SETTING

Most of the stories in TMC are set on Mars, with a few exceptions. The first story, “Rocket Summer,” is set in Ohio when the first rocket to Mars is launched. The fifth story, “The Taxpayer,” returns to that location as Mr. Pritchard yells through the fence surrounding the Third Expedition’s rocket that he wants to go to Mars, fearing an atomic war and other ills of Earth. Both “The Fire Balloons” and “The Wilderness” (added to the revised edition) and “Way in the Middle of the Air” (removed from the revised edition) begin on Earth, but describe groups leaving to colonize Mars (specifically, the Episcopal Fathers; women engaged to, or hoping to marry, men on Mars; and African Americans in the South). Otherwise, no stories are set on Earth until the twenty-sixth (next to last), which describes what happens to an electronically controlled house after the atomic war. With the exception of this last story, each story with an Earth setting shows characters who want to go to Mars.

THEMES

Some humorous episodes mitigate the overall serious tone of the novel. The Second Expedition’s travails and Walter Gripp’s ill-fated meeting with the last woman on Mars are both comic. The gothic grotesqueries of “Usher II” are a comic homage to Edgar Allan Poe, showing a character taking glee in murdering “censors” by methods taken from Poe’s stories. However, the major theme of TMC is a commentary on the negative effect of American civilization’s reliance on certain kinds of technologies. This novel’s perspective on technology is why some science fiction writers and critics say that Bradbury represents a minority view in the science fiction tradition, especially in the context of science fiction of the 1950s, which tended to celebrate the importance of technology in improving life for humanity.

A more somber tone pervades the earliest stories describing the Martians as a dying race who are mostly destroyed by a human disease, as well as the depiction of humans as arrogant and uncaring about the history and culture of the planet’s original inhabitants. The destruction of Earth by atomic war and the final image of one family being the last, or nearly the last, humans alive complete the elegiac, or funereal, tone of the novel.

Two critics have created different interpretations of TMC. In “ The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury’s Cold War Novels,” critic Kevin Hoskinson analyzes TMC as Bradbury’s major statement about the Cold War, the conflict between the United States and the Soviet Union that grew after the end of World War II. TMC especially focuses on the fear of atomic bombs destroying the world. Linked with that sense of precariousness, Hoskinson notes, is a conflict between individuals and society, especially the conflict between those who conform to a majority culture and the individuals who do not fit in. Bradbury’s ongoing interest in the power of technology to suppress individual freedom and identities as well as spirituality and art can also be seen in the book.

Gary K. Wolfe, in “The Frontier Myth in Ray Bradbury,” presents a different reading of the novel. Wolfe argues that Bradbury reflects the same sense of the frontier myth that Frederick Jackson Turner made at the 1893 Chicago world’s fair. Turner’s presentation, titled “The Significance of the Frontier in American History,” argued that the presence of the frontier was the major shaper of American history and culture. Wolfe analyzes the extent to which TMC expresses on Turner’s ideas, without claiming that Bradbury studied Turner. Turner’s basic idea is a familiar element in science fiction; Wolfe notes that the phrase used in the television and film series Star Trek, “Space — the final frontier,” shows how a popularized version of Turner’s historical argument exists even in contemporary televised science fiction.

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