Mars. The ‘Red Planet’ has been a source of imagination since Man first looked up into the night sky and wondered if there were others out there in the galaxy. Since the end of WWII, the rise of the Cold War and atomic research, interest in Mars has increased like it never has before. In films, books, television and (more recently) video games, Mars has been imagined countless times over, as a safe haven from a destructive earth, or a source of our impending doom. It represents more fully our fears and hopes than any other global or galactic icon. In this essay I will compare two texts, Ray Bradbury’s ‘The Martian Chronicles’ from 1950 , and Red Faction: Guerrilla, a video game developed by Volition Inc., published by THQ and released in 2009 . Despite their differences both in time and form of media, each text imagines Mars through the vein of colonizer and colonized, and explores themes of oppression, culture and control and offering a distinct vision of Mars, years apart but with much in common.
Bradbury’s short stories are set in the then-future of 1999-2026, where Earth is undergoing great turmoil due to the threat of impending atomic war. In the face of this the United States sends men to Mars to explore the planet in the hopes of eventual colonization. The book opens with a single page story titled ‘JANUARY 1999: Rocket Summer’ describing the launch of the first rocket to Mars, and its’ effects on the land around it.
“One minute it was Ohio winter, with doors closed, windows locked, the panes blind with frost…and then a long wave of warmth crossed the small town…the icicles dropped, shattering, to melt…the rocket made climates, and summer lay for a brief moment upon the land…”
The rocket’s blistering heat counterpoints ...
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...t life anew and hope not to repeat the mistakes of the past. And yet, as they are free, they are the only inhabitants of Mars, as the indigenous Martians have long since passed away or fled. As the family in the story looks down into the canal, the father figure tells them that the Martians are in fact still on the planet, as he points to the family’s image reflected in the water . It is a sobering mark that their new freedom comes at a great cost. To rule over others, each text would seem to suggest, is not a right but a duty, that we would guard our citizenry and that of other nations with respect and without cruelty. Freedom is not the purvey of the wealthy or powerful. Through imagining Mars, writers of any time and place can explore these ideas in the hopes that Humanity may learn to make Earth a place more worthy to call home, and a world worth keeping safe.
It was that kind of a crazy afternoon, terrifically cold, and no sun out or anything, and you felt like you were disappearing every time you crossed a road. ~J.D. Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye, Chapter 1
If the Martian Chronicles had been written in the 1999’s instead of fifty years ago, many issues and problems would change. Ray Bradbury wrote his book in 1946. In it he wrote about problems such as censorship, man’s cruelty to man, and loneliness. Each issue shows up in one or two of his chronicles. All of his issues affect every one of his characters in many different ways.
During the period after the Industrial Revolution the rich Western nations of the world began their imperialist expansion, racing to colonize any “unclaimed” territories. All of the colonized regions had their own culture and government, but because the West was so much stronger, they were taken over. When these areas were finally freed from years of oppression, their society was left in shambles and much of their culture was destroyed. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles explores this theme of imperial expansion as applied to the hypothetical situation of humans colonizing the planet Mars. In the novel, the humans who flock to the planet are portrayed as reckless beings with no care for their new home. They destroy ruins, clear the land, and rebuild a comfortable human society on Mars. The parallels between the Earthlings in the novel and imperialists today are made very apparent, exposing the reader to the idea that humans have been colonizing territories in the wrong way. Instead, Bradbury offers the correct solution by stating that the righteous way to colonize a new land is by preserving and adapting to the native culture of the land, and by becoming a foreigner, or Martian, themselves.
Ray Bradbury, from small town America (Waukegan, Illinois), wrote two very distinctly different novels in the early Cold War era. The first was The Martian Chronicles (1950) know for its “collection” of short stories that, by name, implies a broad historical rather than a primarily individual account and Fahrenheit 451 (1953), which centers on Guy Montag. The thematic similarities of Mars coupled with the state of the American mindset during the Cold War era entwine the two novels on the surface. Moreover, Bradbury was “preventing futures” as he stated in an interview with David Mogen in 1980. A dystopian society was a main theme in both books, but done in a compelling manner that makes the reader aware of Bradbury’s optimism in the stories. A society completely frightened by a nuclear bomb for example will inevitably become civil to one another. Bradbury used his life to formulate his writing, from his views of people, to the books he read, to his deep suspicion of the machines. . The final nuclear bombs that decimate the earth transform the land. The reader is left with the autonomous house and its final moments as, it, is taken over by fire and consumed by the nature it resisted. Bradbury used science fantasy to analyze humans themselves and the “frontiersman attitude” of destroying the very beauty they find by civilizing it.
An example of the cycle followed by her father, his father, and his father before him is told when Blunt recalls a major blizzard in December 1964 that trapped the family and some neighbors in their small homestead. She unemotionally describes how her father simply proceeded to go through the motions of keeping the pipes from freezing, calmly accepting the fact that he could do nothing as the storm progressed and he could not prevent loss of a of their livestock. Or how when he first ventured out to check on the animals in their nearby barn and nearly lost his way back in whiteout conditions. Later, when the storm passed, she told of playing amongst the frozen corpses of the cattle, jumping from ribcage to ribcage, daring her older brother and sister to cut off pieces of the animals, all with the calm acceptance that this was so normal, nothing strange about it.
