Line #42 Literature/TheMartianChronicles


1	[[quoteright:300:https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/images/518wxafw0rl.jpg]]
2
3	''The Martian Chronicles'' is a series of short stories by Creator/RayBradbury collected into a single book (published in the UK as ''The Silver Locusts''), describing episodes from a future history in which Earth sends several manned expeditions to, and eventually colonizes, the planet Mars. (The stories, written in the 1940s and 1950s, depict the planet as habitable and -- initially -- inhabited.)
4
5	As originally written, the sequence begins with the first manned expedition to Mars in the distant future year of 1999. The stories were revised in 1997 to push it back to 2030.
6
7	"Literature/ThereWillComeSoftRains", though set on Earth, is part of the same future history, and is included in some versions of the book.
8
9	A miniseries adaptation was made in 1979, which Bradbury called "just boring," although it was nominated for a UsefulNotes/HugoAward. A film adaptation is rumored to be in the works as of 2013.
10	----
11	!!The book and series provide examples of:
12
13	* TwentyMinutesIntoTheFuture: In "Mars Is Heaven!", the United States vessel XR-53 became the first Earth ship to land on Mars on April 20, 1987.
14	* AdamAndEvePlot: Subverted in "The Silent Towns". A man wakes up to find that he's been left on Mars by accident after most of the Martian colony has gone back to Earth. He begins dialing phone numbers in a desperate attempt for human contact and manages to get in touch with a woman, who he begins to fall in love with (based on their brief phone conversation). When they finally meet, he finds her [[FatSlob disgustingly fat]], obnoxious, loud, and shallow. When she proposes marriage, he runs away to another city, where he lives happily alone. And if the phone rings, he doesn't pick it up.
15	* AdaptationalAttractiveness: Genevieve Selsor, in the TV miniseries. In the book she's a FatSlob, airheaded, and materialistic. In the series, she's Bernadette Peters (but still airheaded and materialistic).
16	* TheAloner: See AdamAndEvePlot. Initially, he's overjoyed -- all the homes are abandoned, and he's able to eat and drink and smoke what he wants, and even carts around town with a wagon filled with money, for the hell of it. When he realizes he's alone, he breaks down and cries, and focuses solely on his attempt to reach a 'seductive voice' that calls telephones regularly. When he finally finds the owner of the voice -- one FatBastard -- he drives the hell away and is very content in being alone.
17	* AnyoneCanDie: The series has characters dying left and right from the beginning. Then the [[spoiler:nuclear war]] begins, and the previous death counts [[FromBadToWorse get put in perspective]].
18	%%* ApocalypseHow: Class 2/3 for the native Martians [[spoiler:and Class 4-6 for Earth]].%%ZCE
19	* ArousedByTheirVoice: Walter Gripp imagines Genevieve Selsor as beautiful based on their phone conversations. When they eventually meet, he's dismayed to see that she's actually fat and ugly.
20	* AssholeVictim:
21	** In "Usher II," we have the members of [[CulturePolice Moral Climates]], a pro-censorship organization that has seemingly successfully lobbied for virtually all works of fiction to be banned on Earth. An ex-librarian and an ex-actor, both ruined by their actions, proceed to use robots to kill them in grisly ways referencing works they banned, culminating in the leader being personally dispatched by the librarian via [[BuriedAlive live burial]] in an homage to ''Literature/TheCaskOfAmontillado''. Their fates are horrifying, but one can't help but cheer at the triumph of free
22	* AudioAdaptation: ''Literature/WilliamShatnerAndLeonardNimoyReadFourScienceFictionClassics'': Creator/WilliamShatner reads [[AdaptationDistillation abridged]] versions of "Literature/ThePsychohistorians" and "Literature/MimsyWereTheBorogoves", and Creator/LeonardNimoy reads [[AdaptationDistillation abridged]] versions of ''Literature/TheMartianChronicles'' and "Literature/TheGreenHillsOfEarth".
23	** Big Finish produced one in 2015, which was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 and headlined by Sir Derek Jacobi.
24	* BecomingTheMask: "The Martian" is about one of the natives ''trying'' to do this.
25	* BeeBeeGun: The Martians use a gun that shoots live bees, the idea being that the moral responsibility for the actual killing is laid on the head of the living projectile, and the gun-wielder's role is mitigated to that of an accomplice. Proves every bit as effective as earthly firearms, which is lampshaded in the TV series by the turned human who states "...then I offered him my weapon, but he said he already had one..."
