The Martian Chronicles

The only Ray Bradbury that I'd read prior to Books & Beer Club reading Fahrenheit 451 was (probably an abridged version of) "All Summer in a Day," about life on Venus, which I read as a fifth grade teacher with my class. I'd forgotten what planet "All Summer in a Day" was about and was excited, momentarily, thinking that it was going to be part of The Martian Chronicles.

Oh well.

I won't lie. I had a difficult time getting through The Martian Chronicles. As much as I enjoyed it piecemeal, I really wished it was more of a narrative rather than a loosely connected collection of stories about "Earth man's" experience on Mars. But in the end, I am really glad that I stuck with this and finished it.

The Martian Chronicles is set in the not so distance future (from 2030 until 2057), when people from Earth were settling the Mars frontier. It's important to remember that The Martian Chronicles was first published in 1950. I wish I had more knowledge of how certain things were back in 1950 to get a better handle on how Bradbury imagined things to be in the mid-21st Century.

In this novel, Mars is a planet full of lots of dead cities without a whole lot of Martians in 2030 and moving forward. Expeditions from Earth (from America) are trying to colonize the planet. The interactions between "humans" and Martians are quite violent. It's hard to know who is really a person from Earth versus who is a Martian in Bradbury's telling. And life on Mars doesn't appear to that different from life on Earth. Go figure!

Once the expeditions to Mars were more or less successful, transports carried building materials from Earth to Mars. But where did trucks come from? And how exactly where they fueled?

And in certain houses you heard the hard clatter of a typewriter, the novelist at work; or the scratch of a pen, the poet at work; or no sound at all, the former beachcomber at work.

Who knew in 1950 that there wouldn't be typewriters in 2034? Surely not Ray Bradbury!

The references to telephones were interesting. No mobile devices. You'd think if he could imagine rockets transporting people and things, including food, back and forth between the planets that voice communication wouldn't be tied to a wired telephone. And were there answering machines in 1950? Will you leave a message on the answering machine so she may call you when she returns?

What year did Fahrenheit 451 take place? There's mention that books were all burned in the Great Fire of 2006.

There was a chapter called "Usher II." Would that have made more sense to me if I'd read The House of Usher?

My favorite chapter was one called "August 2057 - There Will Come Soft Rains." It's about an automated house in 2057 that probably stood empty for over 20 years. Yet everything continued as it probably had for the past 20 years. I wondered how the  house was powered to go on that long. And where did the food and the cigars and whatever come from after 20 years of being abandoned?

Which brings me to the whole abandonment thing. Let's assume that people started settling on Mars in the late 2020s (which right now seems like it might as well be tomorrow). A destructive war on Earth starts in 2036 and all the Earth folks rush back to Earth? Why rush back? What did I miss in this regard? If you traveled from Earth to Mars for a new life, why would you rush back to Earth when it's on the verge of destruction?

And why did one family rush to Mars to get away from all that?

"I'm burning a way of life, just like that way of life is being burned clean of Earth right now. Forgive me if I talk like a politician. I am, after all, a former state governor, and I was honest and they hated me for it. Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth. That's what the silent radio means. That's what we ran away from.

I'm left to wonder whether there will be the start of settlements on Mars in my lifetime, even though I very much doubt the reality would be anything like Bradbury's vision. Looking forward to discussing this at Books & Beer Club to see how others saw the book.