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Summary
Story Summaries & Analyses
“January 1999: Rocket Summer”
“February 1999: Ylla”
“August 1999: The Summer Night”
“August 1999: The Earth Men”
“March 2000: The Taxpayer”
“April 2000: The Third Expedition”
“June 2001: —And the Moon Be Still as Bright”
“August 2001: The Settlers”
“December 2001: The Green Morning”
“February 2002: The Locusts”
“August 2002: Night Meeting”
“October 2002: The Shore”
“February 2003: Interim”
“April 2003: The Musicians”
“June 2003: Way in the Middle Air”
“2004-2005: The Naming of Names”
“April 2005: Usher II”
“August 2005: The Old Ones”
“September 2005: The Martian”
“November 2005: The Luggage Store”
“November 2005: The Off Season”
“November 2005: The Watchers”
“December 2005: The Silent Towns”
“April 2026: The Long Years”
“August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”
“October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Tools
Nostalgia is a sticky trap on Mars. Bradbury utilizes it in very specific ways throughout The Martian Chronicles, countering what is expected of nostalgic evocation. The nostalgic tone carries upward from Earth (for example, evoking in “The Rocket Summer” a warm sense of hominess), but the first evocation of nostalgia on Mars in “The Third Expedition,” is an emphatic trap. Throughout the Chronicles, nostalgia is employed with Bradbury’s trademark power, but it is a double-edged use that is best characterized by the warm boyhood spell woven over the early trek in ‘”The Musicians” before Bradbury allows the horror of their purpose to unfold.
Bradbury chooses unsympathetic perspectives to explore the worse aspects of human nature like the violent racism of Samuel Teece or the blatant misogyny of Walter Gripp yet cloaks these uncomfortable narrations with the warmth of his nostalgia so they are more tolerable. Beneath the nostalgia, Bradbury’s narrative stance is skeptical of human nature to the degree of building the work around the idea that human nature will so fundamentally destroy the species that our last hope of salvation is discarding every trace of our life and history on Earth, including, especially, the lie of nostalgia.
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By Ray Bradbury