In the episode, the starshipEnterprise fights a powerful planet-killing machine from another galaxy.
Plot
The Federation starship USS Enterprise, following a trail of mysteriously destroyed star systems, picks up the automated distress beacon of one of the Enterprise's sister ships, the USS Constellation. Upon arrival, the Constellation is found drifting in space and severely damaged; Captain Kirk, Chief Medical Officer Dr. McCoy, Chief Engineer Scotty,
and a damage control team transport to the ship to evaluate her. There
they discover the only member of the crew still aboard: the ship's
captain CommodoreMatt Decker, who is suffering from severe mental trauma.
Decker explains that he and his crew had discovered a giant machine, miles long, that used beams of antiprotons
to tear planets apart, consuming the rubble for fuel. Their attack on
the machine was ineffective and they suffered heavy damage. Decker
evacuated his crew to one of the planets of the system, which the
machine subsequently destroyed. Kirk theorizes that the machine is an
ancient doomsday machine, which must be stopped before it reaches more populated sectors of the galaxy. The Enterprise takes the Constellation in tow and McCoy takes Decker back to the Enterprise, while Scott's damage control team attempt repairs on the Constellation's impulse engines, weapons and shields. Kirk attends to the Constellation's nonfunctional viewscreen, which, other than communications from Enterprise, will be his only means of monitoring events outside the ship.
The Enterprise's first officer, Spock, informs Kirk of the sudden appearance of the so-called planet killer and it begins to pursue the Enterprise. As the boarding party prepares to beam back aboard, the machine attacks the Enterprise, damaging the transporter and disrupting communications. Decker, now the senior officer on the Enterprise,
assumes command and orders a phaser attack. The phasers are useless
against the machine, and the ship is then caught in a tractor beam which
draws it towards the planet killer's maw. Kirk completes his repair of Constellation's viewscreen and is shocked to see the Enterprise engaging the machine. Scott has managed to repair impulse engines and recharge one of the Constellation's phaser banks, so Kirk uses the crippled ship to approach and fire at the planet killer, distracting it long enough for Enterprise to escape its tractor beam. After repairing the transporter and reestablishing voice communications, Enterprise
retreats to a safe distance. Spock relieves Decker of command on Kirk's
orders and Decker is escorted to Sickbay. However, Decker subdues his
security escort and steals a shuttlecraft, flying it straight into the maw of the machine. Despite Kirk's plea for him to return to the Enterprise and his own horror as he is swallowed by the planet killer, he does not deviate from his course and dies.
Lt. Sulu
reports that the shuttlecraft explosion has reduced the planet killer's
power output by a small amount. Realizing that this may have been
Decker's intention, and hoping that a starship would do much more
damage, Kirk comes up with a plan to explode the Constellation
inside the planet killer. Over Spock's objections, Kirk insists on
piloting the damaged ship himself, and Scott rigs the impulse engines to
explode with a thirty-second delay before detonation, warning his
captain that once the timer is enabled, there is no way to abort it.
With the rest of the boarding party transported back to the Enterprise, Kirk aims the Constellation at the maw of the planet killer, triggers the timer, and orders the Enterprise
to beam him aboard. The transporter malfunctions, and Scott races to
set it right with advice from Spock. With almost no time to spare, Kirk
is safely beamed aboard the Enterprise as the Constellation explodes inside the planet killer, leaving it dead in space, its threat ended.
Production
Episode
writer Norman Spinrad based the script on a novelette "The Planet
Eater" that had been rejected by a number of publishers. He revived the
idea when he had a chance to pitch it to Executive Producer Gene
Roddenberry. "I did 'The Doomsday Machine' fast," he recalled. Spinrad had written the script with actor Robert Ryan in mind to play Commodore Decker, but Ryan was unavailable, owing to prior commitments.
Some sources hold that the episode was influenced by Fred Saberhagen's Berserker series, which features robotic killing machines built as a doomsday device by a now-vanished race to wipe out their rivals.
However, author Norman Spinrad denies the influence — "I wasn't
conscious of the Saberhagen stuff when I was doing this, but I was
certainly conscious of Moby Dick.
And, actually, my unpublished novelette, which was the genesis of "The
Doomsday Machine", was written before the Saberhagen stuff." Non-canonStar Trek media refer to the device as a Berserker.
