This was first published as “The Spring Night” in The Arkham Sampler, Winter 1948. This short vignette tells of Martians throughout Mars who, like Ylla, begin subconsciously picking up stray thoughts from the humans aboard the Second Expedition’s ship. As the ship approaches their planet, the Martians begin to adopt aspects of human culture such as playing and singing American songs, without any idea where the inspirations are coming from.
Month: November 2011
The Martian Chronicles – Chapter Two: Ylla (February 1999/2030)
First published as “I’ll Not Ask for Wine” in Maclean’s, January 1, 1950. The following chapter, “Ylla”, moves the story to Mars. Ylla, a Martian woman trapped in an unromantic marriage, dreams of the coming astronauts through telepathy. Her husband, though he pretends to deny the reality of the dreams, becomes bitterly jealous, sensing his wife’s inchoate romantic feelings for one of the astronauts. He kills the two-man expedition, astronauts Nathaniel York and one simply called Bert, as soon as they arrive.
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The Martian Chronicles – Rocket Summer (January 1999/2030)
Rocket Summer (January 1999/2030) – First published in Planet Stories, Spring 1947. The stories of the book are arranged in chronological order, starting in January 1999, with the blasting off of the first rocket. “Rocket Summer” is a short vignette which describes Ohio’s winter turning briefly into summer due to the extreme heat of the rocket’s take-off, as well as the reaction of the citizens nearby.
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The Martian Chronicles – Introduction
The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel, containing stories Bradbury originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. For publication, the stories were loosely woven together with a series of short, interstitial vignettes.
Bradbury has credited Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath as influences on the structure of the book. He has called it a “half-cousin to a novel” and “a book of stories pretending to be a novel”. As such, it is similar in structure to Bradbury’s short story collection, The Illustrated Man, which also uses a thin frame story to link various unrelated short stories.
The first third (set in the period from January 1999—April 2000) details the attempts of the Earthmen to reach Mars, and the various ways in which the Martians keep them from returning. In the crucial story, “—And the Moon be Still as Bright”, it is revealed by the fourth exploratory expedition that the Martians have all but perished in a plague caused by germs brought by one of the previous expeditions. This unexpected development sets the stage for the second act (December 2001—November 2005), in which humans from Earth colonize the deserted planet, occasionally having contact with the few surviving Martians, but for the most part preoccupied with making Mars a second Earth. However, as war on Earth threatens, most of the settlers pack up and return home. A global nuclear war ensues, cutting off contact between Mars and Earth. The third act (December 2005—October 2026) deals with the aftermath of the war, and concludes with the prospect of the few surviving humans becoming the new Martians, a prospect already foreshadowed in “—And the Moon be Still as Bright”, and which allows the book to return to its beginning.
A 1997 edition of the book advances all the dates by 31 years (thus running from 2030 to 2057), includes “The Fire Balloons”, and replaces “Way in the Middle of the Air” (a story less topical in 1997 than in 1950) with the 1952 short story “The Wilderness”, dated Mabfby 2034 (equivalent to May 2003 in the earlier chronology).
Tomorrow I’ll begin doing a summary fo all 31 of the short stories in the book sumarizing one each day.
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Summary: Dandelion Wine – Chapter Forty
Chapter forty is “Green Wine for Dreaming” was created the novel the boys are writing. The last chapter of the novel concludes Douglas’ summer, as he and Tom spot school supplies advertised for sale in a shop window. The boys reminisce about the events of summer with the aid of the labeled dandelion wine bottles, guaranteeing that they will remember this summer in their hearts. The Spaulding family stores away their porch swing for autumn, as others reverse their summer preparations as the season draws to an end.
The end of the novel echoes the beginning, with Douglas performing his waking-up act in reverse, pretending to switch the lights off and put everyone else to sleep before finally going to sleep himself, ending a very eventful and memorable summer and ending a very enjoyable book.
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Dandelion Wine – Chapter Thirty-nine
Chapter thirty-nine is about “The Magical Kitchen”. Douglas’ grandma is renowned in the household for her divine cooking for the entire family. Aunt Rose, however, threatens this magic when she questions Grandma’s methods of cooking, and later persuades Grandma to organize her kitchen, wear glasses, and read from a cookbook while cooking. This systematic cooking that results, however, destroys the uniqueness and magicalness of Grandma’s dinners for the rest of the family. In response to this, Grandpa bids Aunt Rose good-bye, but Grandma appears to have lost her touch for cooking. While the rest of the members are awake in their beds, Douglas sneaks down to the kitchen and restores it back to its original chaos, getting rid of the glasses and the cookbook. The family heads downstairs to find that Grandma has reconnected with her cooking again as it was meant to be, and everyone enjoys a magnificent late dinner. The chapter closes with Douglas thinking on how he repaid Mr. Jonas by passing on his favor.
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Summary: Dandelion Wine – Chapters Thirty-six through Thirty-eight
Chapters thirty-six through thirty-eight concerns “Dinner at Dawn”. This story focuses upon Mr. Jonas and his wagon full of discarded objects that he totes around town in the very early morning, allowing people to take what they need from it at no cost; many of them donating some of their old items to the wagon before it moves on forward again.
On a scorchingly hot morning, with the cicadas buzzing louder than normal with the rising temperature, Douglas lies in his bed, burning up with a fever. Tom and his mother attempt to cool him down, to no avail. In his fever, Douglas has hallucinations of long-lost people and machines walking past, including Mr. Tridden and his trolley, Miss Fern and Roberts riding by on their Green Machine, and Colonel Freeleigh popping up like a clock, all waving good-bye to him, which makes him cry out loud.
