Notes On The Martian Chronicles
It's been almost a month since I've posted anything new. I've been working pretty hard on research and getting to the point that I can realistically envision graduation in summer or fall of 2007. It will be a struggle to work in the necessary development and experiments before I can submit a publication to OOPSLA before the deadline, after which I am going to IBM TJ Watson for an internship. There's a lot of hard work that has to happen to meet the deadline, so I'll probably just be recycling book reviews from time to time here. Like the previous one, this review rolls two books into one, hilighting their remarkable similarities, though this time they are not from the same author, or genre.
I have to admit that I haven't read much Science Fiction literature, as I've been primarily occupied with expanding the borders of my English Literature knowledge, something that despite my high school's feeble efforts and the few arts requirements for Science, I appreciably lacked. I started reading seriously around mid-2003, building an expanding catalog of things that I should read and things I want to read. By and large, there is a substantial overlap. The first sci-fi book I read was Fahrenheit 451 by Rad Bradbury around September 2003. I liked it, but so many other more important works of literature waited before I would continue with sci-fi. (By the way, Michael Moore should be ejected from our planet, if for no other reason than shamelessly hijacking and polluting the title of this important work of Science Fiction for his maniacal conspiracy theories masquerading as grown-up political documentary.)
As 2006 set in, I let a couple of days pass before starting up a new book. Having received a hardback edition of early Steinbeck works for Christmas from my brother, I had read The Pastures of Heaven right away, making it my last book for 2005. The last couple of days of 2005 dribbled away, and I was planning on starting To A God Unknown or Tortilla Flat, two more novels in that Steinbeck edition, but I found myself longing for a short and imaginative science fiction story instead. One afternoon at school Jess and I went to the bookstore and I picked the Martian Chronicles, the next logical book by Bradbury for me to read, having read Fahrenheit 451 in 2003. It turns out that The Pastures of Heaven and The Martian Chronicles, upon reflection, share more theme and style than one would guess. Both are loose collections of stories centering around a place on the frontier of human settlement, wandering upon a number of loosely-related characters and spanning several decades. Steinbeck was a profoundly more skilled writer than Bradbury, touching on irony and deep character reflections, though not yet having refined his art to its pinnacle, but Bradbury's imagination reaches beyond this world, into the future, onto another planet, rather than back into the past and, at least for Steinbeck, the homeland.
In The Pastures of Heaven, a number of characters at the turn of the century come to settle the central valley of California and begin life anew, escaping from misfortune and cursed lives or dreaming of starting large and prosperous families. In each story the dreams melt away like sand escaping between their fingers; happiness is elusive, lives tragic. In one story, the patriarch who dreams of his many children and grand children inhabiting his redwood homestead for generations finds disappointment when his wife nearly dies while birthing their first child, and a second is stillborn, crippling his wife. His son tries to carry on the dream, though he does not share the passion. The dream fades when the only grandson leaves and seeks a better life in Monterey. The house that was supposed to serve as the symbol, the homestead of the dynasty, burns to the ground, and the dream disappears in vapor. Other characters seek their redemption in this new land, or find solace here, only to have it ruined by the intrusion of others. Steinbeck's condemnation for the "theft" of aggressive settlers pervades the stories, as each of them suffers some anti-climactic fate, hope and faith unfulfilled in each. Steinbeck loathed those first white men who came to claim the land of California; his works drip with malice and contempt for them, who he considered to be thieves, robbers, and bandits. All of his works set in California contain a least a little of his over-arching pronouncement of guilt on all those who came to spoil the idyllic beauty of that place and upset the natural order, carving the land up and raping it, and then gradually, over generations, transforming from greedy pilgrims to fat capitalists and haughty aristocrats, the archetype he would impugn without apology in The Grapes of Wrath, to such wide acclaim. The Pastures of Heaven contains the seeds of his writing, being his earliest stories. They betray a holistic love of that natural beauty, which in itself is natural and good-hearted, but the dark side of that love is the anger that it compels him to feel for those who have come to live in it and build upon it. In The Pastures of Heaven, those who come to this land cannot live their dreams, at least not for long. Some unseen power always topples them or steals them away quietly in the night.
So, too, it is with Bradbury, only that his setting lay beyond the blue shell of our sky. The Martians he portrays as jumble of things; serene, calm, yet superbly advanced, capable of telepathy; sophisticated, yet capable of the lowest trickery to defeat those who come to settle Mars. They are a shifting mirage that disappears when approached; in touch with their deepest feelings, and capable to live, coexist in the world, yet insane and projecting their fantasies on the world. When the first men come expecting a celebration of a momentous accomplishment, the Martians are uninterested, selfish, and dismissive, so absorbed in their daily lives that they seem not to care much.