According to one source, the model for the USS Constellation was an off-the-shelf AMT Enterprise model painted and torched in places for the battle damage, while other sources claim that the smallest and least detailed Enterprise professional model was altered for the episode. It has also been stated that the Constellation's hull ID number of 1017 came from simply switching the digits of an Enterprise model's 1701 hull numbers.
The episode was written as a bottle episode,
i.e., one that could use existing ship sets to save time and money.
According to Spinrad, the episode was so well received by Roddenberry
that he commissioned him to write another for comedian Milton Berle who planned to do a dramatic turn on the show titled "He Walked Among Us".
Music
This is one of the few Star Trek episodes in the second season for which original music was written; in this case a full score, by Sol Kaplan. Writer James Lileks
notes that the music cues for this episode are "intended to belong
together, and that’s one of the reasons the episode works like few
others: it has a unique symphonic score. Played start to finish, it
holds together." Jeff Bond
notes, "Although he wrote only two scores for the series, New York
composer Sol Kaplan's music was tracked endlessly throughout the show's
first two seasons." Both Lileks and Bond point out similarities between this music and John Williams' award-winning score for Jaws, nearly a decade later. The music for this episode was collected, along with the score for "Amok Time",
on the second release from Crescendo Records of music from the series:
the first release other than the music from the pilot episodes.
Non-canon sequels to the episode
An advanced version of the Planet Killer appears in the Star Trek: The Next Generation novel Vendetta. The novel depicts the original Planet Killer as a prototype for a weapon designed to combat the Borg,
released in desperation when the weapon's designers realized that the
Borg would defeat them before they could finish the more advanced
version. In the 2005 episode of Star Trek: New Voyages, "In Harm's Way", William Windom reprises his role as Commodore Matt Decker almost 40 years later. Star Trek Online features the machine in the Federation storyline.
Reception
For the franchise's 30th anniversary, TV Guide ranked "The Doomsday Machine" No. 4 on its list of the 10 best Star Trek episodes. Zack Handlen of The A.V. Club
gave the episode an "A" rating, describing the episode as "very strong
stuff", noting effective tension building and the development of
Decker's character. Handlen also noted Sol Kaplan's score which "matches the actors' intensity."
In 2010, SciFiNow ranked this the tenth best episode of the original series. In 2012, Christian Science Monitor ranked this the tenth best episode of the original Star Trek. In 2014, Gizmodo
ranked "The Doomsday Machine" as the 18th best episode of Star Trek,
out of the over 700 ones made by that time including later series. In 2015, WhatCulture ranked this the 6th best episode of all time in the Star Trek science fiction universe. In 2015, W.I.R.E.D. magazine did not recommend skipping this episode in their binge-watching guide for the original series.
In 2016, Hollywood Reporter rated "The Doomsday Machine" the 48th best television episode of all Star Trek franchise television prior to Star Trek: Discovery, including live-action and the animated series but not counting the movies. The Business Insider ranked "The Doomsday Device" the 13th best episode of the original series. Empire ranked this the 9th best out of the top 50 episodes of the all the 700 plus Star Trek television episodes. SyFy ranked guest star William Windom's performance as Commodore Matt Decker, as the 4th best guest star on the original series. CNET noted the Doomsday Machine spacecraft as one of the powerful and important spacecraft of the Star Trek franchise. Newsweek ranked "The Doomsday Machine" as one of the best episodes of the original series. Empire ranked "The Doomsday Machine" 9th out of the 50 top episodes of all Star Trek in 2016. At that time, there were roughly 726 episodes and a dozen films released. TVline
ranked this as having one of the top twenty moments of Star Trek,
noting Kirk's line when says, " “Gentlemen, I would suggest you beam me
aboard…,” for the Enterprise to transport him off the spacecraft he is
on.
In 2018, Collider ranked this episode the 11th best original series episode. PopMatters ranked this the 20th best episode of the original series. The note it as a "suspenseful episode" and praised the musical score by composer Sol Kaplan. A 2018 Star Trekbinge-watching guide by Den of Geek, recommended this episode as one of the best of the original series.
In 2019, the Edmonton Journal ranked this as having one of the top ten Spock character moments, pointing out his intervention in Decker's plan to destroy the ship and ensuing conversation.