At four o’clock in the afternoon, Tom tells Mr. Jonas about Douglas’ condition and says that he’s afraid that he might die. Mr. Jonas gives him a set of wind-chimes to hang by Douglas’ window, but they do not make a sound because there is no wind. Mr. Jonas visits the Spaulding residence to see Douglas at seven-thirty, but Douglas’ mother says that he is not to be disturbed. By nightfall, Douglas is no better, and his family takes him outside in a cot, in the hope that he will be cooled by a wind.
Finally, at twelve-thirty, Mr. Jonas makes a stop with his wagon where Douglas is sleeping and leaves him two bottles filled with air containing soothing vapor and smells from the tropics and moisture-filled areas, on the condition that he pass this favor on to someone else. The bottles of air appear to work, as Tom finds Douglas breathing the same refreshing air in and out of his nose.
The next morning, the heat and the cicadas finally fade down with the coming of rain, and Douglas is well enough to write in his tablet again of his experience.
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Dandelion Wine – Chapters Thirty-four and Thirty-five
Chapter thirty-four is about The Tarot Witch that was created for their novel. Douglas takes Tom to a Penny Arcade to show him the mechanical Tarot Witch there. When Tom asks him why he wanted him to see her, Douglas says that he asks too many questions. He then thinks to himself that it’s because he was initially elated when he realized that he was alive, before he realized that being alive meant that he must die someday too, no matter how much he wants to prevent it. No longer certain about his life, he wants to take comfort in something that he knows never will go away, i.e. the permanent amusements at the carnival. Douglas gets a typical fortune from the Tarot Witch, but the card she gives Tom is blank. Tom suggests that the Witch might have run out of ink, but Douglas insists that the blank card must have some special meaning. Thinking that she might have written a message in invisible ink on the back of the card, Douglas runs a match over it. He accidentally burns up the card in the process, but says that he read a French message from the Witch, calling for help. He comes to the conclusion that the Witch is really a princess trapped in hot wax that someone poured over her.
Douglas plots to “rescue” the Tarot Witch by overloading a machine with coins so that Mr. Black, the carnival manager, will use them to get drunk. Mr. Black, however, goes crazy and smashes the Witch’s glass case. Douglas jumps in to stop him; just as Mr. Black is about to attack him with a knife, he passes out from his drinking. Douglas and Tom confiscate the Witch, planning to free her, but just as they reach the ravine, Mr. Black reappears and flings the Witch into the ravine, to Douglas’ horror.
Later on in the day, Douglas and Tom return to where the Tarot Witch is lying. Douglas says to Tom that the Witch is really alive, and that someday he will be able to free her from the wax with magic spells so that the Witch will become just another figurine. As he mentions their fortunes, another blank card falls from her sleeve. Douglas exclaims that it must be written with her thanks and a prediction that they will “live forever.”
Chapter thirty-five can be titled “Hotter than Summer”. Douglas comes upon Tom who is counting the times cicadas buzz every fifteen seconds to measure the temperature. Douglas reads the home thermometer as reading 87°F (31°C), but Tom, after finishing his count, says that it is actually 92° (33°C) Spaulding. Feeling woozy, Douglas begins subconsciously counting to the cicadas’ buzzes too.
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Dandelion Wine – Chapters Thirty-two and Thirty-three
Chapter thirty-two could be titled “Good-by, Grandma”. Douglas’ great-grandma, after countless years of assisting her family, feels that her time is expiring with a growing tiredness. She lies down in her bed amidst the protests of her relatives, waiting for her death. When Douglas asks her who’s going to do all the chores she did around the house, she says that they belong to anyone who wants them, and reminds him that she will not truly be dead in his mind. As her family leaves her to rest alone, she returns to the dream she was in before she was born, dying happily and peacefully.
In chapter thirty-three Douglas, disillusioned by the recent deaths and losses and by the light of a multitude of fireflies, writes for a long time on the shortcomings of things and people, associating them mainly with breaking down (machines) or death (people). He seems to be on the verge of a great revelation as he quickly scribbles at the end a summary of the dark side of his summer experience:
“So if trolleys and runabouts and friends and near friends can go away for a while or go away forever, or rust, or fall apart or die, and if people can be murdered, and if someone like great-grandma, who was going to live forever, can die…if all of this is true…then…I, Douglas Spaulding, some day, must…”
However, the fireflies’ light has gone out, so Douglas stops writing and releases the fireflies into the night. He then tries to fall asleep.
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Poem: Armistice Day
Armistice Day
On November eleven
As all of us knows
We signed an armistice
With all of our foes
And threw off our gas masks
We laid down our gun
And buried our hatchet
Along with the Hun
Now eight years have passed
Since that glorious day
When we signed that armistice
That ended the fray
And thousands of boys
Emerged from the strife
To come home a cripple
For the rest of his life
And thousands of others
Are over there still
Who never came home
And of course never will
They followed old glory
To a faraway shore
And to the loved ones at home
They returned never more
Althou’ we won glory
Across the big pond
We owe our respects
To our comrades that’s gone
And we’ll pause from our labor
Our tribute to pay
To our fallen companions
On Armistice Day
Written by Thomas Aaron Kepler in 1926
Copyright © Estate of Thomas Kepler
The poem was written by my grandfather, Thomas Aaron Kepler. It is one of several I have that he wrote and published. He was a resident of Jamestown, Ohio. He passed away before I was born. His poetry and writing are the only way I have had to know him.
