![]() A man who cannot bear the deaths of his wife and children from a virus has lived for years with robot replicas of them while he awaits rescue. From chapter to chapter, we read of cities, both dead and thriving, of mad starship crewmen and eccentric artists, of wives and husbands and children. This is a book about impermanence, the brevity of life, and above all, loneliness. That's there, but it's just one of many ways Bradbury uses the lens of his science-fantasy (emphatically not science fiction in the strict sense of the term) to focus on the human condition. Bradbury was no exception.īut it would be completely inaccurate to describe the stories that make up this loosely-defined novel as a statement about expansionism and imperialism. With World War II and Hiroshima still a recent memory, armageddon was not far from any SF writer's mind at the time. But in the end, it's our bugs that defeat them, not our weapons. Their telepathy allows a few of them to know we're coming, which some await with a sense of romantic wonder, and others dread as a tangible threat. In some ways, they are so much like us, better and worse in others. ![]() ![]() The same fate awaits the hapless indigenes of Mars in Ray Bradbury's seminal and elegiac The Martian Chronicles. People came from Europe to settle the Americas, and the natives were wiped out, if not by our arms or our religions, then by our diseases. The spread of human civilization has been a ruthlessly cold-blooded Darwinian process. ![]()
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