The Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury

He wanted his scenes to remain mysterious provocateurs to lure him on. So it has been with my stories, plays, and poems over most of my lifetime.

Myth, seen in mirrors, incapable of being touched, stays on.

Don’t tell me what I am doing; I don’t want to know! What a way to live. The only way. For by pretending at ignorance, the intuition, curious at seeming neglect, rears its invisible head and snakes out through your palmprints in mythological forms.

“It is good to renew one’s wonder,” said the philosopher. “Space travel has again made children of us all.”

Marriage made people old and familiar, while still young.

“Do you ever wonder if—well, if there are people living on the third planet?” “The third planet is incapable of supporting life,” stated the husband patiently. “Our scientists have said there’s far too much oxygen in their atmosphere.”

Our scientific assumptions may be philosophically unsound

It was like those days when you heard a thunderstorm coming and there was the waiting silence and then the faintest pressure of the atmosphere as the climate blew over the land in shifts and shadows and vapors.

We’d like someone to give us the key to the city or something like that, and we’d like somebody to shake our hands and say ‘Hooray’ and say ‘Congratulations, old man!’ That about sums it up.”

“Where are we, sir?” The captain exhaled. “In an insane asylum.”

That’s why there was no hullabaloo to welcome us. They merely tolerated what, to them, must be a constantly recurring psychotic condition.”

his name was Pritchard, and he had a right to go to Mars. Wasn’t he born right here in Ohio? Wasn’t he a good citizen? Then why couldn’t he go to Mars? He shook his fists at them and told them that he wanted to get away from Earth; anybody with any sense wanted to get away from Earth.

“Do you think that the civilizations of two planets can progress at the same rate and evolve in the same way, Hinkston?”

“There are many people who are of good faith without such proof, Mr. Hinkston.”

A faith that rests to any extent upon proof is no faith at all.

Born in 1950 in Illinois, and through the grace of God and a science that, in the last fifty years, knows how to make some old men young again, here I am on Mars, not any more tired than the rest of you, but infinitely more suspicious.

It’s a world and we get a second chance. Nobody told us why. But then nobody told us why we were on Earth, either. That other Earth, I mean. The one you came from. How do we know there wasn’t another before that one?”

“It’s not every day,” she said, “you get a second chance to live.”

How? he wondered. How was all this made? And why? For what purpose? Out of the goodness of some divine intervention? Was God, then, really that thoughtful of his children? How and why and what for?

Suppose, now, just for the hell of it, that they wanted to destroy us, as invaders, as unwanted ones, and they wanted to do it in a very clever way, so that we would be taken off guard. Well, what would the best weapon be that a Martian could use against Earth Men with atomic weapons? The answer was interesting. Telepathy, hypnosis, memory, and imagination.

“That city there, Captain, is dead and has been dead a good many thousand years.

A race builds itself for a million years, refines itself, erects cities like those out there, does everything it can to give itself respect and beauty, and then it dies.

we’ll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names. The names we’ll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we’ll never touch it. And then we’ll get mad at it, and you know what we’ll do? We’ll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.”

We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn’t set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose.

How would you feel if you were a Martian and people came to your land and started tearing it up?”

what these Martians had was just as good as anything we’ll ever hope to have. They stopped where we should have stopped a hundred years ago. I’ve walked in their cities and I know these people and I’d be glad to call them my ancestors.”

“Anything that’s strange is no good to the average American. If it doesn’t have Chicago plumbing, it’s nonsense.

Do you remember what happened to Mexico when Cortez and his very fine good friends arrived from Spain? A whole civilization destroyed by greedy, righteous bigots. History will never forgive Cortez.”

Isn’t it enough they’ve ruined one planet, without ruining another; do they have to foul someone else’s manger?

“They knew how to live with nature and get along with nature. They didn’t try too hard to be all men and no animal. That’s the mistake we made when Darwin showed up. We embraced him and Huxley and Freud, all smiles. And then we discovered that Darwin and our religions didn’t mix. Or at least we didn’t think they did. We were fools. We tried to budge Darwin and Huxley and Freud. They wouldn’t move very well. So, like idiots, we tried knocking down religion. “We succeeded pretty well. We lost our faith and went around wondering what life was for. If art was no more than a frustrated outflinging of desire, if religion was no more than self-delusion, what good was life? Faith had always given us answers to all things. But it all went down the drain with Freud and Darwin. We were and still are a lost people.”

