The Martian Chronicles is a series of short stories that watch the unfolding tale of an ancient, stagnated, elegant culture inevitably overtaken by the human explorers, who themselves come close to annihilating both civilizations. It is a dystopian story characteristic of much of early science fiction in the nuclear era, which predicts the chilling future that was a likely possibility in the aftermath of World War II. The stories in this volume are about a stately demise of a civilization, the promising rise of the new civilization, and its destruction, woven with the curiosity, greed, exploration, honor, fear, and the loneliness we all feel.

The first expedition from Earth runs afoul of a bad Martian marriage. The cold, unloving husband finishes them off after some indiscreet comments by his wife, who apparently finds them more exiting than her husband. The second expedition finds a town of telepaths, who pay them no attention because they talk about coming from the third planet; obvious nonsense. Just like the other crazy telepaths who try to create a world that doesn’t exist, only the illusions by these nut-cases persist after their death... By the third expedition the Martians had decided that the Earthers needed to be extinguished, so the third expedition arrives to find a town from their youth, complete with their relatives, back from the dead. Despite the Captain’s skepticism and wariness after two expeditions failed to return, his dead parents convince him to stay, with tragic results. The fourth expedition arrives to find the Martians almost entirely wiped out by chicken pox. After the captain reluctantly dispatches a crew member who goes native, who had despaired of the inevitable destruction of the crystal cities and the fine hieroglyphic books that the coming Earth migration would cause, the planet is cleared for habitation.

As inhabitants arrive, they occasionally encounter some of the dark-skinned, golden-eyed Martians who escaped the plague. One appears to an elderly couple as their dead son, only to come to tragic end—he appears as long-lost loved ones to everyone and is killed as they squabble over him. Another immigrant, traveling from one lonely settlement to another stops with nothing in sight, except the lonely ancient seabed and a sky full of stars. And Time. He meets a Martian from the past, but he cannot see the old Martian city that the Martian describes, or the the carnival going on there; neither can the Martian see the rocket or the settlements. So they part ways, with a taste of the glorious past and the sad but hopeful future.

After the first wild cowboy settlers, come the women, then the preachers, then people seeking a new life. A Southern town on Earth gets an awakening when all the Blacks purchase a rocket and move out en masse, shattering not only an economy whose wealth is based on inexpensive servants, but the pride of white supremists. But some come seeking to make life better for others—Moral Climatists who ban Poe and other fantastical authors because they are not Scientific. These are cleverly dispatched with an elaborate deception involving the House of Usher and a certain Amontillado, an easily pierced ruse, had they only read the books they burned.

Then the remaining aristocratic Martians chase down a fleeing entrepreneur, who thinks nothing of killing stately Martians, destroying their sand ships and their uninhabited crystal cities if he can save himself. They give him the deed to most of Mars, then leave. Sadly, that night, earth is bathed in a fire of nuclear war, and the settlers leave more quickly than they came (causing a run on a prescient luggage merchant), to see if their loved ones are all right. So sudden is the exodus that a prospector returns from the mountains to find an abandoned village and in all of Mars, only a fat young woman whom he can’t stand, even if she is the last woman alive.

Captain Wilder arrives, returning from the outer Solar System, unaware of the news. He finds an empty Mars, with a few scattered people (who had deep frozen everything they could get their hands on when they discovered that the others had left). But one family is a family of robots, created to keep the father company as his family died. Finally he, too, died, but the rest continued with their now meaningless habits. Later, a mechanical house, built to serve its now deceased owners and as living as a house can be, burns to the ground when it runs out of water, and so, even the houses of Earth die. Eventually, two families from Earth arrive, the last remnants of an evil civilization bent on self destruction, coming to start a new civilization on Mars.

Bradbury has created a work that to illustrate the evils of modern American society of the middle twentieth century. The promise of technology to liberate us from drudgery turns into a tool to let the evil within destroy ourselves. Thus, in Bradbury’s society, “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.” His Americans care only for Profit and Expansion, not about Beauty, Culture, or Peace, as evidenced not only by their self-destruction but by their superior attitude towards the beautiful, but dead, Martian society. (Fortunately, like Owen Wister, in the preface to The Virginian in the 1920s, Bradbury’s predictions of the death of American civilization are happily unfounded.)

Bradbury’s themes are not unique to him (although these themes are perhaps most strongly voiced in his work). Pirsig, in Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance observes that people who view the world from an emotional perspective find technology cold and repulsive, because technology is solidly analytic. Artists will find much to dislike about modern America—the cold efficiencies of corporations focused on Profit and the preference of Cheap to Good, typified in our cities by the choice of big, cheap suburban houses over smaller, beautiful houses. It is hardly a surprise, then, when artists, who are the ones actually doing the writing, write “Repent, Harlequin, Said the Tick-Tock Man” (Ellison) to crystallize the coldness of our society, or The Martian Chronicles during an era where nuclear war was a constant threat.

Although The Martian Chronicles has very similar themes to The Illustrated Man, also by Bradbury, it seems to succeed much better. The Illustrated Man suffered from theme obsolescence, but the themes in The Martian Chronicles are less prone to obsolescence, in part because there is only one main theme, which allows for more nuance than a collection of unrelated short stories. The Martian Chronicles is about the evil inherent in Man and the society he built. This evil takes the form of destruction: destruction of beauty and ultimately destruction of ourselves, which are much stronger themes than the dangers of nuclear war. Within the larger story arc however, are also stories with sub themes of nostalgia, the pain of the loss of loved ones, loneliness, and the errors of censoring. Certainly censoring is less of an issue in a political climate where the right to free speech is a cause for many lawsuits, but because this is only one story, and a satisfyingly ironic one, it works well.  The overall theme is slowly revealed as the stories unfold, with diversions to other themes, all the while presenting a background that evolves with the progression of time. The Martian Chronicles is an excellent sample of early science fiction, showing the terror of nuclear war, Communism, and McCarthyism of the post-WWII era, all in an enjoyable and well-written package.