26	* BigCreepyCrawlies: The praying mantis machine in "Night Meeting".
27	* BittersweetEnding: Most of the humankind perish in nuclear war, but few surviving humans settle on Mars to start civilization anew.
28	* BoldlyComing: In the second short, "Ylla," the eponymous Martian woman has psychic dreams that an astronaut from Earth will arrive, kiss her, and offer to take her home. This drives her husband jealous, and he shoots the astronaut when he lands.
29	* BookBurning: "Usher II" alludes to events on Earth where the government sponsored a "Great Burning" of books and made them illegal, which leads to the formation of an underground society of book owners.
30	* BroadStrokes: Not all of the stories were originally intended to be in the same continuity, so this is applied. The native Martians are described ''very'' differently in some of the earlier stories than they are later on.
31	* BuriedAlive: William Stendhal reenacts "Literature/TheCaskOfAmontillado".
32	* ButWhatAboutTheAstronauts: [[spoiler:The population of Earth is wiped out by a nuclear war, but the people on Mars survive.]]
33	* CassandraTruth: Nobody ever believes the captain of the second expedition when he says he is from Earth.
34	* ContinuityNod: The government-approved [[BookBurning book burnings]] mentioned in "Usher II" are a call-back to ''Literature/Fahrenheit451''.
35	* CosyCatastrophe: "The Silent Towns" features a man who, after a Martian colony is abandoned, is one of the last humans on Mars. He enjoys it for a while.
36	* CrystalSpiresAndTogas: The Martians' civilization. Most of the elements seem like a fantastic version of Egypt, with books written in hieroglyphs that sing when you touch them, houses built of crystal pillars and traveling using flocks of birds, all in the middle of a great desert.
37	* CulturalCringe: Jeff Spender absolutely despises American culture as shallow, narrow-minded and xenophobic. He would rather be a Martian instead.
38	* CulturalPosturing: Spender believes the aliens developed their society far better than we did; he's not afraid to explain how to Captain Wilder. Oddly enough, the actual Martians never do this.
39	* CulturePolice: In "Usher II", all works of fiction on Earth have been destroyed during the Great Burning. When the Moral Climate Monitors threaten to spread their censorship to Mars, a literary aficionado plans an elaborate revenge.
40	* DeadToBeginWith: Played with in "The Third Expedition" The crewmen assume they're in the afterlife when they meet their deceased relatives on Mars, but it's just a trick to lure them into a false sense of security.
41	* DownerEnding:
42	** The Third Expedition": The explorers land on Mars and find [[NostalgiaHeaven all their deceased relatives, apparently alive and well]], until the captain of the ship realizes something is amiss, and the shapeshifting [[TelepathicSpacemen telepathic Martians]] kill them all.
43	** "Ylla": Ylla's jealous husband [[spoiler:murders the human astronaut to prevent Ylla from getting to meet him]].
44	** "The Earth Men": A crew of astronauts arrive on Mars, only to find that the Martians don't even care that they're from Earth -- because [[spoiler:they assume that they're insane, and they think their spaceship is just a psychic hallucination]]. They end up [[spoiler:sent to an insane asylum]], and they're ultimately [[spoiler:shot to death by a Martian doctor trying to put them out of their misery]].
45	* DyingRace: Only a handful of Martians survived the chickenpox pandemic brought by the third human expedition, and the survivors do not have any hope for the future of their species.
46	* EarthThatWas: [[spoiler:The population of Earth is wiped out by a nuclear war, but the people on Mars survive.]]
47	* EveryoneHasStandards: Cherokee, one of the astronauts from the fourth expedition to Mars, is a Native American who is rather vocal about his anger at America's historical mistreatment of his ancestors, yet [[spoiler:he's absolutely horrified when the similar sentiment motivates Spender to go on a killing spree against human colonists and chooses to be killed by his instead of joining him]].
48	* FaeriesDontBelieveInHumansEither: An early portion has a Martian parent talking to a child, assuring it that there can't be any life on Earth, because of the excessive amounts of oxygen.
49	* FromBadToWorse: Near the end of the short stories, there are only a few more than a hundred Martians left, the majority of humans abandoned Mars, and Earth is at war. [[spoiler:Then Earth goes boom.]]
50	* FutureSocietyPresentValues:
51	** "The Wilderness" revolves around women sitting around being terrified about relocating (in this case, moving to Mars) just to get married (yet speaking as if they ''have to'' go), talking about being "old maids" if they don't go, and complaining about how "the men" make all their decisions for them... in 2003.