The first few chapters are mixed up; originally the stories were quite separate from each other and only later collected into the book. As a result there are a number of different sides hanging in space without cohesion. But the confusion of the first few chapters subside to a tone harshly damning on those settlers from Earth coming to Mars as the Martians disappear gradually, killed off by chicken pox. Here we find a clue as to where Ray Bradbury is coming from; the Martians are symbolic of the Native Americans, the majority of whom were killed by diseases, principally small pox. One reflective character laments that the great sophistication of the Martians is not fitting with their end, festering and dying of a non-fatal childhood disease on Earth, drying up and blowing away like black leaves. The frivolity of their deaths is showcased as Earth children sneak into the deserted cities and play with the bones before the adults come to sweep it all away.
And along this theme, here comes the deluge of all accumulated class guilt that white men should feel. Earth men are condemned as greedy, profit-seeking, throwing up shabby and cheap towns while Martian cities ten thousand years old, which we are continually led to revere and rue the decay of, stoically sit in silence, empty. Each man worthy of individual description, distinguished from the masses whom Bradbury wastes no opportunities to smear with every over-generalization possible--savage, stupid, and despicable profit-chasers who will gobble the planet and eat hot dogs--is given some quaint dream or past injury that is savaged by circumstances and does not come to fruition. Bradbury leaves it to the reader to assume they deserved everything they got. Miracle of all miracles, he even manages to squeeze in, where it only barely fits, a quick trip through the southern states at the height of racism, their black people rising up into the sky in the rockets to escape to Mars where they can be free. It nicely completes the whistle-stop tour of all the past things white people out to feel bad about.
To mount guilt upon fear upon hubris upon immaturity, of course an atomic war has to destroy the entire Earth, but not before man managed to come to Mars and desecrate it, too. The desolation left on Mars after men scramble home to the war on Earth is looked upon almost smilingly by Bradbury. Such smug self-righteousness is odious, especially from a writer whose Martian chronicles wouldn't have amounted to much more than a lamb's mad bleat had they been set on Earth.
The doom that Bradbury so satisfyingly bestows on his characters, given no space for the gravity of their imports, belies a certain type of frivolity towards those men, as if justice was ever a frivolity. For that's what both Steinbeck and Bradbury were really saying, that these frivolous ends to little dreams are justice to those who defy the natural order. A gloomy and unwelcome sentence--a sentence that punishes and destroys hope, faith, spirit, and survival of humanity. Our culture needs fewer sowers of guilt and more sowers of ambition. Give it a rest, Ray.
I have to admit that I haven't read much Science Fiction literature, as I've been primarily occupied with expanding the borders of my English Literature knowledge, something that despite my high school's feeble efforts and the few arts requirements for Science, I appreciably lacked. I started reading seriously around mid-2003, building an expanding catalog of things that I should read and things I want to read. By and large, there is a substantial overlap. The first sci-fi book I read was Fahrenheit 451 by Rad Bradbury around September 2003. I liked it, but so many other more important works of literature waited before I would continue with sci-fi. (By the way, Michael Moore should be ejected from our planet, if for no other reason than shamelessly hijacking and polluting the title of this important work of Science Fiction for his maniacal conspiracy theories masquerading as grown-up political documentary.)
As 2006 set in, I let a couple of days pass before starting up a new book. Having received a hardback edition of early Steinbeck works for Christmas from my brother, I had read The Pastures of Heaven right away, making it my last book for 2005. The last couple of days of 2005 dribbled away, and I was planning on starting To A God Unknown or Tortilla Flat, two more novels in that Steinbeck edition, but I found myself longing for a short and imaginative science fiction story instead. One afternoon at school Jess and I went to the bookstore and I picked the Martian Chronicles, the next logical book by Bradbury for me to read, having read Fahrenheit 451 in 2003. It turns out that The Pastures of Heaven and The Martian Chronicles, upon reflection, share more theme and style than one would guess. Both are loose collections of stories centering around a place on the frontier of human settlement, wandering upon a number of loosely-related characters and spanning several decades. Steinbeck was a profoundly more skilled writer than Bradbury, touching on irony and deep character reflections, though not yet having refined his art to its pinnacle, but Bradbury's imagination reaches beyond this world, into the future, onto another planet, rather than back into the past and, at least for Steinbeck, the homeland.
