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Originally Posted by Bookpossum
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.
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Apart from the initial exploration of Mars, then rebellion by one crew member against the other humans explorers, I didn't feel that the book particularly explored Mars as an alien environment. It could have been some new land on Earth, and as such, wasn't particularly science-fiction.
Each to their own. But I prefer more genuine "alieness," more vaulting imagination in the sci-fi I read. For me, that is what sets science-fiction apart from other genres. It does exist in places in the book.
The silver locust concept is great, but the Martians vanish right at the start, and don't return (except as a brief ghost). As such there is very little interaction between Earth and Mars.
For all it's simplicity, I believe that Edgar Rice Burroughs generally does a better job of conjuring up the strangeness of Mars.
Quote:
Originally Posted by Bookpossum
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.
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Interestingly, place names and description words do frequently survive the suppression of a preceding culture. They are often all that remains of the preceding language. One can see this on the road-signs of any long-trip through North America, and also in the remnants of Celtic words in English vocabulary.