The underlining theme in The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury is unarguably war. War is the point of origin from all conflicts generated throughout this story. War drives man to Mars, nearly wipes out the Martian population, wreaks havoc on Earth, and forces humans to leave their newly found planet to its previous tenants. War is the driving factor for this whole story; without it, this story never occurred. It gives humanity the courage to travel way out of their comfort zone onto a wasteland of a planet. Being that war follows humans to Mars due to their actions makes humans realize that they cannot escape their own violence.
Gallagher, Edward J. “The Thematic Structure of ‘The Martian Chronicles.’” DISCovering Authors. Online ed. Detroit: Gale, 2003. Gale Virtual Reference Library. Web. 3 March 2011.
Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles shows us not only a different world from Earth and Mars, but also the future of America. Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles depicts the colonization of Mars in terms of the colonizationof America. The story is similar to what America experienced, such as thediscovery of America, the invasion of Indian colonies, and the new civilization.Dana's response paper also discussed the colonization of Mars.Other critics also pointed out that Bradbury's theme in the story was death.Through futuristic imagination, Bradbury applies connections to American historyand the issue of death in his story while raising concerns and warnings of thefuture.
Race is a prevalent concept in Edgar Rice Burroughs’ novel, A Princess of Mars. The two principal Martian races—Green and Red—are characterized by drastically different beliefs, abilities, and social organizations. Although differences in their ways of life can be misconstrued to suggest the presence of a racial hierarchy, Burroughs makes no specific delineations about one race being superior over another, thereby reinforcing the idea that the equally created races are simply divided by their respective cultures.
Hayden, Robert Earl. "Those Winter Sunday's." Backpack Literature: An Introduction to Fiction, Poetry, Drama, and Writing. Ed. X.J. Kennedy and Dana Gioia. New Jersey: Pearson, 2012. 382. Print.
Reflection on the past is a mirror towards the future. As the characters in The Martian Chronicles reflect, they come to the conclusion that their distress arises from the self, saying, “‘I was looking for Earthian logic, common sense, good government, peace, and responsibility.’ ‘All that up there?’ ‘No, I didn’t find it. It’s not there anymore. Maybe it’ll never be there again. Maybe we fooled ourselves it was ever there’” (Bradbury 231). The futuristic and fantastical journey to colonize Mars may appear insignificant on the surface, but Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles is much more than a simple science fiction novel; it is an exploration of humanity, its tribulations and triumphs, and its fatal flaws. It was written both as an
As characters in the poem are literally snow bound, they find that the natural occurrence actually serves a relaxing and warming purpose, one that brings together family. This effect is further achieved through the use of meter throughout the work as a whole. In its simplistic yet conversational tone, the author uses meter to depict the result that nature has forced upon these humans, who are but a small sample size that actually is representative of society that that time. Due to nature, the characters can talk, represented by the conversational meter, and thus, they can bond within the family. A larger representation of this more specific example can be applied to a more general perspective of human’s relationship with the natural world. Although “Snowbound” captures what humans do as a result of nature, it can also represent a larger picture, where nature appears at the most opportune times to enhance relationships from human to human. In “snowbound,” this is symbolized by the fire, “Our warm hearth seemed blazing free” (Whittier 135). This image relays a spirited, warm, mood full of security, which is expertly used by the author to show how fire, a natural phenomena, can provide such beneficial effects on humans. This very occurrence exemplifies how such a miniscule aspect of nature can have such a profound effect on a family, leaving the reader wondering what nature and its entirety could accomplish if used as a
In the ominous and intriguing short story “ Dark They Were and Golden Eyed ” conjured by the mind of Ray Bradbury, an Earthling family gets stranded on the planet of mars and gradually transform into martians. Through the use of interesting and distinctive imagery, Bradbury conveys the inevitability of change within the story.
“The Snow Man,” by Wallace Stevens, dramatizes a metaphorical “mind of winter”, and introduces the idea that one must have a certain mindset in order to correctly perceive reality. The poet, or rather the Snow Man, is an interpreter of simple and ordinary things; “A cold wind, without interpretation, has no misery” (Poetry Genius). Through the use of imageries and metaphors relating to both wintery landscapes and the Snow Man itself, Stevens illustrates different ideas of human objectivity and the abstract concept of true nothingness. Looking through the eyes of the Snow Man, the readers are given an opportunity to perceive a reality that is free from objectivity; The Snow Man makes it clear that winter can possess qualities of beauty and also emptiness: both “natural wonder, and human misery”. He implies that winter can also be nothing at all: “just a bunch of solid water, dormant plants, and moving air.” (The Wondering Minstrels). “One must
captive by a sheath of frost, as were the glacial branches that scraped at my windows, begging to get in. It is indeed the coldest year I can remember, with winds like barbs that caught and pulled at my skin. People ceaselessly searched for warmth, but my family found that this year, the warmth was searching for us.