They had landed on an immense tomb.
Here, a civilization had died.
It was only simple courtesy that the first night be spent quietly.
Perhaps no book owes more to the archaic vision of Martian canals than the Martian Chronicles.
A vast and sprawling collection of short stories; The Chronicles covers a huge range of ideas and times.
It begins with man's first expedition to Mars, and the Martian reaction to it.
It moves on to the fall of Martian Civilization, and the rise of Earth culture on Mars,
and then finally it provides a poignant mirror for us, as human civilization
destroys itself in a fittingly human way.
So today we are gonna begin with the first few stories.
The Dying Race stories.
The story is about the Martians themselves
in the last few years before they're wiped out by earth borne disease.
We begin at the very beginning with the story of Ylla
They had a house of crystal pillars on the planet Mars by the edge of an empty sea.
And every morning, you could see Mrs. K eating the golden fruits that grew from the crystal walls
or cleaning the house with handfuls of magnetic dust, which, taking all the dirt with it, blew away on the hot wind.
Mr. and Mrs. K had lived by the Dead Sea for 20 years, and their ancestors had lived in the same house
which turned and followed the sun, flower-like, for ten centuries.
This is the story of the first human expedition to Mars, but no human character appears in it at all.
Rather, it's the story of the Martian people. In it, we follow a husband and a wife
who've been living the same routine and moving through the same banal existence
day after day, for years; whose family may have been living this way, in this same place, doing
essentially the same things...for a millennium.
They live with technological marvels beyond anything to be found on Earth;
but you get the sense that these marvels were invented a long, long time ago.
And the technological wonders they possess are strangely specific.
In every other aspect, they're living a very pastoral, very rustic existence, but they never questioned this dichotomy.
They are deeply incurious.
They're not happy, but they are complacent. But Ylla, the wife and this pair starts to have dreams.
She dreams of a light in the sky, like a coin reflecting the sun.
It falls until she sees it become a silver ship,
which lands in front of her. A man steps out. A tall, strange man with blue eyes and dark hair.
Pale. Paler than any Martian. And he speaks a language that she doesn't know,
but she can understand him, because she, like all Martians, is a telepath
She's excited by this possibility,
but when she relays it to her husband, he becomes jealous and angry.
They continue on like any couple stuck in a relationship
which is no longer what it once was. A relationship that should have ended a long time ago,
except neither party has the imagination or the energy to end it. Over the course of the day,
they tell each other tiny lies; not directly addressing the issue at hand, until, in the end, the husband goes out
"hunting" and kills the Earth men his wife saw in her dream.
The earth men who have just landed on their planet the first visitors from another world.
Two stories later, in The Earth Men, we witness the arrival of the second
expedition. A new rocket has landed, with a new crew, but to their surprise,
there's no fanfare. No welcoming party to greet their arrival; but as they go from house to house,
they're met with disinterest and derision--always passed along to somebody else. Sent to be someone else's problem, rather than celebrated.
Finally they find a group of people who gives them the welcome they've been so long expecting.
But, as they question these Martians, who, at last seem happy to see them, it becomes clear that they are insane.
The Earth men have been shut away in a Martian asylum. 'Cause, you see, Martians can manifest
however they want with their telepathy. So, when they are delusional, they appear to everybody as their
delusions. When the Earth men finally talked to the Martian doctor and take him to their rocket ship to prove that it's real,
he thinks that they've got a very advanced case of psychosis; projecting an incredible
manifestation of the ship. And so he applies the only known cure, and shoots them all.
And when the ship doesn't fade, the only answer he can come up with is that he himself
must have been infected with the madness, and so he shoots himself as well.
It's with these stories that Bradbury sets the tone for the Martians.
He shows them as a once great race in decline.
Relying on the technology and the advancements of the past, without adding anything new.
Lacking curiosity, or desire for anything, but the most banal comforts
Then he contrasts this with the people of Earth, who send ship after ship
hurtling millions of miles to explore Mars, even though ship after ship never comes back.
And here, alongside Tolkien, Bradbury helps set the dying race archetype.
The old race of beings that have run out of vigor. That have lived too long,
and, in doing so become too used to the world, too focused on their own internal affairs.
But where Tolkien presents a great crisis that rouses the elves one last time from their slow decline,
Bradbury confronts the Martians with a dying world whose resources are gradually dwindling,
and they ignore the problem; busying themselves with more pedestrian concerns, and passing the problem off to future generations
and to me it's in this that you can see the difference between a novel influenced largely by the
Pre-War era and the stories written with a much more
Post-war society in mind. Because even though Lord of the Rings was published after the Martian Chronicles,
Tolkien seems to be reflecting on what he'd seen of the world in his lifetime, or, at least,
his writing was very impacted by it.
He really hated people taking his work as an allegory. Whereas Bradbury was clearly writing with an eye to the Future
Bradbury's work is a commentary on
decadence and decline, of a society at once more civilized, and more barbaric than what we know,
resting on the achievements of the past. A society in which people literally wear masks to hide their emotions, and where anything
outside the norm is considered dangerous,
deviant, and to be destroyed. And yet, in the end, it's this rejection that destroys the
Martians. As, in a twist borrowed from War of the Worlds,
they are wiped out by chickenpox picked up from the early expeditions. And since they've killed each human that's landed,
there's no one there to share our research and medicine to help blunt the disease.
The Martian Chronicles can clearly be read as a cautionary tale for 50's America.
But the genius of it lies in the fact that it doesn't serve only as allegory. Bradbury also
extrapolates out and shows us the possible dangers inherent of 50's society; as it is a very 50's
mankind he has colonized Mars. So join us next time as we follow the rise and fall of Bradbury's human colonies on Mars.