In The Pastures of Heaven, a number of characters at the turn of the century come to settle the central valley of California and begin life anew, escaping from misfortune and cursed lives or dreaming of starting large and prosperous families. In each story the dreams melt away like sand escaping between their fingers; happiness is elusive, lives tragic. In one story, the patriarch who dreams of his many children and grand children inhabiting his redwood homestead for generations finds disappointment when his wife nearly dies while birthing their first child, and a second is stillborn, crippling his wife. His son tries to carry on the dream, though he does not share the passion. The dream fades when the only grandson leaves and seeks a better life in Monterey. The house that was supposed to serve as the symbol, the homestead of the dynasty, burns to the ground, and the dream disappears in vapor. Other characters seek their redemption in this new land, or find solace here, only to have it ruined by the intrusion of others. Steinbeck's condemnation for the "theft" of aggressive settlers pervades the stories, as each of them suffers some anti-climactic fate, hope and faith unfulfilled in each. Steinbeck loathed those first white men who came to claim the land of California; his works drip with malice and contempt for them, who he considered to be thieves, robbers, and bandits. All of his works set in California contain a least a little of his over-arching pronouncement of guilt on all those who came to spoil the idyllic beauty of that place and upset the natural order, carving the land up and raping it, and then gradually, over generations, transforming from greedy pilgrims to fat capitalists and haughty aristocrats, the archetype he would impugn without apology in The Grapes of Wrath, to such wide acclaim. The Pastures of Heaven contains the seeds of his writing, being his earliest stories. They betray a holistic love of that natural beauty, which in itself is natural and good-hearted, but the dark side of that love is the anger that it compels him to feel for those who have come to live in it and build upon it. In The Pastures of Heaven, those who come to this land cannot live their dreams, at least not for long. Some unseen power always topples them or steals them away quietly in the night.
So, too, it is with Bradbury, only that his setting lay beyond the blue shell of our sky. The Martians he portrays as jumble of things; serene, calm, yet superbly advanced, capable of telepathy; sophisticated, yet capable of the lowest trickery to defeat those who come to settle Mars. They are a shifting mirage that disappears when approached; in touch with their deepest feelings, and capable to live, coexist in the world, yet insane and projecting their fantasies on the world. When the first men come expecting a celebration of a momentous accomplishment, the Martians are uninterested, selfish, and dismissive, so absorbed in their daily lives that they seem not to care much.
The first few chapters are mixed up; originally the stories were quite separate from each other and only later collected into the book. As a result there are a number of different sides hanging in space without cohesion. But the confusion of the first few chapters subside to a tone harshly damning on those settlers from Earth coming to Mars as the Martians disappear gradually, killed off by chicken pox. Here we find a clue as to where Ray Bradbury is coming from; the Martians are symbolic of the Native Americans, the majority of whom were killed by diseases, principally small pox. One reflective character laments that the great sophistication of the Martians is not fitting with their end, festering and dying of a non-fatal childhood disease on Earth, drying up and blowing away like black leaves. The frivolity of their deaths is showcased as Earth children sneak into the deserted cities and play with the bones before the adults come to sweep it all away.
And along this theme, here comes the deluge of all accumulated class guilt that white men should feel. Earth men are condemned as greedy, profit-seeking, throwing up shabby and cheap towns while Martian cities ten thousand years old, which we are continually led to revere and rue the decay of, stoically sit in silence, empty. Each man worthy of individual description, distinguished from the masses whom Bradbury wastes no opportunities to smear with every over-generalization possible--savage, stupid, and despicable profit-chasers who will gobble the planet and eat hot dogs--is given some quaint dream or past injury that is savaged by circumstances and does not come to fruition. Bradbury leaves it to the reader to assume they deserved everything they got. Miracle of all miracles, he even manages to squeeze in, where it only barely fits, a quick trip through the southern states at the height of racism, their black people rising up into the sky in the rockets to escape to Mars where they can be free. It nicely completes the whistle-stop tour of all the past things white people out to feel bad about.
To mount guilt upon fear upon hubris upon immaturity, of course an atomic war has to destroy the entire Earth, but not before man managed to come to Mars and desecrate it, too. The desolation left on Mars after men scramble home to the war on Earth is looked upon almost smilingly by Bradbury. Such smug self-righteousness is odious, especially from a writer whose Martian chronicles wouldn't have amounted to much more than a lamb's mad bleat had they been set on Earth.
The doom that Bradbury so satisfyingly bestows on his characters, given no space for the gravity of their imports, belies a certain type of frivolity towards those men, as if justice was ever a frivolity. For that's what both Steinbeck and Bradbury were really saying, that these frivolous ends to little dreams are justice to those who defy the natural order. A gloomy and unwelcome sentence--a sentence that punishes and destroys hope, faith, spirit, and survival of humanity. Our culture needs fewer sowers of guilt and more sowers of ambition. Give it a rest, Ray.
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