The Martian Chronicles

After finishing Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles there is a sense of loss. With Earth gone to cinders, me like most actors of the story felt at a loss with what to do next. One of the last desperate message to the colonisers were “Come home. Come home.”

Bradbury, apart from Asimov and others writing epochal writings on the SciFi-future for humanity in space, leaves you with a more realistic, humble and depressing prospect: loneliness. While the death of Earth is dramatic there are several chapters covering the long silence and loss of direction as humans seek to return to Earth for, yes for what? To share the nuclear fallout?

The answer is for the colonisers to become something else. They are no more Earthlings, they are Martians. Having killed off most other species previously inhabiting Mars, the few surviving humans must painstakingly return life to a world that itself is indifferent to their existence.

Though set in outer space, Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles brings back the focus on problems like myopic geopolitics, technofixes and fear of the other as issues that are unlikely to go away with the move to outer space. Indeed, they are not even outsourced but aggravated as it too become an arena for unequal distribution and power struggles among nations stuck on Earth. This Bradbury succinctly summarised as Mars being colonised primarily by Americans seeking that final frontier and ironically also the African-Americans seeking refuge from that very same apartheid-society.

A good read for anyone who for a while wish to venture beyond our own planet only to look back on it from far away and then with a different view.