Reflection: The Martian Chronicles

I wanted to start off this post with a quote. I shamelessly admit that I was browsing the Wikipedia page for The Martian Chronicles when I stumbled upon a brief sentence written by Carl Sagan.

"Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears."

I love this sentence, not just because it captures so well the feelings I get from The Martian Chronicles, but because it captures what I'll call the pioneer spirit. In class we spoke a lot about how Mars mimics the western United States and the concept of manifest destiny. I completely agree with this - Morgan's post talks about this concept a little bit more in-depth. But I think it's worth taking a step back. Sagan says that Mars became a place where we can project our hope and fears. And in many ways, the Old West was like that too. But there's more - in England, when the first men and women were leaving for the New World, they too projected their hopes and fears upon the new land. In fact, there's always been that kind of projection onto a new land, the sense and wonder and fear of the land more under control of the natural world than it is the human world. It's the lack of control of a new land that makes that feel that fear, but the unknown that draws us to it. Much of it may simply be our ability to project onto the land our more basal desires. That kind of projection takes a huge role in Bradbury's work - it's not just evident in plot, but in the actual character of the Martians.

I think what Bradbury wants to say is very much the antithesis to what Schmitt sees as the relationship between peoples of different lands. Bradbury, in his very fuzzy manner, tells us that no, boundaries are not hard entities which are not meant to be crossed. They instead serve only as reminders that the land you step on is not yours, that others have treaded on the same patch of ground. Bradbury doesn't answer whether or not the land will ever actually belong to those who come from far away searching for a new life. Certainly there may be laws and provisions which hand the land over to the new people, but how important are those laws when faced with the individual interactions people have there? Bradbury's work is so very different than Schmitt even more because there isn't any sense of a higher ruler, one to distinguish friend from enemy, at least in a situation like this. It is up to the individual, and even then it's not clear what the relationship between the invader and the invaded is. At the end of his work, Bradbury shows us that the few Earthlings left on Mars have BECOME the Martians, in an ironic turn. Whether or not this is a boon to Mars, or a sad day, is yet again not up to the Martians.