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color words. And the pages of the Chronicles are splattered with simple weather words: heat, cold, summer, winter, sun, stars, fire, ice, fog, rain, snow, wind.
Martin Gardner, "The Martian Chronicles" (1974), Gardner's Whys & Wherefores (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 4142
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Willis E. McNelly
Essentially a romantic, Bradbury belongs to the great frontier tradition. He is an exemplar of the (Frederick Jackson) Turner thesis, and the blunt opposition between a traditionbound Eastern establishment and Western vitality finds itself mirrored in his writing. The metaphors may change, but the conflict in Bradbury is ultimately between human vitality and the machine, between the expanding individual and the confining group, between the capacity for wonder and the stultification of conformity. These tensions are a continual source for him, whether the collection is named The Golden Apples of the Sun, Dandelion Wine, or The Martian Chronicles. Thus, to use his own terminology, nostalgia for either the past or future is a basic metaphor utilized to express these tensions. Science fiction is the vehicle.
Ironic detachment combined with emotional involvementthese are the recurring tones in Bradbury's work, and they find their expression in the metaphor of "wilderness." To Bradbury, America is a wilderness country and hers a wilderness people. There was first the wilderness of the sea, he maintains. Man conquered that when he discovered this country and is still conquering it today. Then came the wilderness of the land. He quotes, with obvious approval, Fitzgerald's evocation at the end of The Great Gatsby:. the fresh, green breast of the new world . . . for a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent . . . face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder."
For Bradbury the final, inexhaustible wilderness is the wilderness of space. In that wilderness, man will find himself, renew himself. There, in space, as atoms of God, mankind will live forever. Ultimately, then, the conquest of space becomes a religious quest. The religious theme in his writing is sounded directly only on occasion, in such stories as "The Fire Balloons," where two priests try to decide if some blue fireballs on Mars have souls, or "The Man," where Christ leaves a far planet the day before an Earth

 
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