52	* GhostPlanet: Mars after the native Martians die out.
53	* GhostTown: In "The Silent Towns", Gripp walks around one and samples the abandoned services.
54	* HumanityIsInfectious: The Martians (who have psychic abilities of some kind) gradually become infected with human memories to the extent that their entire culture goes insane and is pushed to the point of extinction.
55	* HumansThroughAlienEyes: Yll calls the human in Ylla's dream "a misshapen giant"; both characters are confused by the strange appearance of the Earth man.
56	* IWantMyJetpack: See above, about the first manned expedition to Mars in the distant future year of 1999. Later printings revise this to 2030.
57	* InfectiousInsanity: In "The Earth Men", as the Martians are telepathic, insanity is highly contagious among them. As a result, when they think someone is crazy (because they're claiming to be from another planet, for instance), the automatic reaction is to shoot them immediately -- and possibly then shoot themself, just to be on the safe side.
58	* InvoluntaryShapeshifter: In "The Martian", the titular character shifts between forms depending on which character looks at it. The other Martians seemed to have more self-control.
59	* KarmicDeath: The [[MoralGuardians officials and bureaucrats]] in "Usher II". If only they had read Creator/EdgarAllanPoe,[[note]]Or visited this Tropes site[[/note]] they would have seen all those death traps coming a mile away.
60	* KickedUpstairs: The captain of the Fourth Expedition starts to have qualms about colonizing Mars and leaving no traces of the native culture. In a later story in the collection, it's revealed he was subsequently shipped off on a mission to the Outer Planets and thus literally "kicked upstairs".
61	* TheLastManHeardAKnock: In "The Silent Towns", a man thinks he's the last human on Mars, but discovers -- much to his displeasure -- that he isn't.
62	* LiteraryAllusionTitle:
63	** "And the Moon Be Still as Bright", a quotation from Creator/LordByron's "So We'll Go No More A-Roving".
64	** "There Will Come Soft Rains" is named after (and includes a reading of) a poem by Sara Teasdale.
65	* LotusEaterMachine: speech.
66	** "The Third Expedition" starts out as a sort of OntologicalMystery in the beginning. A crew from Earth land on Mars, which looks like Ohio at the turn of the 20th century. When their [[NostalgiaHeaven long lost dead relatives start appearing]], the crewmembers are overcome with the excitement of seeing old faces again. It has a DownerEnding: [[spoiler: the residents of the town are shape-shifting [[TelepathicSpacemen telepathic Martians]] who put up the facade to throw the spacemen off guard. It works: [[SlainInTheirSleep that night, just as the Captain realizes this, his "brother" kills him]]. The same thing happens all over town. The next day, they have a funeral for the spacemen... and then take on their true forms and gleefully tear the ship apart.]]
67	* MarsNeedsWomen: A very literal inversion. The first human to land on Mars is shot dead by a native Martian whose wife dreamed that she would run away with the man.
68	* {{Martians}}: The Earthmen initially find Mars to be populated by golden-eyed, dark-skinned RubberForeheadAliens; relations -- and conflicts -- between Earthmen and Martians are a major theme of many of the stories in the collection.
69	* MasterOfIllusion: In "The Third Expedition", an expedition to Mars is surprised to find an Earth village populated by all their deceased relatives, only to realize too late [[LotusEaterMachine it's a trap]] designed to lure them outside their rocket ship so they can be easily murdered.
70	* AMindIsATerribleThingToRead: This is pretty much what did in the Martians. While they were perfectly fine being telepathic by themselves, the sheer novelty of thoughts emanating from the first handfuls of human explorers were enough to drive them completely insane, resulting in the rapid downfall of their civilization and the destruction of the entire species.
71	* MistakenForInsane: This is what causes the demise of the Second Expedition to Mars in "The Earth Men", as the humans get euthanized by a Martian doctor due to their 'delusion' of coming from another planet. Unfortunately, insane Martians can manifest their delusions in physical form, so even their rocket ship doesn't convince him. When the rocket ship remains after the humans are killed, the alarmed Martian is convinced that he's been infected by their insanity and shoots himself as well.
72	* MoralGuardians: "Usher II" alludes to events on Earth where the government sponsored a [[BookBurning "Great Burning" of books]] and made them illegal, which leads to the formation of an underground society of book owners. Those found to possess books had them seized and burned by fire crews. Mars apparently emerged as a refuge from the fascist censorship laws of Earth, until the arrival of a government organization referred to only as "Moral Climates" and their enforcement divisions, the "Dismantlers" and "Burning Crew".
