The Martian Chronicles

The fractured nature of the narrative allows Bradbury to explore the practices and consequences of colonization at a minute level, implying that colonialism is not simply the purview and direction of governmental initiative but is reinforced by even the smallest indifferent actions of each of the colonizers. This theme is woven throughout the work and several of its most powerful images are dedicated to depicting the oppression of minutia in the colonialist enterprise.

Perhaps the darkest of these images is proffered by the children in “The Musicians,” who are knowingly playing amidst the ashes and bones of a conquered civilization. The boys have no care or understanding of the vanished Martians; they are ambivalent about the Martians to the point of using their bones as instruments. This callous indifference points to vital forgetting that must take place as successive generations establish the right of the colonial empire over the land. The parents punish the children for disobeying their direct orders, not for desecrating the remains of sentient beings. They refuse to take the responsibility of educating their children about the vanished people and instilling respect. The process of societal-wide forgetting is echoed in “The Naming of Names” in which the Martian markers for the land are stripped away and replaced with human language.

Bradbury returns to Earth to focus on the violent racist Samuel Teece, perhaps to observe the Earth-bound practices that encouraged colonialism and oppression. Teece draws his power from the deference of the oppressed—finding his identity in the enforced niceties of those he views as below him—the use of his supposedly superior knowledge, and by his immediate access and recourse to the white authorities after he sees the migrants leaving. These same characteristics are echoed by Sam Parkhill in “The Off Season.” Parkhill is violently oppressive, killing Martians only moments after meeting them and callously destroying their cities, and relies on his Earth knowledge in interactions with them, believing he understands what they are saying without listening to them. He also draws confidence from his connections to “The Rocket Corporation” (182), his Earth employers, who he is sure will support his murderous reaction to the Indigenous population. In Teece and Parkhill, Bradbury throws into light the smallness of the men who claim hierarchical power in colonialist endeavor.

And even the settlers fall victim to the monoculture of imperial colonizers. Racial outsiders like Gomez in “The Night Meeting” are forced to find communion with the planet and its peoples on the margins of society, exchanging sympathies and understandings far from the towns in the middle of the night. While men like Driscoll, who plants a life-giving forest in “The Green Morning,” must get beyond the confines of conventional, colonialist society, where their voices and desires will be normally oppressed, before they can find the life they seek to live.

The colonial drive is emphatically stated in “The Long Years,” when it is revealed that Captain Wilder, who shared Jeff Spender’s sympathies, was reassigned away from Mars so he wouldn’t “interfere with colonial policy” (211). The authoritarian control of the American government, despite its colonialist ambitions, is unable to oppress Mars in the same way it has oppressed its own nation and fails for reasons that echo many colonial empires including distance, differing cultures, and lack of conviction in the on-the-ground authorities and work force.

In reading The Martian Chronicles, it becomes impossible to ignore the similarities to the conquest of the Americas by European colonialists, in the taking of land from Indigenous peoples, erasing history, and deploying biological weapons. Yet the work is less a satire of colonialist folly than a study in human nature and psychology, and the ways we are bound to repeat and revisit the mistakes of the past.