Martian Chronicles / Farenheit 451

Ray Douglas Bradbury (born August 22, 1920) is an American fantasy, horror, science fiction, and mystery writer. Best known for hisdystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and for the science fiction stories gathered together as The Martian Chronicles (1950) and The Illustrated Man (1951), Bradbury is one of the most celebrated among 20th and 21st century American writers of speculative fiction. Many of Bradbury's works have been adapted into television shows or films.

The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fiction short story collection by Ray Bradbury that chronicles the colonization of Mars by humansfleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere between a short story collection and an episodic novel, containing stories Bradbury originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. For publication, the stories were loosely woven together with a series of short, interstitial vignettes.

The stories of the book are arranged in chronological order, starting in January 1999, with the blasting off of the first rocket. "Rocket Summer" is a short vignette which describes Ohio's winter turning briefly into summer due to the extreme heat of the rocket's take-off, as well as the reaction of the citizens nearby.

The following chapter, "Ylla", moves the story to Mars. Ylla, a Martian woman trapped in an unromantic marriage, dreams of the coming astronauts through telepathy. Her husband, though he pretends to deny the reality of the dreams, becomes bitterly jealous, sensing his wife's inchoate romantic feelings for one of the astronauts. He kills the two-man expedition, astronauts Nathaniel York and one simply called Bert, as soon as they arrive.

This short vignette tells of Martians throughout Mars who, like Ylla, begin subconsciously picking up stray thoughts from the humans aboard the Second Expedition's ship. As the ship approaches their planet, the Martians begin to adopt aspects of human culture such as playing and singing American songs, without any idea where the inspirations are coming from.

This story tells of the "Second Expedition" to Mars. The astronauts arrive to find the Martians to be strangely unresponsive to their presence. The one exception to this is a group of Martians in a building who greet them with a parade. Several of the Martians in the building claim to be from Earth or from other planets of the solar system, and the captain slowly realizes that the Martian gift for telepathy allows others to view the hallucinations of the insane, and that they have been placed in an insane asylum. The Martians they have encountered all believed that their unusual appearance was a projected hallucination. Because the "hallucinations" are so detailed and the captain refuses to admit he is not from Earth, Mr. Xxx, a psychiatrist, declares him incurable and kills him. When the "imaginary" crew does not disappear as well, Mr. Xxx shoots and kills them. Finally, as the "imaginary" rocket remains in existence, Mr. Xxx concludes that he too must be crazy and shoots himself. The ship of the Second Expedition is sold as scrap at a junkyard.

A man insists that he has a right to be let onto the next rocket to Mars, because he is a taxpayer. He insists on being let on the ship so strongly because the Earth will be having a great atomic war soon, and no one wants to be around when it happens. He is not allowed on the ship and eventually gets taken away by the police.

The arrival and demise of the third group of Americans to land on Mars is described by this story. This time the Martians are prepared for the Earthlings. When the crew arrives, they see a typical town of the 1920s filled with the long-lost loved ones of the astronauts. Captain John Black tells his crew to stay in the rocket. The crew are so happy to see their dead family members that they ignore their captain's orders and join their supposed family members. The Martians use the memories of the astronauts to lure them into their "old" houses where they are killed in the middle of the night by the Martians themselves. The next morning, sixteen coffins exit sixteen houses and are buried.

The original short story was set in the 1960s and dealt with characters nostalgic for their childhoods in the Midwestern United States in the 1920s. In the Chronicles version, which takes place forty years later but which still relies upon 1920s nostalgia, the story contains a brief paragraph about medical treatments that slow the aging process, so that the characters can be traveling to Mars in the 2000s but still remember the 1920s.

In The next chapter opens with the men of the Fourth Expedition gathering firewood against the cold Martian evening. The scientists have found that all of the Martians have died ofchickenpox (brought by one of the first three expeditions) — analogous to the devastation of Native American populations by smallpox. The men, except for the archaeologist Spender and Captain Wilder, become more boisterous. Spender loses his temper when one of his crew-mates starts dropping empty wine bottles into a clear blue canal. He knocks him into the canal. When questioned by his captain, Spender replies "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," referring to Earth. He leaves the rest of the landing party to explore Martian ruins.

§ Note that, in some editions of the collection, the two stories relating to Jeff Spender have been combined as one.

Spender returns to the rest of the expedition. He carries a gun and shoots six of his crew-mates, saying he is the last Martian. Captain Wilder approaches under a white flag and has a short discussion with Spender during which the archaeologist explains that if he manages to kill off the expedition it may delay human colonization of the planet for a few more years, possibly long enough that the expected nuclear war on Earth will protect Mars from human colonization completely. Although he opposes Spender's methods, Captain Wilder somewhat agrees with his attitude towards colonization and wishes for him a humane death. He returns to the others and joins them as they pursue Spender, and Wilder shoots Spender in the chest during the fight before he has the opportunity to be killed by anyone else.

