Literary The Martian Chronicles by Ray Bradbury

[Bookworm_Girl]

Originally Posted by Kyle Connor

How big a difference are we talking here between the 1950 and 1997 version?
I read the earlier one and ya, you can enjoy it if you read it with the mindset of a person in the 50's.

Mainly the dates that the stories occur were shifted 31 years from 1999 to 2030 onward. Since the stories are just meant to take place "in the future" and the themes/takeaways deal with "universal truths" that could occur at anytime, then I don't think that matters. From that perspecitive it also probably doesn't matter where the stories occur - Mars, Jupiter or some newly discovered place on Earth.

I believe that regardless which version you read it is important to remember the time period it was written because of the social commentary within the stories. Post WWII, Cold War, pre-Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, countries that were colonized by Western countries fighting for independence, etc.

Otherwise there are a few shifts to the stories contained within the collection. Most noticeably the 1997 version removes the story dealing with racism on Earth. I found a synopsis of it with a Google search. I wish it hadn't been removed. History is what it is however unpleasant some of it may be. It is replaced with a story about 2 women on their last night on Earth before they take a rocket to meet a boyfriend who is already on Mars. The 1997 version also adds a story which I really enjoyed that is about priests who have just arrived on Mars. They interact with Martians. They struggle with should they be missionaries to the Martians (what kinds of sins would they have, how would they relate to God and the Church) or should they help the settlers with their sins (which are common to Earth sins - think of Wild West saloons or Klondike gold rush towns!).

[Wearever]

Originally Posted by crich70

I think that was part of Ray Bradbury's point. We humans tend to not be very good about learning from our own mistakes and just repeat them over again where ever we go.

That's what I was thinking as well. The human emotions were also present in the Martians, with the martian husband, who was jealous his wife talked about the humans all the time as exotic, more interesting than he was to her. Other stories like thinking the humans were psychotic, when they knocked on the door and were surprised no one cared that they came from earth. Lol I probably would have done the same, if a Martian knocked on my door.

I thought Bradbury held up a mirror at times.

[Dazrin]

I have about an hour to go in this (listening to the audio book) but I have really enjoyed it so far. I do wish the copy I have had the racism story included.

Some of the stories have been very good, some just entertaining, and a couple disturbing.

I was horrified about the music playing boys. I know many atrocities were done when Europeans discovered the "new world" and who knows how many people died because of the diseases that were brought over (95% is the guess). I know this is supposed to be a parallel to the expansion in the America's and I know there were some real monsters involved, but the lack of empathy from the boys is still very disturbing.

Usher II, discussing censorship, is one of my favorites though. Maybe one of these days I will have to read his other more famous work on censorship.

Originally Posted by AnotherCat

I remember one English class where the teacher made the point that we should not be over zealous in reading messages into the literature we read as it may be that all that was intended by the material was that it made a good story or provided a frame for a good story. That stuck in my memory and while the literati seem to be free with interpretations of author's works without much challenge we do see the writers of song lyrics quite frequently correcting the pontificators (perhaps the best known being Lennon's repudiation, backed by McCartney, of the claims that the title Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds was an LSD based pun).

That is one of my biggest complaints about literature in school and I wish one of my teachers had made a similar statement. I wonder how many millions of people have been turned off reading as a whole because of well-intentioned teachers trying to find more meaning in something than the author intended? Sometimes books are just good stories.

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

...From that perspecitive it also probably doesn't matter where the stories occur - Mars, Jupiter or some newly discovered place on Earth...

That is what I think too and is one of the reasons I felt that the book, and so the stories within it, did not seem to me to be intentionally constructed as a science fiction one (although I have no personal problem with it being categorised as such).

To me the stories come across as predominantly artistic creations and so their setting could have been anywhere that allowed use of the theme of being "ripe" for colonisation and required a trek to get there.

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

...I believe that regardless which version you read it is important to remember the time period it was written because of the social commentary within the stories. Post WWII, Cold War, pre-Civil Rights struggles of the 1960s, countries that were colonized by Western countries fighting for independence, etc...

The stories were written in the late 1940s and the book published in 1950. So it predates the Cold War and without researching to be sure I think that at that time the only country colonised by a Western country that had fought for independence was the USA nearly 200 years before so perhaps irrelevant.

