Quote:
Originally Posted by Pajamaman
I was disappointed that a book about Mars only contained two (arguably) three stories about real Martians. I felt the material about real Martians (as opposed to colonists) contained the most imagination, which is what I was hoping for.
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My feeling was that the point of the book was not alien (to us) life forms, but the behaviour of humans in alien conditions.
I found the tragedy of what happened all too believable, when you consider the havoc we have brought wherever we impose ourselves on a new environment, whether it is the early colonisers of Australia, or the settlers moving into the American West, the Spanish in South America, and so on.
The rockets were the Silver Locusts of the original UK (and elsewhere?) title - see the very short story titled
The Locusts - and they brought in them the plague of humans.
Quote:
And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye to bludgeon away all the strangeness, their mouths fringed with nails so they resembled steel-toothed carnivores, spitting them into their swift hands as they hammered up frame cottages and scuttled over roofs with shingles to blot out the eerie stars, and fit green shades to pull against the night. And when the carpenters had hurried on, the women came in with flower-pots and chintz and pans and set up a kitchen clamour to cover the silence that Mars made waiting outside the door and the shaded window.
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Again in
The Naming of Names Bradbury writes of the need for the colonising people to place their own names on everything. It is only now, more than 200 years after Europeans first came to colonise Australia, that we are reverting back to the place names given by the Aboriginal people, especially for places of particular significance such as Uluru, which used to be called Ayers Rock.
I read an older version of the book, with the original dates. I didn't have a problem with this, as for me it was happening in an alternate universe. However my copy doesn't have the story
Usher II, so I shall be interested to hear about that one.
By chance, the bookmark I was using for this book was one I received from an organisation I support called "Indigenous Community Volunteers". On it is quoted an Aboriginal proverb:
Quote:
We are all visitors to this time, this place. We are just passing through. Our purpose here is to observe, to learn, to grow, to love - and then we return home.
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Somehow, it seemed very appropriate to contemplate the truth of this, and to learn to step more lightly on our own world, rather than to continue with the frontier mentality of using up, destroying and then moving on to the next place, whether that is another part of our own land or another planet.