Lecture 2
The Martian Chronicles (1950):
Plot Development, Character Development
(Narrative Point of View, Martian and Human Characters), Setting, Themes. Alternative Perspective: A Postcolonial Reading.
The Martian Chronicles (TMC) is possibly the best known and most critically acclaimed of Bradbury’s work. First published in 1950, TMC has been continuously in print, in both America and Britain, ever since. TMC has been marketed as science fiction, but it more closely fits what some critics call science fantasy. As Joe Patrouch, a scholar of fantastic literature, argues in “Symbolic Settings in Science Fiction: H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison,” Bradbury’s Mars is “scientifically inaccurate by the science” of the 1940s; instead, it reflects the “rural, small-town Midwest of Bradbury’s childhood” (Patrouch 41). Bradbury makes it clear in one of his introductions that he never intended to write a scientifically accurate version of the colonization of Mars because such a vision would go out of date in a few years. Despite the implausibility of his vision, Bradbury notes in his introduction to the 1997 Avon edition that he is still regularly invited to speak at the California Institute of Technology, which shows the enduring power of myth (xii). Further evidence of this mythic power is the recent adaptation of TMC as a computer game.
This lecture references the Avon “updated and revised” edition published in 1997. This edition includes an introduction by Bradbury describing how he came to write TMC, noting the early influence of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and describing his visit to New York and his conversation with Walter Bradbury (no relation), the Doubleday editor who inspired him to think of a book incorporating his Martian stories. This edition is different than the first American edition in two ways.
The first and more substantial change is in the selection of stories: two have been added (“The Fire Balloons” and “The Wilderness”) and one has been dropped (“Way in the Middle of the Air”). The second change is more subtle but also important: a revision in the dates included with the story titles in the table of contents and on the first page of each story. Critics do not include the dates when referring to the story titles, so this change is only apparent in the table of contents. The 1950 edition dates its first story as taking place January 1999, its last in October 2026; the cycle of stories thus covers a twenty-seven year period, beginning approximately fifty years after the first edition was published. In the 1997 edition, the first story is dated January 2030, the last one October 2057. The stories still cover a twenty-seven year span, and the first story is dated approximately forty years after the edition’s publication date. Bradbury’s chronology in both editions suggests a near future to contemporary readers.
Of the twenty-seven stories in the revised edition, sixteen of them are full stories, of varying lengths, with named characters. The eleven other pieces are the “bridge” sections, short passages with descriptions of events rather than individual characters, making transitions or setting up the stories, which focus more on characters in conflict.
Plot development
The genesis of TMC lies in an editor’s suggestion that Bradbury combine various previously published short stories set on Mars into a unified whole. As with the book’s model, Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio, critics have debated whether the text constitutes a true novel. Some, knowing that a number of the stories were published independently, consider the work more a collection of stories than a novel. However, Jonathan Eller’s careful analysis of Bradbury’s process of revising those earlier stories to create TMC supports the claim that this book is Bradbury’s first novel.
In “The Body Eclectic: Sources of Ray Bradbury’s Martian Chronicles,” Eller, one of the scholars who has devoted the most time to studying Bradbury’s work, considers all of Bradbury’s Mars stories, a number of which were never considered for TMC, describes the various plans or lists Bradbury created at different stages in composing the book, and closely compares the earlier stories with Bradbury’s revised versions that were included in TMC. Eller concludes that, “viewed as a process, the transformation of these tales helps to define the structural and thematic unities of the book, and to determine just what kind of book it is” (Eller 377). Eller argues that since “more than half of the composite text [of TMC] is new or rewritten,” and the five different editions published in America and Britain over the years show no more than a “5% variation in content,” Bradbury, in creating TMC, “essentially wrote an entirely new book” (Eller 401–2).
Eller’s textual analysis and use of Bradbury’s original composition materials show impressive scholarship. However, even readers who lack the training or access to such materials can see the structural unity of TMC in its text. Bradbury’s title gives a hint of that unity. “Chronicles” are historical narratives, usually associated with the Middle Ages, in which events are described by people living at that time and are usually arranged chronologically under annual headings, focusing on a single place. For example, The Plantaganet Chronicles covers England in the High Middle Ages (circa 1000–1300), focusing on military, political, and religious events. Similarly, The Martian Chronicles offers not a random collection of stories about various characters but a unified narrative about the history of human colonization of Mars. That narrative unity is found in the “metaplot,” the story line that connects the various stories, not just in the plots within the stories.
The first seven stories describe the start of exploration of Mars and the failure of the first three expeditions. This first section also establishes the probability of atomic war on Earth and the near-extinction of the Martians from chicken pox.
The next thirteen stories detail the settlement of Mars. First come small groups of men, who deal with loneliness (“The Settlers”), set up mining communities, and plant trees (“The Green Morning”). Then comes a mass migration; houses are built and communities established (“The Locusts” and “Night Meeting”). A second wave of settlers arrives from the urban areas of America (a brief explanation in “The Shore” suggests that other nations are too concerned with “thoughts of war” (119) to colonize Mars). Following the settlers come institutions. Priests build churches (“The Fire Balloons”). More buildings for settlers (“Interim”) are constructed. Families appear, with children playing among the ruins (“The Musicians”). Women leave Earth to marry the men in the settlements (“The Wilderness”). Place-names are given, and regulatory agencies and rules follow (“The Naming of Names” and “Usher II”). Finally, the rich, the tourists, and the elderly move in as well (“The Old Ones” and “The Martian”).
The next three stories detail the beginning of the atomic war on Earth (speculated about in “The Luggage Store” and witnessed in “The Off Season” and “The Watchers”), and the start of the evacuation whereby the rockets take the colonists back to Earth.
The next two stories relate what happens to people who missed the evacuation: “The Silent Towns” describes the “last man” on Mars (or so he believes). In “The Long Years,” which takes place twenty years after the war and evacuation, Hathaway’s death leaves Captain Wilder to discover that the marooned man’s family members are robots.
The last two stories describe the destruction on Earth and the last human survivors. “And There Will Come Soft Rains” describes the final breakdown of an automated house on Earth, and “The Million-Year Picnic” ends the novel with the story of a family who has escaped the final destruction to settle on Mars.
CHARACTER DEVELOPMENT
Narrative Point of View
Most of the sixteen full stories are told in the third-person, limited omniscient point of view. This narrative perspective describes not only the actions and speech of all characters but can also report the feelings and thoughts of selected “point of view” characters. In TMC, the stories tend to have a single point of view character, focusing attention and empathy on that character and showing readers events through this individual’s perceptions and beliefs.
The eleven bridge sections are written in third-person objective, or “fly on the wall,” perspective, which places the narrative focus on exterior events, without reference to any characters’s feelings or emotions. Through the use of these multiple narrative perspectives, Bradbury presents a complex and multi-layered view of humans colonizing Mars.