Norman Richard Spinrad (born September 15, 1940) is an American science fiction author, essayist, and critic. His fiction has won the Prix Apollo and been nominated for numerous awards, including the Hugo Award and multiple Nebula Awards.
In an interview with Locus magazine in 1999, Spinrad described himself as an "anarchist" and a "syndicalist".
Style
Some critics have noted utopian themes in Spinrad's works. In a 1999 interview, he talked about his hopes for the role of science fiction in society:
How
much science fiction is being published now that's set in worlds that
are better than ours? Not that have bigger shopping malls or faster
space ships, but where the characters are morally superior, where the
society works better, is more just? Not many. It becomes difficult to do
it, and that's a feedback relationship with what's happening in the
culture, with science fiction being the minor note. People don't credit
it anymore! Not just better gizmos and more virtual reality gear, but
better societies. People don't believe the future will be a better
place. And that is very scary.
According to critic Galen Strickland, "Spinrad has never taken the easy
course of artistic repetition, nor tailored his thoughts to the dictates
of any editor. Each of his books are unique, and explore avenues of
thought and speculation few others have traveled. Sex and power are
usually his primary themes". Consciousness-altering drugs often feature prominently in his stories. According to Spinrad:
If
there's one gaping void in the story of American literary history in
the second half of the twentieth century as currently promulgated, it's
the influence of grass and psychedelic drugs, not only on the lives of
writers, but on the content of what's been written, and on the form and
style too. It's hard to be critically or biographically courageous when
so much creative work was done under the influences of jailable
offenses.
Controversies
Spinrad has been called "perhaps the most controversial American component of science fiction New Wave
movement of the mid-to-late 1960s, and if such an idea is conceivable,
has probably irritated and offended as many readers and critics as has
[Harlan] Ellison". He had difficulty finding a publisher willing to print Bug Jack Barron as a book. Publisher Michael Moorcock printed the novel in installments in the magazine New Worlds. The newsstand company WHSmith refused to distribute one of the issues because of the installment of Spinrad's novel. The Arts Council of Great Britain, which subsidized New Worlds,
put public pressure on WHSmith and forced the company to distribute the
issue. This led to denunciations of Spinrad, The Arts Council, and New Worlds in the British Parliament.
Spinrad could not find an American publisher for his 2007 novel Osama the Gun.
"[O]ne rejection letter, foaming at the mouth, declared that no
American publisher would touch it." He decided to self-publish the novel
as an e-book. The book, which features several passages in Paris, has been published in French, by a very much mainstream edition, J'ai lu (2011).
Major works
Bug Jack Barron
Bug Jack Barron (1969), a pre-cyberpunk
tale of a cynical, exploitative talk-show host who gradually uncovers a
conspiracy concerning an immortality treatment and the methods used in
that treatment, was serialised in the British magazine New Worlds during Michael Moorcock's
editorship. With its explicit language and cynical attitude to
politicians, it roused one British Member of Parliament's ire at the
magazine's partial funding by the British Arts Council.
The Iron Dream
The Iron Dream (1972) is an alternate history novel, the bulk of which is the middle part consisting of a fictional fantasy classic entitled Lord of the Swastika, written by one Adolf Hitler. The first part explains that the deceased author Hitler was a sci-fi writer and that this novel was widely praised by fandom. The third part is a critical review of the novel and its aftermath. According to Spinrad,
the book was banned for twenty-five years in Germany, but was finally
exonerated after appeals. More accurately, the book was indexed by the Federal Department for Media Harmful to Young Persons,
thus the sale of the book was permitted, but the public display of the
book or its covers was prohibited, despite the fact that there were no
swastikas on the cover of the first German edition. The Iron Dream won a
Prix Tour-Apollo Award, and was nominated for an American Book Award.
A World Between
A World Between (1979) tells of a mildly turbulent period on the planet of Pacifica, a eutopic, democratic
electronically mediated society, on which lands a ship from each of the
two factions in the "Pink and Blue War": the patronisingly
paternalistic Institute of Transcendental Science on the one side, and
the rabidly man-hating lesbian Femocrats on the other. Nobody suffers a
worse fate than political embarrassment, and status quo is restored by
the simple fact of Pacifican society being better than that of either of
the off-world factions.
