of self-preservation. Given that from what I’ve read about American history it seems like up until somewhere around the late '70s everyone was just constantly drunk all the time, this may not be an exaggeration. “Usher II” depicts a future where the general public are deliberately kept ignorant by their leaders. The colonists going back to Earth en masse to die in an atom war is clearly not wise decision-making. There seems to be a recurring theme that the American people, while unwise and ignorant, are also optimistic to a fault, and for better or worse will charge head-first into any challenge presented to them whether it’s going to wind up being good or bad for them in the end.
Overall, I can’t recommend this novel, and yet, I feel like it’s an important piece of Serious American Literature. It’s clumsy, it’s incoherent, it sends mixed messages, it presents a convoluted excuse for avoiding a major moral quandry, and the third act really requires you to assume that every single human being depicted in the story is an idiot, but it’s definitely a valid slice-of-life presentation of mid-20th-century America and its reflections on the pioneer days.
Thank you for reading my book report.
