The Martian Chronicles

by Ray Bradbury

All the sensualities and childishnesses and sins of the body were stripped away when our bodies were put aside.

One can still sin even without a physical body. That’s because sin is intentional—occurring by will. Sin is not only committed through a physical action. For example, a bodiless soul could still sin by lusting, even without the body to act on that lust.

“We wish to tell you that we appreciate your building this place for us, but we have no need of it, for each of us is a temple unto himself and we need no place wherein to cleanse ourselves.

They have no need of God’s grace? Nope, I don’t think these creatures are possible.

“The way I see it is there’s a Truth on every planet. All parts of the Big Truth. On a certain day they’ll all fit together like the pieces of a jigsaw. This has been a shaking experience. I’ll never doubt again, Father Peregrine. For this Truth here is as true as Earth’s Truth, and they lie side by side. And we’ll go on to other worlds, adding the sum of the parts of the Truth until one day the whole Total will stand before us like the light of a new day.”

The fire balloons are finite creatures, and that is enough to say that they are inclined to sin and are unable to lift themselves up to the power of God. This is another kind of relativism that makes no sense whatsoever. But somehow the intelligent beings of other planets will encounter God, and He will save them. But no created being will ever become God Himself. All who are created are in need of God.

the boys pushed and heaved and fell in the leaves, in the death that had turned the dead to flakes

Oh, gross…

Falling forever among meteor clouds and godless comets. Down the elevator shaft. Down the nightmare coalchute into nothingness.

“It’s always Columbus Day or Plymouth Rock Day, and I’ll be darned if I know what we women can do about it.”

And she decided, as sleep assumed the dreaming for her, that yes, yes indeed, very much so, irrevocably, this was as it had always been and would forever continue to be.

They began to plan people’s lives and libraries; they began to instruct and push about the very people who had come to Mars to get away from being instructed and ruled and pushed about.

a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves.”

Every man, they said, must face reality. Must face the Here and Now! Everything that was not so must go. All the beautiful literary lies and flights of fancy must be shot in mid-air!

shot them down, and burned the paper castles and the fairy frogs and old kings and the people who lived happily ever after (for of course it was a fact that nobody lived happily ever after!), and Once Upon A Time became No More!

Ignorance is fatal, Mr. Garrett.”

“Don’t doubt, please don’t doubt me!”

“I’m not anyone, I’m just myself; wherever I am, I am something, and now I’m something you can’t help.”

If you can’t have the reality, a dream is just as good.

The swift figure meaning everything to them, all identities, all persons, all names.

“We heard about wars in Asia. But we never believed them. It was too far away. And there were too many people dying. It was impossible.

To all intents and purposes, Earth now was dead; they had been away from it for three or four years. Space was an anesthetic; seventy million miles of space numbed you, put memory to sleep, depopulated Earth, erased the past, and allowed these people here to go on with their work. But now, tonight, the dead were risen, Earth was reinhabited, memory awoke, a million names were spoken:

And when once in a while over the long years the phone rings—he doesn’t answer.

Dang

How would it be, he wondered, to live on a planet with a wife and three children and have them die, leaving you alone with the wind and silence? What would a person do?

“There’ll never be anything as fine as them again. They’re built to last; ten, fifty, two hundred years. Yes, they’ve as much right to—to life as you or I or any of us.”

Night after night for every year and every year, for no reason at all, the woman comes out and looks at the sky, her hands up, for a long moment, looking at the green burning of Earth, not knowing why she looks, and then she goes back and throws a stick on the fire, and the wind comes up and the dead sea goes on being dead.

The house was an altar with ten thousand attendants, big, small, servicing, attending, in choirs. But the gods had gone away, and the ritual of the religion continued senselessly, uselessly.

The war was as removed and far off as two flies battling to the death in the arch of a great high and silent cathedral. And just as senseless.

Life on Earth never settled down to doing anything very good. Science ran too far ahead of us too quickly, and the people got lost in a mechanical wilderness, like children making over pretty things, gadgets, helicopters, rockets; emphasizing the wrong items, emphasizing machines instead of how to run the machines. Wars got bigger and bigger and finally killed Earth.

that way of life proved itself wrong and strangled itself with its own hands.

“Now we’re alone. We and a handful of others who’ll land in a few days. Enough to start over. Enough to turn away from all that back on Earth and strike out on a new line—”

The apocalyptic desire

The Martians were there—in the canal—reflected in the water. Timothy and Michael and Robert and Mom and Dad. The Martians stared back up at them for a long, long silent time from the rippling water....