The Void Captain's Tale
The Void Captain's Tale
(1983) takes place three or four thousand years in the future in an era
called the Second Starfaring Age, a setting Spinrad revisited in the
1985 novel Child of Fortune. The book contains elements of confession,
love story, eroticism, and horror.
Child of Fortune
Child of Fortune
(1985) deals with the adventures of a young woman, Moussa, in her
search for her true calling. In Moussa's culture, young people of her
age and class undertake a wanderjahr
during which they wander from planet to planet, free to go wherever and
do whatever they wish. While on their travels they are known as
Children of Fortune, and are treated with indulgence and kindness by
most in memory of their own wanderjahr. The Children of Fortune blend
elements of gypsies, hippies of 1960s America, and other groups and legends, including Peter Pan.
While some parents give their children a great deal of money for the
trip, Moussa's parents believe that she will learn more with a true
wanderjahr rather than a subsidized tour, so they give her nothing but a
voucher for a one-way ticket home. Moussa becomes a "ruespieler" or
storyteller, and takes the name "Wendy" in honor of Pater Pan, the man
she meets, loves, and loses during her wanderjahr. The wanderjahr bears a
superficial resemblance to the Grand Tour
which many upper-class young men undertook after finishing school, the
difference being that Children of Fortune are expected to have explored
themselves as well as the world during their travels, and to come home
knowing who they are and what place they want for themselves.
He has been credited as a writer on two feature films, The Red Siren and Druids. Universal Pictures bought the film rights to Bug Jack Barron, and Costa-Gavras was slated to direct. Harlan Ellison wrote an early version of the script, but the movie was never made.
The Martian Chronicles is a 1950 science fictionshort storyfixup by American writer Ray Bradbury, which chronicles the colonization of Mars by humans fleeing from a troubled and eventually atomically devastated Earth, and the conflict between aboriginal
Martians and the new colonists. The book lies somewhere in between a
short story collection and an episodic novel, containing stories
originally published in the late 1940s in science fiction magazines. The
stories were loosely woven together with a series of short, interstitialvignettes for publication.
Structure
The Martian Chronicles is a fixup of short stories with new text connecting them into a novel. Bradbury has credited Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio and John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath
as influences on the structure of the book. He has called it a
"half-cousin to a novel" and "a book of stories pretending to be a
novel". As such, it is similar in structure to Bradbury's short story
collection, The Illustrated Man, which also uses a thin frame story to link various unrelated short stories.
The Martian Chronicles follows a "future history"
structure. The stories, complete in themselves, come together as
episodes in a larger sequential narrative framework. The overall
structure is in three parts, punctuated by two catastrophes: the
near-extinction of the Martians and the parallel near-extinction of the
human race.
The first third (set in the period January 1999—April 2000)
details the attempts of the Earthmen to reach Mars, and the various ways
in which the Martians keep them from returning. In the crucial story,
"—And the Moon Be Still as Bright", it is revealed by the fourth
exploratory expedition that the Martians have all but perished in a
plague caused by germs brought by one of the previous expeditions. This
unexpected development sets the stage for the second act (December
2001—November 2005), in which humans from Earth colonize the deserted
planet, occasionally having contact with the few surviving Martians, but
for the most part preoccupied with making Mars a second Earth. However,
as war on Earth threatens, most of the settlers pack up and return
home. A global nuclear war
ensues, cutting off contact between Mars and Earth. The third act
(December 2005—October 2026) deals with the aftermath of the war, and
concludes with the prospect of the few surviving humans becoming the new
Martians, a prospect already foreshadowed in "—And the Moon Be Still as
Bright", and which allows the book to return to its beginning.
Publication history
This
title was first published in hardbound form in the United States in
1950 by Doubleday & Company, Inc. It has been reprinted numerous
times by many different publishers since then. A collectible first
edition in jacket is highly sought after given the importance of
Bradbury's book.
The book was published in the United Kingdom under the title The Silver Locusts
(1951), with slightly different contents. In some editions the story
"The Fire Balloons" was added, and the story "Usher II" was removed to
make room for it. In the Spanish-language version, the stories were preceded by a prologue by Argentinian writerJorge Luis Borges.
In 1979, Bantam Books published a trade paperback edition with illustrations by Ian Miller.