“Yes. They knew how to combine science and religion so the two worked side by side, neither denying the other, each enriching the other.”

“The Martians discovered the secret of life among animals. The animal does not question life. It lives. Its very reason for living is life; it enjoys and relishes life. You see—the statuary, the animal symbols, again and again.”

Life was its own answer. Life was the propagation of more life and the living of as good a life as possible.

They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle.

I hate this feeling of thinking I’m doing right when I’m not really certain I am. Who are we, anyway?

Can one man be right, while all the world thinks they are right? Let’s not think about it. Let’s crawl around and act exciting and pull the trigger.

And from the rockets ran men with hammers in their hands to beat the strange world into a shape that was familiar to the eye, to bludgeon away all the strangeness,

Time looked like snow dropping silently into a black room or it looked like a silent film in an ancient theater, one hundred billion faces falling like those New Year balloons, down and down into nothing.

Tomás felt of his own body and, feeling the warmth, was reassured. I am real, he thought. The Martian touched his own nose and lips. “I have flesh,” he said, half aloud. “I am alive.” Tomás stared at the stranger. “And if I am real, then you must be dead.” “No, you!”

“But there they are. I see them. Isn’t that enough for me? They wait for me now, no matter what you say.”

The second men should have traveled from other countries with other accents and other ideas. But the rockets were American and the men were American and it stayed that way, while Europe and Asia and South America and Australia and the islands watched the Roman candles leave them behind. The rest of the world was buried in war or the thoughts of war.

If there are new senses on Mars, you must admit the possibility of unrecognizable sin.”

Amoebas cannot sin because they reproduce by fission. They do not covet wives or murder each other.

No, they don’t sin because they are not made in God’s image and do not have free will to choose good or evil.

“Somehow, they saved us. That proves they have souls.”

“Can’t you recognize the human in the inhuman?” “I’d much rather recognize the inhuman in the human.”

“Not Adam and Eve on Mars. No Original Sin. Maybe the Martians live in a state of God’s grace.

Grace is only granted to those who have fallen, that is, human beings.

“I must prove everything.”

“You, Brother Mathias, will create, in glass, a replica of this circle, a globe, filled with bright fire. It will stand upon the altar.” “A cheap magic trick,” muttered Father Stone. Father Peregrine went on patiently: “On the contrary. We are giving them God in an understandable image. If Christ had come to us on Earth as an octopus, would we have accepted him readily?” He spread his hands. “Was it then a cheap magic trick of the Lord’s to bring us Christ through Jesus, in man’s shape? After we bless the church we build here and sanctify its altar and this symbol, do you think Christ would refuse to inhabit the shape before us? You know in your hearts he would not refuse.”

I would not let a Martian sphere burn in hell, either, for it is a sphere only in mine eyes. When I close my eyes it stands before me, an intelligence, a love, a soul—and I must not deny it.”

I often wonder why our missionaries do well in Africa, with a snow-white Christ. Perhaps because white is a sacred color, in albino, or any other form, to the African tribes. Given time, mightn’t Christ darken there too? The form does not matter. Content is everything.

I think is is true to some extent; but that the same time Christ did and does have a real, physical body with specific features. Those who lived near him saw him as we has bodily. So there should be an acknowledgment of this fact, although it’s true that Christ suffered with US, and thus also suffered with the fire balloons and in some way took on the body of a fire balloon. Even we cannot really know exactly what Christ looked like, so of course even we merely imagine him as a particular form which is similar to our own and demonstrates his incarnation as a body like ours.

He built an architecture of Bach, stone by exquisite stone, raising a music cathedral so vast that its farthest chancels were in Nineveh, its farthest dome at St. Peter’s left hand.

We have put away the sins of the body and live in God’s grace.

Ah, so they have made themselves gods? I’m skeptical.