The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury's "There Will Come Soft Rains" is, for my money, one of the greatest short stories in American literature. You might have read it back in school a time or two. It's about this smart house, or at least a proto-smart house that could be conceived back in 1950, in the aftermath of a nuclear apocalypse. The house rings alarms, announces calendar events, prepares meals, keeps itself clean, and plays music and reads poetry, completely unaware and uncaring of the fact that it has been uninhabited for years. The story's as clean and efficient as they come, taking you from "what's going on here?" to "oh no" to "yeah, this all seems like a fairly logical conclusion" in the span of, like, eight or nine pages. It's as simple as a Dr. Seuss allegory but the images it depicts without explicitly spelling them out - like the horrifying death of millions of people in a fiery blaze, or a mangy dog being torn to shreds by robotic mice - are the kinds of horrifying things that'll stay with you forever. (I think I was seven or eight when we first heard this in school. Understood it, but couldn't grasp the urgency and foreboding of it. Read it late in high school and it hit closer to home. Could probably revisit it in my old age and lament how little things have changed in a hundred years.)

Anyway, I bring up "There Will Come Soft Rains" because even though it's a complete story that stands alone perfectly, it hints at this global disaster that you can only really imagine. The Martian Chronicles, one of those novel-like collections of tightly knit short stories, fills in a few of those gaps, but only barely; most of the action takes place on the planet Mars as humans attempt to colonize it and, after succeeding, do their best to live there without making the same mistakes they'd made on Earth. But the long and short of it, well, yeah, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is the second-to-last story in the collection. This was not an inciting event that led people to flee for Mars; this was the conclusion of a human race that had already made it to Mars. (The last short story focuses on the few people remaining on Mars after, we are left to assume, everyone on earth is dead. It's bittersweet but hopeful - the perfect note to end on.)

So, yeah. This is a cynical and glum portrait of humanity, albeit not an especially deep or profound one. In fact the criticism here is subtle. Not present are the wacky one-dimensional characters of, say, Kurt Vonnegut, nor is there any judgment or humor in the tone of the narration; everything is told in third person without any flair or humility.

The rest of the stories in the book touch on all kinds of warts found throughout human history - colonialism, genocide, folly, hubris, tribalism. Blink and you might miss it, but maybe the biggest tragedy of all is that toward the end of the book, a thriving human population on Mars ends up wiped out not Mars is engulfed in any warfare, but because to a man they almost all decide to return to Earth once nuclear war breaks out there. Idiots!

Last note, more of a side note, I always love going back to these seventy-year-old science fiction stories and seeing what aspects of the future these authors got right and what they totally biffed on. I mean, yes, sure, these are allegories that belong in their own times and aren't necessarily attempting to predict anything, but it's amazing to see that Ray Bradbury essentially predicted a smart house (although he wasn't alone in doing that - isn't that essentially what the Jetsons live in?) but not, say, communication advancements that would allow Earthlings and Martians to communicate with one another by any means faster than handwritten letters. And the gender and racial dynamics in these stories from another time are always something to behold. Still, does this hold up? This absolutely holds up.

Okay, actual last note, way more of a side note, I couldn't pick up this book without singing this old chestnut in my head:

Yeah, remember that one? You do now.