Shorts

I really like short story collections. My favorites include stories all in the same world. This way, the author has the freedom to take his or her ideas in many different directions. They can start a dialogue that would get old in longer form. With these advantages come the corresponding challenge of threading these pieces into a compelling story, a cohesive metanarrative (no, not that kind of metanarrative). The reader is treated to more than two dozen distinct snapshots of life on Mars. This all works for me because I am sometimes more drawn in by world-building than storytelling.

Ultimately, the Martian Chronicles manages to paint a not so much impressionistic, but fractal picture of Mars. What I mean, is that the reader can step back and look at Mars all together, the gestalt. At the same time, zoom in on a story and you find details, but those details often lead to further questions that could go on ad infinitum. For example: You read the whole book, and have a sense of the history of Mars and its interactions with people from Earth. Zoom in on the story of the hot-dog stand, and you get more of the story, but now wonder what's up with those fragile cities, why give away the land like this?

Every author leaves things for the reader to puzzle over, but The Martian Chronicles consists almost entirely of these puzzles. Even the meaning of the title changed as I read. By the second story, I thought it was about the indigenous people of Mars, the Martians. A few stories in, it was clear the "Martians" were all but gone, so the Martian in Martian chronicles must simply refer to the planet. At the end, Bradbury turned the humans into the eponymous "Martians."

Everything in Martian Chronicles is colored by Martian telepathy, it seems. Do the trees really sprout over night in "The Green Morning?" While every character in the collection was familiar, they reacted to the Martian surroundings somehow. I think the only static character Bradbury gives us to lean on is the Earth. Everywhere throughout the book, the Earth is characterized by some sort of decay, whether racism, suffocating moral police, or nuclear winter. Although, it must be significant that Mars starts and ends in states eerily similar to Earth (think the familiarity of "Ylla" and the emptiness of "The Million-Year Picnic).

Expectations and Alien Life

All of the early stories about the encounters between the martians and the first humans to come to mars have the common thread of expectations not being met, and this leading to disaster. Ylla expects to meet the humans and fall in love, but her predictions lead to her husband killing both members of the first expedition. The second expedition is ruined when the humans expect to be welcomed as heroes, but martians expect anyone out of the ordinary to be insane. And the third expedition comes to ruin when they throw all of their reason out the window when their expectations are not met. Since what they find is not what they expect, they decide to accept anything, however unlikely.

The warning here from Bradbury is that we cannot allow either our expectations or lack-thereof to make us blind to reason when dealing with an alien life for, or the unexplained in general. The first two expeditions fail because the humans expect to be welcomed with open arms by the martians. The martians, on the other hand, choose to see the humans as a single madman of unbelievable brilliance instead of accept the possibility that he might be telling the truth. These problems could have been avoided had both races set aside what they predicted would happen, and accepted what did happen.

On the other end of the spectrum we have the third expedition. The astronauts, upon finding something that they cannot explain, accept the first explanation given to them, despite its extreme improbability. They could have saved their live if they had kept their skepticism, and tried to think rationally. The lesson is that when dealing with the unknown we cannot allow what we think we know, or what we are told, overpower what we can observe and reason for ourselves.