Dimension X: The Martian Chronicles (Ray Bradbury, adapted by Ernest Kinoy)

[james_davis_nicoll]

The Martian Chronicles

This adapts the following into a series of short vignettes:

"Rocket Summer": Climate change, rocket-style

"Ylla": A Martian woman dreams of the touch of an Earth man. Her husband turns out not to be into netorare.

"—And the Moon Be Still as Bright": The Earthmen learn that a previous expedition brought chicken pox to Mars, something the Martians have no resistance to. Reactions to this vary.

"The Shore": Humans settle on Mars en masse.

"The Off-Season": An entrepreneur's grand plan for his hot dog stand on Mars are sabotaged by global thermonuclear war on Earth.

"The Watchers": Most of the humans head back to the dying Earth for some reason.

"There Will Come Soft Rains": used as a frame for

"The Million-Year Picnic": In this version the family that gets incinerated in the original version of "There Will Come Soft Rains" instead flees to Mars, where the father seems hopeful that they will form the basis of the new population there.

Interesting creative decision to cram so many stories into just 30 minutes.

Comments

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I never quite understood why the nuclear war caused all of the Martian colonists to go home, either. That isn't how it usually works, is it?

[nelc.livejournal.com]

I guess it might depend on the level of destruction. If it's a fifties-era war, then the colonists might want to return home to help rebuild. Also, the colony might not yet be sustainable without imports from Earth.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Bradbury was inconsistent within the set of stories: in "The Off Season", it seems to blow up:

Earth changed in the black sky.
It caught fire.
Part of it seemed to come apart in a million pieces, as if a
gigantic jigsaw had exploded. It burned with an unholy dripping
glare for a minute, three times normal size, then dwindled:


While in "The Watchers", written specifically for the book a few years later, it doesn't seem _quite_ so bad, although it might just be a more low-key description of the same thing...

At nine o' clock Earth seemed to explode, catch fire, and burn.
The people on the porches put their hands up as if to beat the fire out.
They waited.
By midnight the fire was extinguished. The Earth was still there.

And then comes a morse light-flash message (visible naked eye across 70 million miles of space? Bradbury, you science fail again)

AUSTRALIAN CONTINENT VAPORIZED IN PREMATURE EXPLOSION OF ATOMIC STOCKPILE. LOS ANGELES, LONDON BOMBED. WAR. COME HOME. COME HOME.

So I guess the scale of the war can be interpreted various ways, but almost certainly worse than an OTL 1950s war would be. I'd go with the "not sustainable", but I wouldn't bet on Bradbury working that out for himself. But the whole million-year picnic thing seems to argue that Earth isn't going to send anyone into space for a looong time.

Where did those spaceships full of black people go? Or was it a US government eugenics dodge?

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

I remember reading the collection and concluding that the stories weren't necessarily 100% in the same continuity.

[daev.livejournal.com]

Some of the early ones couldn't possibly be, like the one where an astronaut comes to Mars and is sent to a Martian shrink, who refuses to believe either the Earthman or his own eyes. (Weren't there a lot of "psychologists are impervious to reason and evidence!" stories back in the day?)

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

Well, he had a rather strong reason for not believing (I wonder how they could distinguish between severe hypochondriacs and people with actual symptoms?)

[mmcirvin.livejournal.com]

...Wikipedia tells me that "Way in the Middle of the Air" has actually been deleted from recent editions of "The Martian Chronicles", including a 1990s one in which all the dates got pushed into the 2030s so as not to seem obsolete. (This seems like a particularly pointless exercise for this particular book.)

[agoodwinsmith.livejournal.com]

Regarding the chicken pox thing - in the early 50's my uncle's first son died in infancy because he was exposed to chicken pox. It seems to have a silly name, and you don't hear much about it any more (vacination?), but it was a dangerous childhood disease.

[chrysostom476.livejournal.com]

Yes, chicken pox has been vaccinated for in the US since the mid-90s.

[bruce munro (from livejournal.com)]

I had a case of it in the 80s, when I was in my teens, and I was in bed, covered with blisters and lotion, for several days: I still have a couple pockmarks.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

I managed to get exposed to it on at least six separate occasions, but never got it myself. My parents believe I must've just got so mild a case it was never noticeable, although I probably should get a vaccination for safety's sake.