A 1997 edition of the book advances all the dates by 31 years
(thus running from 2030 to 2057). (This change counteracts a problem
common to near-future stories, where the passage of time overtakes the
period in which the story is set; for a list of other works that have
fallen prey to this phenomenon.)
This edition includes "The Fire Balloons", and replaces "Way in the
Middle of the Air" (a story less topical in 1997 than in 1950) with the
1952 short story "The Wilderness", dated May 2034 (equivalent to
May 2003 in the earlier chronology).
Influences
Edgar Rice Burroughs's works were key influences. In an article written shortly before his death, Bradbury said the John Carter of Mars books and Harold Foster's 1931 series of TarzanSunday comics had such an impact on his life that "The Martian Chronicles would never have happened" otherwise. In an introduction he wrote for The Martian Chronicles, Bradbury cited the Barsoom stories and Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson as literary influences.
The background of Mars shared by most of the stories, as a desert planet crisscrossed by giant canals built by an ancient civilization to bring water from the polar ice caps, is a common scenario in science fiction of the early 20th century. It stems from early telescope observations of Mars by astronomers from the 19th-century who believed they saw straight lines on the planet, the first of them being the Italian Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1877. Schiaparelli called them canali (a generic Italian term used for both natural and artificial "grooves" or "channels"),
which was popularly mistranslated into English as "canals", man-made
water channels. Based on this and other evidence, the idea that Mars was
inhabited by intelligent life was put forward by a number of prominent
scientists around the turn of the century, notably American astronomer Percival Lowell. This ignited a popular fascination with the planet which has been called "Mars fever". Planetary astronomer Carl Sagan wrote:
Mars has become a kind of mythic arena onto which we have projected our Earthly hopes and fears.
Contents
"Rocket Summer" (January 1999/2030)
The stories of the book are arranged in chronological order,
starting in January 1999, with the blasting off of the first rocket.
"Rocket Summer" is a short vignette which describes Ohio's winter
turning briefly into "summer" due to the extreme heat of the rocket's
take-off, as well as the reaction of the citizens nearby.
"Ylla" (February 1999/2030)
First published as "I'll Not Ask for Wine" in Maclean's, January 1, 1950.
The following chapter, "Ylla", moves the story to Mars,
describing the Martians as having brown skin, yellow eyes, and russet
hair. Ylla, a Martian woman trapped in an unromantic marriage, dreams of
the coming astronauts through telepathy.
Her husband, though he pretends to deny the reality of the dreams,
becomes bitterly jealous, sensing his wife's inchoate romantic feelings
for one of the astronauts. After taking his gun under the pretense of hunting, he kills astronauts Nathaniel York and "Bert" as soon as they arrive.
"The Summer Night" (August 1999/2030)
First published as "The Spring Night" in The Arkham Sampler, Winter 1948.
This short vignette tells of Martians throughout Mars who, like
Ylla, begin subconsciously picking up stray thoughts from the humans
aboard the Second Expedition's ship. As the ship approaches their
planet, the Martians begin to adopt aspects of human culture such as
playing and singing American songs, without any idea where the
inspirations are coming from.
This story tells of the "Second Expedition" to Mars. The
expedition is a group of four men. The astronauts arrive to find the
Martians to be strangely unresponsive to their presence. The one
exception to this is a group of Martians in a building who greet them
with a parade. Several of the Martians in the building claim to be from
Earth or from other planets of the solar system,
and the captain slowly realizes that the Martian gift for telepathy
allows others to view the hallucinations of the insane, and that they
have been placed in an insane asylum. The Martians they have encountered
all believed that their unusual appearance was a projected
hallucination. Because the "hallucinations" are so detailed and the captain refuses to admit he is not from Earth, Mr. Xxx, a psychiatrist,
declares him incurable and kills him. When the "imaginary" crew does
not disappear as well, Mr. Xxx shoots and kills them too. Finally, as
the "imaginary" rocket remains in existence, Mr. Xxx concludes that he
too must be crazy and shoots himself. The ship of the Second Expedition
is sold as scrap at a junkyard.
"The Taxpayer" (March 2000/2031)
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.
A man insists that he has a right to be on the next rocket to
Mars, because he is a taxpayer. He strongly insists on boarding the ship
due to the impending nuclear war on Earth. He is not allowed on the
ship and eventually gets taken away by the police.
