It looms in our sky, fascinating us for the whole of our recorded history. Reddish, bright, and moving weirdly retrograde to other points of light in the heavens, Mars beckons, inspires, and intrigues.
Mars turns out to be a place of contrasts. Flat plains peppered with eroded craters give way to canyon systems that are longer, deeper, and wider than anything Earth could possibly hope to offer. The Valles Marineris would stretch all the way across the continental United States. Mars boasts shield volcanoes that dwarf anything we have, including some — Olympus Mons, Pavonis Mons, Ascraeus Mons — so high that they jut out above the atmosphere. The thought of standing before the great escarpments on the edges of Tharsis and staring up at nearly vertical ten-mile-high cliffs…it boggles the mind.
But the real Mars is only one Mars. There have been others, some of them intensely poetic in their flamboyant unreality. Astronomers like Schiaparelli and Lowell convinced themselves that Mars was streaked with straight canals. Thus the notion of a magnificent doomed intelligent race that built the canals to preserve water against the long drought as the planet gradually dried out. In that mistaken notion was born a fantastical landscape of wonder, invoked fictionally for better or worse by generations of writers. Edgar Rice Burroughs turned it into a lurid backdrop for great battles and daring heroism; Robert Heinlein made it a base for a stirring teenage boy adventure, as did “Carey Rockwell”, the pseudonym for the roster of hack writers who produced the Tom Corbett Space Cadet series. The classic early science fiction story A Martian Odyssey gave us an unforgettably well-conceived Martian while adding its own compelling elements to the basic Lowellian Mars of deserts, canals, and and ancient doomed civilization.
For my money one version stands above all the rest, a lyrical creation of haunting beauty by one of America’s finest writers. I refer here to Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles, a collection of stories often improperly classified as science fiction. The Martian Chronicles is not science fiction. Perhaps you could call it fantasy, but even that sells it short. Chronicles is simply a work of art, rich and compelling, tender and sweet and wistful and laced through with a quiet melancholy. Bradbury’s slender silver-eyed telepathic Martians manage to fend off three expeditions from Earth by increasingly sophisticated techniques — including fooling the Third Expedition into thinking that they’ve landed in a heaven-like world where their dearest loves have all gathered — but are then defeated quickly and savagely by the chicken pox brought to Mars by their American visitors. So the Earthmen of the Fourth Expedition land on a Mars that has become a graveyard, its chessboard-like cities filled with rustling corpses.
Wickedly funny stores rub elbows with eloquent one-page evocations of mood, then give way to sweeping vistas and grand operatic scenes of sandships streaking across the desert sands or gossamer chariots arcing through the sky, drawn by thousands of tiny glowing flame birds. Slowly but surely it becomes clear that humanity will be exterminating itself just as adroitly as it has destroyed the Martians. Both Earth and Mars are nearly lifeless at the conclusion. But The Martian Chronicles ends in a delicately moving vision of hope, even after all else has been lost.
The Martian Chronicles was a signature book of my childhood; I lost sight of it for a while but the stories remained screwed into my DNA. I have just re-read it after an interval of at least forty years; unlike most of the books that pushed my teenaged buttons, The Martian Chronicles seems better than ever. Because Bradbury set it in a timeless fantasy Mars, scientific advancement cannot render it obsolete. Bradbury’s Mars is a dreamscape, the stage setting for a moving human drama. The Martians aren’t aliens; they’re dreamy versions of us. Americans are often painted as broad stereotypes, sometimes for pure comic relief and other times as archetypes of our best, or worst, qualities. The young astronaut from an early expedition who is the only one to mourn the loss of the magnificent Martian civilization, the witty aristocrat who strikes a blow for a free society on Mars in the face of increasing bureaucratic meddling, the clear-minded individualist who rejects the last woman on the planet in order to retain his freedom, the scientist who builds a robotic replica of his dead wife and lives with her happily in the Martian outback. These are all evocations of our better selves. But then there is the idiotic and crass Sam Parkhill, who sets up a hot dog stand at a Martian crossroads just in time for the human race’s mutual suicide, and the viciously stupid astronaut who reacts to the frail beauty of an ancient city by using the towers for shooting target practice.
A lot of the plots come right out of pulp fiction, but Bradbury invests them with dignity that obliterates their low-class origins. Some of the stories have left descendants, such as the many Star Trek episodes that are easily traced to Bradbury’s original. Even if The Martian Chronicles isn’t itself science fiction, it inspired generations of sci-fi writers. Maybe none of their inventions could match the gentle lyricism of the originals, but they carry their inheritance proudly nonetheless.
The rocket made climates, as the expeditions take off from rural Ohio in the chill of winter, briefly transforming a frozen land into summer. The Martian Chronicles opens with a two-page introduction that sets an almost impossibly high level of literary imagination, but miraculously Bradbury sustains his elevated standard throughout. His prose remains as eloquent as ever, perhaps even more so to my older senses as I am better equipped to appreciate just how delicately and persuasively he crafts his language. Only the occasional affectation — self-conscious British usages that grate a bit given Bradbury’s overall solid American English — betrays the work’s origins in pulp science fiction and fantasy, a genre prone to fits of pomposity.
If you have never read The Martian Chronicles: read it. If you have: may I invite you to give it another go. Mr. and Mrs K in their crystal home on the edge of the dried lakebed, the compassionate Martian boy who tries to become an elderly couple’s long-lost son, the Johnny Appleseed who succeeds beyond his wildest imagination, the tragic Martians streaking across the desert in their sandships, the automated house on nuclear devasted Earth that keeps carrying out its programmed tasks even when its inhabitants are dead.
And of course the haunting conclusion: The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water…