73	* NastyParty: In "Usher II", Stendhal and Pikes construct Stendahl's image of the perfect haunted mansion, complete with mechanical creatures, creepy soundtracks, and thousands of tons of poison to kill every living thing in the surrounding area. They then invite the [[MoralGuardians Moral Climate Monitors]] to visit and kill each of them in ways that allude to different horror masterpieces.
74	* NoBiochemicalBarriers: Averted. Cross-species disease is a major plot point in "And the Moon Be Still as Bright".
75	* NoSuchThingAsSpaceJesus: In "The Fire Balloons", two ministers try to ''make'' a Space Jesus representation to some aliens, but it turns out that they've had their Jesus Analogue and are well aware of The Faith.
76	* NostalgiaHeaven: "The Third Expedition": Some explorers land on Mars and are stunned to find their childhood hometown, populated by all their deceased relatives, very much alive and well. [[spoiler:[[LotusEaterMachine It's a trap]].]]
77	* NukeEm: The war on Earth has a '''lot''' of poorly thought-out nuke use.
78	* OfCorpseHesAlive: In "The Long Years", Hathaway, a respected former astronaut, [[spoiler:finds himself the last living man in his town. Being an ingenious fellow and a dab hand with electronics, he rigs the entire city to look like it's still alive and vibrant from his slightly secluded home. He also creates robot duplicates of his wife and daughters, with whom he interacts just as if they were the originals]].
79	* OnceGreenMars: There was a civilization living on Mars [[FaeriesDontBelieveInHumansEither who didn't think Earthlings existed]] until they started landing on the planet, which the Martians attempt to resist as much as possible. Eventually, the Martians die off from a mild Earth disease and humans are all that remain on Mars.
80	* OnlySaneMan: Subverted in "The Earth Men". While the Martians seem insane in how they ignore the significance of the astronauts being explorers from a different world, it's revealed that [[spoiler:they think the astronauts are just insane Martians projecting illusions with telepathy]].
81	* PatchworkStory: The original stories were written over a period of time, and have only the barest continuity.
82	* PendulumOfDeath: In "Usher II", all of the murders are based on Poe stories. One of the victims is killed by the descending pendulum from "The Pit and the Pendulum".
83	* PlanetBaron: Several of the collection's stories use this trope in a minor key for several of its stories when Mars becomes almost totally depopulated of human settlers. Easy to be king of the world when you're the only one there:
84	** "The Off Season": A hot dog stand owner and his wife, quite possibly the last people on Mars, tidy up in anticipation of the colonists returning. [[DownerEnding Then nuclear war starts on Earth]].
85	** "The Silent Towns": A look at a miner left behind who has free run of its various settlements until a chance telephone call [[TheLastManHeardAKnock leads him to realize he isn't alone]]. Unfortunately, [[AbhorrentAdmirer he may have been better off that way]].
86	** "The Million Year Picnic": A family escapes nuclear holocaust on Earth to become the new "martians", and thereby the new owners of Mars. Whether or not the cycle of abuses humanity conducts will continue there [[UncertainDoom is left unstated]].
87	%%* PrefersTheIllusion: [[spoiler:Mr. Hathaway and his too-idyllic family in "The Long Years".]]%%ZCE
88	* RaceLift: Jeff Spender becomes black in the miniseries to emphasize his empathy with the Native Martians. His race is never specified in the book, but his statement that his parents hated Mexicans for their dark skin implies he's white.
89	* RealityBleed: In "Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed", a fledgling colony on Mars starts to gain a peculiarly insightful understanding of the extinct Martians, until [[spoiler:they actually become Martians by the end of the story]].
90	* RegionalRedecoration: The entire Australian continent is atomized in a premature detonation of a nuclear stockpile, which sets the stage for a nuclear war on Earth.
91	%%* ReplacementGoldfish[=/=]RidiculouslyHumanRobots: [[spoiler:Mr. Hathaways's family in "The Long Years".]]%%ZCE
92	* SandIsWater: The Martians have sand ships.
93	* ScaryDogmaticAliens: ''Humans'' are (very obviously) the "Conquistadores" type.
94	* SciFiWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale: When [[spoiler:nuclear war erupts]] on Earth, the Martian colonists can, with their naked eyes, see the planet blaze with fiery light. [[spoiler:Yet there's still somehow an intact Earth for them to return to.]]
