The Lonely Ones

Well, fortunately, “eradication” is not entirely correct. A few remnants of humanity were able to move off-world. Fortunately, between 1999 and 2005, humans colonized Mars. Well, fortunately for the humans; it was not quite so fortunate for the Martians.

It’s funny how science fiction written in the 1940s seems so wildly off in its forecasts of the future. As you may have noticed, Mars wasn’t colonized by 2005. We do still have time to have a giant nuclear conflagration before 2026, though, so maybe the book isn’t totally off. Oh, don’t worry. The international situation is so remarkably stable, there is no chance at all of a giant world war. The book is just wrong.

The book? Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles.

First question: is this a novel or a collection of short stories? I have no idea. It sits right in no man’s land. It is clearly a whole bunch of bits written as stand alone short stories which are organized temporally and interspersed with brief little bits of connecting tissue in the form of one page vignettes. So, there is an overall story line through the book, but each substantive chapter could be ripped out of the book and read with absolutely zero loss of ability to understand the story.

As a story, it definitely has some clever bits. The book is easily divided into thirds. At first humans start arriving on Mars, and shockingly the Martians don’t seem too happy to see the humans. Conflict ensues. The Humans win (yeah for the humans!). Then we get a bunch of stories in which Mars is an unknown territory far from earth and the human settlements have all sorts of problems. Then the people on earth manage to destroy themselves and so life on Mars becomes the last refuge of humanity.

Now Bradbury is a fine writer and some of the stories are clever and fun, but is there any reason to read a bunch of 1940s science fiction if you aren’t unnaturally obsessed with post war apocalyptic imaginations about other worlds?

Yes.

The always amazing Library of America recently published the first volume of Bradbury’s writings. At the end of this volume is a brief essay Bradbury wrote helpfully entitled “A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles.” In it he relates how he came to write these stories. The idea started as Winesburg, Ohio set on Mars, which he fortunately abandoned because, well, Sherwood Anderson already wrote a book called Winesburg, Ohio, and it is really good and so why rewrite the same book?

What was he going to write instead?

It was going to be about people and they were going to be lonely people. They could not help being lonely, for they were double damned; once by a civilization that yanked the base out from under their God, and tried to take their mind off their loss with nylon toothbrushes and V-8 engines, and again by the impossible total miles between Earth and Mars.

That is exactly what The Martian Chronicles is all about. Every single story hammers home in one way or another, the unbearable problem of how to find a connection with another. The early explorers show up desperately hoping to be welcomed by the Martians and the tragedy is that the Martians have no interest in becoming companions of these lonely Earthmen. Eventually, humans take out their frustration at being so lonely so far from earth by asserting their control over Mars, hoping to build a place for humans to be in community, but once the Martians are gone, the loneliness remains. And then the humans on Earth use their new-found toys to destroy each other and the book ends with “The Million-Year Picnic” on Mars, where a few straggling remnants of humans trying desperately to build a community.

The Martian Chronicles is indeed a novel.

Who are these lonely people? This is the question which makes the novel truly fascinating. Also from “A Few Notes on The Martian Chronicles”:

[In] my home in Illinois there was a man who prowled the streets in the year 1928, who was known as “the lonely one.” I have never forgotten him. Some day his sons, or the sons of his sons, will go to Mars. Eliot calls them The Hollow Men. Call them what you will, but there they go, off to Mars, just for the ride, thinking they will find a planet like a seer’s crystal, in which to read a miraculous future. What they’ll find, instead, is the somewhat shopworn image of themselves. Mars is a mirror, not a crystal.

About whom are we reading when we read The Martian Chronicles? It is a mirror. Those lonely people? They are us, living in Eliot’s Wasteland, headpieces filled with straw. Alas.

The loneliness bred in the modern age is a subject which has been widely discussed. I teach at a college with a couple thousand students living in crowded dormitories, and yet, “lonely” is a pretty good adjective to describe most of my students. What happens when a bunch of lonely people are put together in a place? Well, all sorts of attempts to form deep bonds emerge, most of which do not actually generate such bonds, and thus the loneliness increases.

The Martian Chronicles is a taxonomy of failed means of trying to solve the problem of loneliness. Story after story, we just keep seeing yet one more way the quest to cure loneliness has failed. In the end, we destroy ourselves.

That sounds kinda depressing. And indeed, while the stories in Bradbury’s volume are entertaining, there is not a lot of hope here. I suppose that should be obvious in a book in which the most famous story (“There Will Be Soft Rains”), the penultimate chapter in the novel, is the tale of an automated house continuing to hum along making breakfast and so on for a family that is now just a shadow on a wall created by a nuclear explosion. And then the automation in the house breaks down, and even the house dies in a fire. The final chapter is the million year long picnic on Mars…maybe that will work out? Yeah, probably not.

What is the cure for loneliness? Bradbury doesn’t have an answer. He drives that point home by ending the last story in the book with an ellipsis; it just wanders off into the unknown. Bradbury is writing stories trying to convince you that there is a problem, that you are indeed lonely and that you don’t have a cure for your loneliness. Bradbury is silently whispering in your ear: This is the way the world ends, not with a bang, but a whimper.

The Bradbury short stories are good, but here is a great example of the whole being better than the sum of the parts. I read his book decades ago and thought it was ho-hum. Some nice stories, no real cohesion. I was wrong. As a reflection on how humans try and fail to cure themselves of loneliness, it is rather amazing. Read this book, and then look around the world, and you suddenly see: it’s just The Martian Chronicles repeating itself here on Earth.

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