The captain later knocks out the teeth of Parkhill, another expedition member, when he disrespectfully damages some Martian glass structures while "target practicing." Many of the characters of the Fourth Expedition — Parkhill, Captain Wilder, and Hathaway — re-appear in later stories. This is also the first story that displays a central theme of The Martian Chronicles. It acts as a commentary on the Western frontier of the United States and its colonization, using the colonization of Mars as the analogy. Like Spender, Bradbury's message is that some types of colonization are right and others are wrong. Trying to recreate Earth is viewed as wrong, but an approach that respects the fallen civilization that is being replaced is right.

The Martian Chronicles is a very fragmentary book. Many of its stories were written to stand alone. Therefore, any analysis of the book should first state what the novel manages to achieve as a whole. Obviously, it is a fictional account of the colonization of Mars. NASA repeatedly sends teams to explore; finally, one of them is successful. What follows is rampant settlement, much like Westward Expansion in American History. Some are looking for escape from civilization, but most only want to bring civilization to Mars--American civilization, that is. Finally, atomic war breaks out on Earth, and so all the humans go home. A few humans flee the war and head to Mars; when they get there, they don't make the mistake of trying to recreate American civilization. They have seen that the result of Earth civilization was war, so they burn their maps of Earth and decide to become Martians. Bradbury's message is that some types of colonization are right and others are wrong. Trying to replicate the old civilization is wrong, but appreciating the civilization you have found is right.

Beside this warning against reckless exploration and expansion, Bradbury is also simply writing a story about the American Dream of the frontier. He writes exciting tales about the dangers the first explorers face, and one is reminded of cowboys and Indians. He writes about the loneliness of the frontier, about how different people approach the idea of a new landscape. He shows how the American Dream can lead to misunderstandings and waste, and he shows the diversity of that dream, in disaffected literati like Stendahl, in oppressed Negroes like Silly, in rowdy young men like Sam Parkhill.

There are no major characters in The Martian Chronicles, and its plot, as stated above, does not move steadily from story to story. Why, then, is the novel so famous? First, it was a function of the novel's crossover appeal--it was a science-fiction novel that non-sci-fi fans could enjoy. Second, it is a very poetic novel. Whether you think the "poetry" is good or bad, it cannot be denied that, for a novel about outer space, Bradbury pays an extraordinary amount of attention to physical beauty, to familial ties, and to eerie, chilling atmospheres.

Fahrenheit 451 is a 1953 dystopian novel by Ray Bradbury. The novel presents a future American society where reading is outlawed and firemen start fires to burn books. Written in the early years of the Cold War, the novel is a critique of what Bradbury saw as issues in American society of the era.^[1]

The title refers to "the temperature at which book paper catches fire and burns". 451° Fahrenheit is approximately 233° Celsius.

Fahrenheit 451 doesn’t provide a single, clear explanation of why books are banned in the future. Instead, it suggests that many different factors could combine to create this result. These factors can be broken into two groups: factors that lead to a general lack of interest in reading and factors that make people actively hostile toward books (People don’t like to feel inferior to those who have read more than they have.)

Guy Montag. Appropriately named after a paper-manufacturing company, Montag is the protagonist of Fahrenheit 451. He is by no means a perfect hero, however. The reader can sympathize with Montag’s mission, but the steps he takes toward his goal often seem clumsy and misguided. Montag’s faith in his profession and his society begins to decline almost immediately after the novel’s opening passage.

Mildred is the one major character in the book who seems to have no hope of resolving the conflicts within herself. Her suicide attempt suggests that she is in great pain and that her obsession with television is a means to avoid confronting her life. But her true feelings are buried very deep within her. She even appears to be unaware of her own suicide attempt. She is a frightening character, because the reader would expect to know the protagonist’s wife very intimately, but she is completely cold, distant, and unreadable. Her betrayal of Montag is far more severe than Beatty’s, since she is, after all, his wife.

Beatty is a complex character, full of contradictions. He is a book burner with a vast knowledge of literature, someone who obviously cared passionately about books at some point.

Named after a famous publisher, Faber competes with Beatty in the struggle for Montag’s mind. His control over Montag may not be as complete and menacing as Beatty’s, but he does manipulate Montag via his two-way radio to accomplish the things his cowardice has prevented him from doing himself, acting as the brain directing Montag’s body.

Montag encounters a gentle seventeen-year-old girl named Clarisse McClellan, who opens his eyes to the emptiness of his life with her innocently penetrating questions and her unusual love of people and nature.

narrator · Third-person, limited omniscient; follows Montag’s point of view, often articulating his interior monologues

climax · Montag’s murder of Beatty

protagonist · Montag

antagonist · Beatty, but also society in general

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