The arrival and demise of the third group of Americans to land on
Mars is described by this story. This time the Martians are prepared
for the Earthlings. When the crew arrives, they see an idyllic small
town of the 1920s occupied by the long-lost loved ones of the
astronauts. The bewildered and happy crew members ignore their captain's
orders and disperse to join their supposed family members. The Martians
use the memories of the astronauts to lure them into their "old" homes
where they are killed in the middle of the night. The next morning,
sixteen coffins are carried from sixteen houses and are buried by
mourners who sometimes resemble humans and sometimes "something else".
The original short story was set in the 1960s and dealt with
characters nostalgic for their childhoods in the Midwestern United
States in the 1920s. In the Chronicles version, which takes place
forty years later but which still relies on 1920s nostalgia, the story
contains a brief paragraph about medical treatments that slow the aging
process, so that the characters can be traveling to Mars in the 2000s
but still remember the 1920s.
"—And the Moon Be Still as Bright" (June 2001/2032)
The next chapter opens with the men of the Fourth Expedition
gathering firewood against the cold Martian evening. The scientists have
found that all of the Martians have died of chickenpox (brought by one of the first three expeditions)—analogous to the devastation of Native American populations by smallpox.
The men, except for the archaeologist Spender and Captain Wilder,
become more boisterous. Spender loses his temper when one of his
crew-mates starts dropping empty wine bottles into a clear blue canal
and knocks him into the canal. When questioned by his captain, Spender
replies, "We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit
ourselves," and that "we Earth Men have a talent for ruining big,
beautiful things," referring to Earth. He leaves the rest of the landing party to explore Martian ruins after one crew member vomits on an ancient tile mosaic.
Spender returns to the rest of the expedition. He carries a gun
and, claiming to be the last Martian, shoots six of his crew-mates,
including one with sympathy towards the Martians from his Cherokee
ancestry. Captain Wilder approaches under a white flag and has a short
discussion with Spender about how Martians were better than us. This is
because the Martians knew how to combine religion and science, without
criticizing and fighting as we humans do. During which, the
archaeologist explains that if he manages to kill off the expedition it
may delay human colonization of the planet for a few more years,
possibly long enough that the expected nuclear war on Earth will protect
Mars from human colonization completely. Although he opposes Spender's
methods, Captain Wilder somewhat agrees with his attitude towards
colonization and wishes for him a humane death. He returns to the others
and joins them as they pursue Spender, and Wilder shoots Spender in the
chest during the fight before he has the opportunity to be killed by
anyone else. Another member of the crew named Parkhill, uses the ruined
town as target practice, so Wilder knocks his teeth out.
Many of the characters of the Fourth Expedition—Parkhill, Captain
Wilder, and Hathaway—re-appear in later stories. This is the first
story that focuses on a central motif of The Martian Chronicles:
the colonization of the Western frontier in the United States. Like
Spender, Bradbury's message is that some types of colonization are right
and others are wrong. Trying to recreate Earth is viewed as wrong, but
an approach that respects the fallen civilization that is being replaced
is right.
In some editions the two stories relating to Spender were combined as one.
"The Settlers" (August 2001/2032)
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.
In the previously mentioned version, this short story describes
the first settlers coming to Mars, the "Lonely Ones", the ones that came
to start over on the planet.
"The Green Morning" (December 2001/2032)
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.
The next several chapters describe the transformation of Mars
into another Earth. Small towns similar to those on Earth begin to grow.
In "The Green Morning", Benjamin Driscoll makes it his mission to plant
thousands of trees on the red plains to increase oxygen levels. Due to some property of the Martian soil, the trees grow into a mighty forest overnight.
"The Locusts" (February 2002/2033)
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.
This vignette concerns the swift colonization of Mars. The title
refers to the rockets and settlers which quickly spread across all of
Mars.
"Night Meeting" (August 2002/2033)
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.
This story begins with a conversation between an old man and a
young traveler, Tomás Gomez. The older man explains that he came to Mars
because he appreciates the new and novel. Even everyday things have
become amazing to him once again. He has returned full circle to his
childhood. Later, Tomás encounters a Martian named Muhe Ca. Each can see
the Mars he is accustomed to, in his own time frame, but the other
person is translucent and intangible to him and has the appearance of a
phantom. The young man sees ruins where the Martian sees a thriving
city, while the Martian sees an ocean where Tomás sees the new Earth
settlement. Neither knows if he precedes the other in time, but Bradbury
makes the point that any one civilization is ultimately fleeting.
