Review written for ClubReading.com by Barbara
The first story, “Rocket Summer,” takes place in January of 1999, but no matter. It’s not the date that’s important; rather, it’s Bradbury’s writing, Bradbury’s visions of the colonization of Mars, Bradbury’s notion of man. Though a collection of short stories that can each stand on it’s own, they are intricately connected by a progression through time as man settles on a planet where ethereal denizens still seem to live. Earth travelers settle into little villages perhaps drawn from childhood memory, they have picnics, and they drive trucks, and all around them is the Martian landscape. And the Martians. But are they real? Are they ghosts? What, in the end, are they? To Bradbury, they are many things, and he discloses this in a novel that’s science fiction, but it’s also poetry and psychological drama too. Though Mark Twain once said that “a classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read,” he would never have said this at all had he lived long enough to read The Martian Chronicles.
EXCERPT FROM The Martian Chronicles:
But, he thought, just suppose . . . Just suppose, now, that there were Martians living on Mars and they saw our ship coming and saw us inside our ship and hated us. Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earth Men with atomic weapons?
The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory, and imagination. Suppose all of these houses aren’t real at all, this bed not real, but only figments of my own imagination, given substance by telepathy and hypnosis through the Martians, thought Captain John Black. Suppose these houses are really some other shape, a Martian shape, but, by playing on my desires and wants, these Martians have made this seem like my old home town, my old house, to lull me out of my suspicions. What better way to fool a man, using his own mother and father as bait?
And this town, so old, from the year 1926, long before any of my men were born. From a year when I was six years old and there were records of Harry Lauder, and Maxfield Parrish paintings still hanging, and bead curtains, and “Beautiful Ohio,” and turn-of-the-century architecture. What if the Martians took the memories of a town exclusively from my mind? They say childhood memories are the clearest. And after they built the town from my mind, they populated it with the most-loved people from all the minds of the people on the rocket!
And suppose those two people in the next room, asleep, are not my mother and father at all. But two Martians, incredibly brilliant, with the ability to keep me under this dreaming hypnosis all the time.