![]() ![]() But in most of these stories, Bradbury holds up a mirror to humanity that reflects a shameful treatment of "the other," yielding, time after time, a harvest of loneliness and isolation. In "The Silent Towns," the last man on Mars hears the phone ring and ends up on a comical blind date. ![]() ![]() ![]() Colonists appear, most with ideas no more lofty than starting a hot-dog stand, and with no respect for the culture they've displaced.īradbury's quiet exploration of a future that looks so much like the past is sprinkled with lighter material. The Martians guard their mysteries well, but they are decimated by the diseases that arrive with the rockets. Starting in the far-flung future of 1999, expedition after expedition leaves Earth to investigate Mars. But longing for this comfortable past proves dangerous in every way to Bradbury's characters-the golden-eyed Martians as well as the humans. Written in the 1940s, the chronicles drip with nostalgic atmosphere-shady porches with tinkling pitchers of lemonade, grandfather clocks, chintz-covered sofas. From "Rocket Summer" to "The Million-Year Picnic," Ray Bradbury's stories of the colonization of Mars form an eerie mesh of past and future. ![]()
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