95	* SeaOfSand: Martian ships sail in the sandy deserts of Mars.
96	%%* SendInTheSearchTeam%%ZCE
97	* ShapeshifterSwanSong: The title character of "The Martian" appears to whoever sees him as a lost loved one. When he's surrounded by a crowd of people, who all need to see somebody different, the results are not pleasant.
98	* ShoutOut: In "Usher II", a fan of Creator/EdgarAllanPoe creates an elaborate death-trap based on Poe's best-known gothic horror tales to kill and replace the MoralGuardians trying to destroy literary works. The final line of the story is a direct quote of the final line to "Literature/TheFallOfTheHouseOfUsher".
99	* SingleBiomePlanet: Parodied in "The Earth Men". Some Earth-astronauts go to Mars, and the local Martians think they're nutters just claiming to be aliens, so the astronauts find themselves locked up in the loony bin. While there, several other loonies claim to be from Earth, and each say that Earth is a "massive jungle planet", a world covered with just oceans, or just desert, et cetera.
100	* SkeletalMusician: Inverted in "The Musicians", in which skeletons are used to make music.
101	* SmallNameBigEgo: Sam Parkhill serves as a violent example of this during the standoff with Jeff Spender. Later in the book, he sets up a hot dog stand, expecting a huge rush of business from an arriving wave of settlers and workers. [[spoiler:Gets his comeuppance when he panics, kills a Martian who was about to give him property titles for half the planet, and then watches the nuclear war begin on Earth.]]
102	* SoleSurvivor: In the ''Radio/DimensionX''/''Radio/XMinusOne'' radio adaptations of "The Third Expedition", Dr. Horst was the only member of his family to survive UsefulNotes/TheHolocaust. When he was a child, all of his relatives were gassed in Dachau.
103	* SpaceElves: Martians are slender, beautiful (with copper skin and golden eyes) members of an elegant culture with psychic powers and a psychology bordering on BlueAndOrangeMorality.
104	* SuperiorSpecies: Jeff Spender believes Martians to be this to humans after studying their ruins, hypothesizing among other things that they lived in harmony with the environment and had no conflict between science and religion. The stories that actually feature the Martians, however, show them to be just as flawed as humans.
105	* TelepathicSpacemen: Creator/RayBradbury's "The Third Expedition": The [[{{Telepathy}} telepathic]] Martians create a LotusEaterMachine to trap the crew of a human spaceship until [[SlainInTheirSleep they're all asleep, so the Martians can murder them easily]].
106	* ThrowAwayCountry: Nuclear war on Earth begins with Australia [[spoiler:accidentally being atomized. As in the ''entire landmass''. The event is so energetic that it casts shadows on Mars. It's not entirely clear how there was anything left to fight over on Earth, or how anyone (or even a microbe) was still alive to fight after that; this might be a case of ScienceFictionWritersHaveNoSenseOfScale]].
107	* TheUnpronounceable: The alien last names are pretty much impossible to pronounce in "The Earth Men", being three letters (consonant or vowel) in a row.
108	* UnwantedFalseFaith: In the TV version, a telepathic, shapeshifting Martian encounters a priest who's undergoing a crisis of faith. Since the priest longs to meet Jesus, his thoughts force the Martian to take on His appearance. The Martian begs the priest not to see him as the Messiah because he can't bear the responsibility, and fears he'll be trapped in Jesus' image forever. The priest asks the Martian to go whenever he pleases, and come back as Jesus only personally for him and only on Easter.
109	* VoluntaryShapeshifting: In "The Third Expedition", the Martians are a race of shapeshifters who assumed the forms of the deceased relatives of the crew of the XR-53 in order to make them think that [[TitleDrop Mars is Heaven]] and lull them into a false sense of security.
110	* WeaksauceWeakness: The Martians are almost completely wiped out by chicken pox. One character muses how wrong this is: "in the name of all that's holy, it has to be chicken pox, a child's disease, a disease that doesn't even kill ''children'' on Earth! It's not right and it's not fair. It's like saying the Greeks died of mumps, or the proud Romans died on their beautiful hills of athlete's foot!"
111	* WhenTheClockStrikesTwelve: In "Usher II", the Red Death appears at midnight, just before Usher II is destroyed.
112	* {{Zeerust}}: Typewriters are still in use. Most of this is due to the time the stories were written.

Context Literature / TheMartianChronicles