Plot Development, Character Development

Lecture 2

The Martian Chronicles (1950):

(Narrative Point of View, Martian and Human Characters), Setting, Themes. Alternative Perspective: A Postcolonial Reading.

The Martian Chronicles (TMC) is possibly the best known and most critically acclaimed of Bradbury’s work. First published in 1950, TMC has been continuously in print, in both America and Britain, ever since. TMC has been marketed as science fiction, but it more closely fits what some critics call science fantasy. As Joe Patrouch, a scholar of fantastic literature, argues in “Symbolic Settings in Science Fiction: H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison,” Bradbury’s Mars is “scientifically inaccurate by the science” of the 1940s; instead, it reflects the “rural, small-town Midwest of Bradbury’s childhood” (Patrouch 41). Bradbury makes it clear in one of his introductions that he never intended to write a scientifically accurate version of the colonization of Mars because such a vision would go out of date in a few years. Despite the implausibility of his vision, Bradbury notes in his introduction to the 1997 Avon edition that he is still regularly invited to speak at the California Institute of Technology, which shows the enduring power of myth (xii). Further evidence of this mythic power is the recent adaptation of TMC as a computer game.

This lecture references the Avon “updated and revised” edition published in 1997. This edition includes an introduction by Bradbury describing how he came to write TMC, noting the early influence of Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and describing his visit to New York and his conversation with Walter Bradbury (no relation), the Doubleday editor who inspired him to think of a book incorporating his Martian stories. This edition is different than the first American edition in two ways.

The first and more substantial change is in the selection of stories: two have been added (“The Fire Balloons” and “The Wilderness”) and one has been dropped (“Way in the Middle of the Air”). The second change is more subtle but also important: a revision in the dates included with the story titles in the table of contents and on the first page of each story. Critics do not include the dates when referring to the story titles, so this change is only apparent in the table of contents. The 1950 edition dates its first story as taking place January 1999, its last in October 2026; the cycle of stories thus covers a twenty-seven year period, beginning approximately fifty years after the first edition was published. In the 1997 edition, the first story is dated January 2030, the last one October 2057. The stories still cover a twenty-seven year span, and the first story is dated approximately forty years after the edition’s publication date. Bradbury’s chronology in both editions suggests a near future to contemporary readers.

Of the twenty-seven stories in the revised edition, sixteen of them are full stories, of varying lengths, with named characters. The eleven other pieces are the “bridge” sections, short passages with descriptions of events rather than individual characters, making transitions or setting up the stories, which focus more on characters in conflict.

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