Chapter five, The Taxpayer, first appeared in The Martian Chronicles. A man insists that he has a right to be let onto the next rocket to Mars, because he is a taxpayer. He insists on being let on the ship so strongly because the Earth will be having a great atomic war soon, and no one wants to be around when it happens. He is not allowed on the ship and eventually gets taken away by the police.
Tag: Recipient of the National Medal of Arts Award
The Martian Chronicles – Chapter Four: The Earth Men (August 1999/2030)
Chapter Four – The Earth Men (August 1999/2030) was first published in Thrilling Wonder Stories, August 1948. This story tells of the “Second Expedition” to Mars. The astronauts arrive to find the Martians to be strangely unresponsive to their presence. The one exception to this is a group of Martians in a building who greet them with a parade. Several of the Martians in the building claim to be from Earth or from other planets of the solar system, and the captain slowly realizes that the Martian gift for telepathy allows others to view the hallucinations of the insane, and that they have been placed in an insane asylum. The Martians they have encountered all believed that their unusual appearance was a projected hallucination. Because the “hallucinations” are so detailed and the captain refuses to admit he is not from Earth, Mr. Xxx, a psychiatrist, declares him incurable and kills him. When the “imaginary” crew does not disappear as well, Mr. Xxx shoots and kills them. Finally, as the “imaginary” rocket remains in existence, Mr. Xxx concludes that he too must be crazy and shoots himself. The ship of the Second Expedition is sold as scrap at a junkyard.
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The Martian Chronicles – Chapter Three: The Summer Night (August 1999/2030)
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.
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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.