This is the only full-length story in The Martian Chronicles that had not previously appeared in another publication.
"The Shore" (October 2002/2033)
This
story describes the rippling outward of colonization, the first wave
being loner, pioneer types, and the second, also Americans, being from
the "cabbage tenements and subways" of New York City.
"The Fire Balloons" (November 2002/2033)
First appeared as "…In This Sign" in Imagination, April 1951.
A missionary expedition of Episcopal
priests from the United States anticipates sins unknown to them on
Mars. Instead, they meet ethereal creatures glowing as blue flames in
crystal spheres, who have left behind the material world, and thus have
escaped sin.
This story appeared only in The Silver Locusts, the British edition of The Martian Chronicles,
the 1974 edition from The Heritage Press, the September 1979
illustrated trade edition from Bantam Books, the "40th Anniversary
Edition" from Doubleday Dell Publishing Group and in the 2001 Book-of-the-Month Club edition. It otherwise appeared in The Illustrated Man.
This story describes the building of a Martian town by colonists and how much it was made to resemble an average Midwestern American town. The town was said to have appeared to have been swept up by a tornado on Earth, and brought to Mars.
"The Musicians" (April 2003/2034)
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.
Several boys venture into the ruins of Martian cities. They enter
houses and play with the debris, imagining that they are on Earth
playing with the autumn leaves. They have fun playing "white xylophones"—Martian
ribcages. They play with a sense of urgency because the Firemen are due
to arrive soon, cleaning and disinfecting the ruins and destroying this
source of fun.
Two women, Janice Smith and Leonora Holmes, prepare to depart on a
rocket to Mars, to find husbands or lovers waiting for them there.
Janice muses on the terrors of space, drinks in last memories of the
Earth she will soon be leaving, and compares her situation to that of
the pioneer women of the 19th-century American frontier.
This story only appears in the 1974 edition of The Martian Chronicles by The Heritage Press, the 1979 Bantam Books illustrated trade edition, and the 1997 edition of The Martian Chronicles.
In its original form, the story was dated 2003, and this date is
consistent with the other stories. As it appears in the 1997 edition,
the date (together with all the other dates) has been shifted ahead
31 years, to May 2034.
In an unnamed Southern town, a group of white men learn that all
African Americans are planning to emigrate to Mars. Samuel Teece, a
racist white man, decries their departure as a flood of African
Americans passes his hardware store. He tries to stop one man, Belter,
from leaving due to an old debt, but others quickly take up a collection
on his behalf to pay it off. Next he tries to detain Silly, a younger
man who works for him, saying that he signed a contract and must honor
it. As Silly protests, claiming that he never signed it, one of Teece's
friends volunteers to take his place. Several of Teece's friends stand
up to him and intimidate him into letting Silly depart.
As Silly drives off, he yells to Teece, "What you goin' to do nights?" - referring to Teece's nightly activities with a gang that had terrorized and lynched
blacks in the area. The enraged Teece and a friend give chase in his
car, but soon find the road cluttered with the discarded belongings of
the rocket passengers. After they return to the hardware store, Teece
refuses to watch as the rockets lift off. Wondering how he and his
friends will spend their nights from now on, he takes a small triumph in
the fact that Silly always addressed him as "Mister" even as he was
leaving.
This episode is a depiction of racial prejudice in the United States. However, it was eliminated from the 2006 William Morrow/Harper Collins, and the 2001 DoubleDay Science Fiction reprinting of the book.
This story is about later waves of immigrants to Mars, and how
the geography of Mars is now largely named after the people from the
first four expeditions (e.g., Spender Hill, Driscoll Forest) rather than
after physical descriptions of the terrain.
"Usher II" is about censorship.
William Stendahl is a book lover who has retreated to Mars after the
government confiscated and destroyed his vast collection. On Mars, he
constructs his 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. He is assisted by
Pikes, a film aficionado and former actor whose collection was
confiscated and destroyed by the government and who was subsequently
banned from performing. When the "Moral Climate Monitors" come to visit,
Stendahl and Pikes arrange to kill each of them in ways that allude to different horror masterpieces, culminating in the murder of Inspector Garrett in a sequence reminiscent of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado".