The pre-civil rights movement (in broad terms from after the War of Independence to mid fifties) was I believe (I stand to be corrected, I am working from both memory and another country) about the rights of African Americans who were actually fellow colonizers with the Europeans. By use of that last phrase I am not trying to hide the fact that they were forced by slavery to be colonizers against their will and were to modern eyes abysmally treated, but rather differentiate them from the fates of the indigenous American Indians ("Native Americans", I think now in PC talk?) during colonisation which would be the North American parallel with the Martians in my reading of the book.

With respect to the atomic war in Chronicles... the world experience Bradbury would have had to draw on would very likely have been knowledge of the Hiroshima/Nagasaki bombings only as there were less than half a dozen USA tests prior to 1950 (and most, the later ones, with little media coverage, and all were in the western Pacific far removed from the USA); Russia's first atomic bomb was tested in the last half of 1949 so post dated the writing of the stories.

These are all things that contributed to my wonder if there was much intentional propaganda in Bradbury's writing of the book. As an example, Bradbury would have been well aware of the devastation a single atomic bomb could wrought, and so likely also the calamity that a nuclear war would bring. But his use of an atomic war in the book seems to me to not dwell on such destruction as propaganda but just use of such a war as a tool enabling him to "refresh" the colonisation of Mars by sending the original colonizers "home". If so, it may be that parallels drawn with the likes of Earth's historic colonisation experiences were not meant as moral messages but simply as a frame for the story.

As I said in my previous post, I am not making any claims here, I just don't know and I have not found anything authoritative as to what Bradbury actually claimed his motives, if any, were.

[Bookworm_Girl]

I tend to agree that critics often attribute meanings to literature that the author may never have intended. That's part of what makes the discussion so interesting and animated and personal.

I haven't finished the book yet so I haven't formed any cohesive opinions on the themes yet. I am only at 70% or so and haven't gotten through the parts addressing the Earth war. Therefore my thoughts are certainly in development and could change.

The Cold War started in the mid to late 1940s after WWII, although some historians even date it back to the Russian revolution of 1917. George Orwell used the term in 1945. The McCarthy era started around the time the book was published.

India and Pakistan fought for independence in the 1940s, achieving it by 1947. Lots was also happening to define the borders of the Middle Eastern countries as we know them today. Israel declared independence in 1948. Some African colonies had also gained independence by the time this book was published to be accelerated after WWII. Then there was the Atlantic Charter in the early 1940s between the US and UK attempting to define post-war goals and rights of people to self-determination.

[fantasyfan]

Is a good story ever "just" a good story? Surely there are reasons for its quality such as characterization and motive, plot (which is not the same as story-line), irony, both simple and dramatic and the development of theme, to mention a few. These items are analysable just as in the case of other art forms. And this analysis can often reveal greater depths than is apparent on a single reading.

Further, I do not believe that a particular work of Art--such as a short-story--is necessarily limited strictly to the author's conscious intention. The creation can take on a life, identity, beauty, and meaning implicit in itself. Further the reader, listener, viewer recreates the work; Wordsworth refers to

" . . . All the mighty world
Of eye, and ear,--both what they half create
And what perceive . . ."

Thus through the act of imaginative reading which is linked to experience and memory a glowing centre of awareness (to paraphrase Frank O'Connor) is ignited in the reader. And this may well include features not intended by the author. The figure of Satan in Paradise Lost clearly meant one thing in Milton's conscious mind but Shelley got a totally different impression which most certainly was not intended (consciously) by Milton.

So I believe there is a creative aspect to imaginative reading and I think it can be a very wonderful thing indeed and not the bad thing that some possibly seem to be implying.

[AnotherCat]

Bookworm_Girl I was really just intending to consider that things such as the Cold War, struggles for rights, freedoms, etc. did not seem to me to be of any specific importance compared to those same things as have occurred throughout history, or compared with other world events preceding the writing of the short stories in the last years of the 1940s to make it a cinch that Bradbury was sending messages about them. I was not intending to refute history so please take the following comment as a description of where I am coming from in that rather than being any specific disagreement. Also, as I said in my earlier post, whether there are intentional messages or propaganda in Chronicles I am open minded about, it just seems to me that there is no specific reason for there to have been so.

