“We Earthmen have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.”
I began reading this book with very high hopes, as Ray Bradbury is by far one of my favourite authors. The political dystopia of Fahrenheit 451 and all its scary similarities to the world of today still haunt my brain almost three years after reading it, and one of my fondest bookish memories involves 13-year-old me staying up late at night to read just one more sinister short story in Bradbury’s Long After Midnight collection.
And yet, I felt a little let down by The Martian Chronicles. The artistry of Bradbury’s prose is still wonderfully evident, and the plot promises the same complexity and bizarreness characteristic of Bradbury’s work. However, in this instance, that complexity and bizarreness was overdone, to the point where I completely lost track of what was happening at times. This is probably due to the fact that The Martian Chronicles is a fix-up novel, a collection of random pieces not originally intended to be published together.
Besides from the confusing and messy storyline, Bradbury’s actual point is clear: colonisation is morally wrong. Fundamentally, The Martian Chronicles is a fictional account of how men from Earth came to Mars, bringing with them their ideas and technologies, but also their Western prejudices and disrespect for alien (pun not intended) cultures. Bradbury criticises people’s tendency to change an unfamiliar way of life into something more culturally recognisable to them, rather than trying to better understand it. The Earth men rename Martian landmarks, destroy Martian art and infrastructure – essentially, they make no attempt to understand this new culture or even decipher its language. There are only a few who realise the deeply evil nature of their high-handed human ways.
“All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. […] And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. […] No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.”
Agree or disagree with Bradbury’s political premise, but it is impossible to read The Martian Chronicles and not be struck with the beautiful prose, the analogies, the metaphors, that make you have to close the book for a second and wish you could write like that. If only the plot had been more cohesive and flowing, I might have read it a lot quicker and with more ease.
“I’m numb and I’m tired. Too much has happened today. I feel as if I’d been out in a pounding rain for forty-eight hours without an umbrella or a coat. I’m soaked to the skin with emotion.”