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of a new planet are promptly possessed by a resident intelligencestands out: it is also the only one which is almost pure SF. Others, particularly those where a setting such as Mexico replaces an idea, are less impressive. |
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Stephen Hugh-Jones, "Bradburies," New Statesman, 18 September 1964, p. 406 |
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I do not know whether Bradbury has read much of(G. K.) Chesterton, but The Martian Chronicles, like all of Bradbury's writing, glows with a Chestertonian mix of wonder, hilarity, exhilaration (and thankfulness?) at finding oneself miraculously alive in an endlessly fascinating universe. It cannot be said too often that Bradbury is not particularly interested in science. The scientific content of the Chronicleswhat point is there in denying it?is quite low. We learn very little about the actual Mars, and what we learn is (. . .) mostly wrong. We do learn a great deal about the colors and mysteries of tellurian experience. Going to Mars, like going anywhere, helps us take fresh looks at the too-familiar scenery of Green Town, Illinois. "Space travel," says Bradbury's unnamed philosopher in the book's epigraph, "has again made children of us all." |
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The descriptive touches in the Chronicles delight and startle the reader the way a rainbow, seen for the first time, startles and delights a child. Martian children play with toy spiders made of gold, spiders that spin filmy webs and scurry up their legs. Martian books are raised hieroglyphics on silver pages (aluminum in earlier printings of the stories) that speak and sing when fingertips brush over them. Martian airships are white canopies drawn by thousands of flame-birds. Blue-sailed sand-ships carry Martians over the sandy beds of dead seas, like the sand-ship that Johnny Doit built for Dorothy and Shaggy Man to use in crossing the Deadly Desert that surrounds Oz. At night, Martians sleep suspended in a blue mist that in the morning lowers them gently to the floor. Martian guns shoot streams of deadly bees. The canals, cutting through mountains of moonstone and emerald, flow with green and lavender wine. Silver ringfish float on the rippling water, "undulating and closing like an iris, instantly, around food particles." |
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Bradbury is in love with the sights and sounds and smells of the world, and (like all true poets) he prefers to describe them with those simple, elemental words that are part of a child's vocabulary. Colors on Mars are red, blue, green, black, gold, silverno fancy synonyms, just the old familiar |
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