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

...The Cold War started in the mid to late 1940s after WWII, although some historians even date it back to the Russian revolution of 1917. George Orwell used the term in 1945. The McCarthy era started around the time the book was published...

With respect to the Cold War itself insofar as it relates to the book, that is the real threat of nuclear war between the West and the USSR in the '50s and '60s, I have considered that it post dates the book. As I mentioned Russia had not even tested a nuclear device until around the time the short stories were published.

Originally Posted by Bookworm_Girl

...India and Pakistan fought for independence in the 1940s, achieving it by 1947. Lots was also happening to define the borders of the Middle Eastern countries as we know them today. Israel declared independence in 1948. Some African colonies had also gained independence by the time this book was published to be accelerated after WWII. Then there was the Atlantic Charter in the early 1940s between the US and UK attempting to define post-war goals and rights of people to self-determination.

I was taking "fought" as meaning something definitive such as a war for independence. If one is using the word "fought" as just being a struggle, whether peaceful (e.g. Ghandi) or including local rebellions (as in most countries histories, including my own, whether colonies or not), then such struggles have been very commonplace through history for millennia, whether that is to seek independence from the government of another country or to seek independence from their own government (even here in peaceful, little old NZ there are people who consider themselves "struggling" for their own independence from our independent democratic government, and indeed as recently as 9 years ago a number were charged with planning terrorist acts seeking to fight for such independence). In my view there was nothing special regarding these things during or preceding the times when the short stories were conceived.

Regarding African countries, prior to 1950 the only African countries to achieve independence (as far as I am aware) were Liberia (that way back in mid 19th Century and it is questionable as to whether it ever was colonised), South Africa and Egypt. I confess that I had forgotten the Egyptian Revolution (1919) but that was the only one of the three countries to have to have "fought" in the sense of a "war" as I was interpreting it. Apart from a couple in the '50s, all other African independences were post 1960. There is no disagreement that there were "struggles" prior to 1950, but I was looking at it from the point of view that such struggles had been going on for millennia so did not regard their existence as being special in a way giving any special encouragement to Bradbury promoting propaganda in the stories. If the stories were written post 1960 my view may have been different.

As far as the Middle East is concerned the history of struggles is so convoluted and commonplace over millennia that I won't even get started commenting . While there were some rebellions in India (as there were in other colonies, even Canada, for example) there was no war.

I quite agree that one can draw parallels with such struggles and that of colonisation by Earthlings and the plight of the Martian,s but I don't see any special reason why they may be no more than providing a frame for the stories. If there had been a series of actual wars of independence preceding the time the stories were written then perhaps, in my view, there would have been. I'll leave it there in my state of indecision .

[AnotherCat]

Originally Posted by fantasyfan

Is a good story ever "just" a good story? Surely there are reasons for its quality...

One of the things I noticed with the book is that I found it quite cinematic.

By that I mean that with some books one just reads the words and follow the story and it is enjoyable because of the prose and storyline, or even because the propaganda in it is also relevant.

With others, some or all of those things may be present but one can also, if so inclined, create and "watch" a movie in ones head as the story is read.

I found that so with Chronicles, right from the start from the descriptions in the narration in the first story Rocket Summer, even though with that first story there was no real inkling as to what the rest of the book was to be about. Helped in that first at least, I think, by short sentences or short tight phrases giving some sort of sharpness to it.

[Bookpossum]

Originally Posted by BenG

My favorite Bradbury Martian story not included in the Chronicles is Dark They Were and Golden-eyed. It can be found online HERE.

There is also a sequel to Way In the Middle of the Air in The Illustrated Man. The Other Foot takes place twenty years later and the shoe is on, well, the other foot.

Thanks for this link Beng. Well worth reading.

[sun surfer]

I didn't care for it very much. It was disjointed and uneven, and sexist even considering its time. There were some good ideas and some pretty writing but overall it left me cold.

[fantasyfan]

Originally Posted by sun surfer

I didn't care for it very much. It was disjointed and uneven, and sexist even considering its time. There were some good ideas and some pretty writing but overall it left me cold.

Sorry you didn't care for the book, Sun Surfer, but I understand your reasons. Bradbury seems to create brilliant fragments. I was surprised that Alfred Bester didn't win.