Once Stendahl's persecutors are dead, he and Pikes watch from a
helicopter as the house crumbles and sinks into the lake as in Poe’s
short story "The Fall of the House of Usher".
At the end of this story, Poe (or Stendahl) hints that the "Moral
Climate Monitors" could have avoided these deaths if they had only read
the books they banned, since then they would have recognized what was
happening to them.
Bradbury hints at past events on Earth, set in 1975–30 years
prior to the events in "Usher II". The government sponsored a "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". Bradbury would reuse
the concept of massive government censorship (to the point of abolishing
all literature) in his book Fahrenheit 451.
In 2010, Los Angeles artist Allois, in collaboration with Bradbury, released illustrated copies of "Usher" and "Usher II".
This story also appears in the 2008 Harper Collins/ Voyager edition of "The Illustrated Man."
"The Old Ones" (August 2005/2036)
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.
A very brief prelude to the following story, describing the immigration of elderly people to Mars.
LaFarge and his wife Anna have forged a new life for themselves,
but they still miss their dead son Tom. A night thunderstorm startles
the elderly pair, who see a figure standing outside their home in the
rain.
When morning comes, "Tom" is busy helping Anna with chores.
LaFarge sees that Anna is somehow unaware of Tom's death, and after
speaking privately with him, LaFarge learns that "Tom" is a Martian with
an empathic shapeshifting ability: the Martian appears as their dead son to them.
Later that day, Anna insists on a visit to the town. "Tom" is
deathly afraid of being so close to so many people. LaFarge promises to
keep him close, but at the town they become separated. While searching
for "Tom", LaFarge hears that the Spaulding family in town has
miraculously found their lost daughter Lavinia. Desperate to avoid a
second devastating heartbreak to his wife, LaFarge stands outside
Spaulding's home and finds "Tom" now masquerading as Lavinia. He is able
to coax "Tom" to come back, and they run desperately back for their
boat to leave town. However, everyone "Tom" passes sees someone
significant to them—a lost husband, a son, a wanted criminal. The
Martian, exhausted from his constant shape-changing, spasms and dies.
"The Luggage Store" (November 2005/2036)
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.
The story of Mars and its inhabitants is continued in a
discussion between a priest and a luggage storeowner. Nuclear war is
imminent on Earth, and the priest predicts that most of the colonists
will return to help.
On Mars, former Fourth Expedition member Sam Parkhill has opened a
hot-dog stand and is expecting a huge rush of business as soon as the
next wave of settlers and workers arrives from Earth. When a lone
Martian walks in one night, Parkhill panics and kills him. Other
Martians arrive in sand ships, prompting Parkhill and his wife to flee
across the desert in their own ship. Once the Martians catch up, they
surprise Parkhill by giving him ownership of half the planet. He returns
to his hot-dog stand just in time to witness the start of the nuclear
war on Earth, which puts an end to the settler flights and his business.
"The Watchers" (November 2005/2036)
First appeared in The Martian Chronicles.
The colonists witness a nuclear war
on Earth from Mars. They immediately return out of concern for their
friends and families, buying up the luggage store owner's entire
inventory before they leave.
"The Silent Towns" (December 2005/2036)
First published in Charm, March 1949.
Everybody has left Mars to go to Earth, except Walter Gripp—a
single miner who lives in the mountains and does not hear of the
departure. At first excited by his find of an empty town, he enjoys
himself with money, food, clothes, and movies. He soon realizes he
misses human companionship. One night he hears a telephone ringing in
someone's home, and suddenly realizes that someone else is alive on
Mars. Missing the call, and several others, he sits down with a phone book of Mars and starts dialing at A.
After days of calling without answers, he starts calling hotels.
After guessing where he thinks a woman would most likely spend her time,
he calls the biggest beauty salon on Mars and is delighted when a woman
answers. They talk, but are cut off. Overcome with romantic dreams, he
drives hundreds of miles to New Texas City, only to realize that she
drove to find him on a back road. He drives back to his town, and meets
Genevieve Selsor as he pulls in.
Their meeting is the opposite of what he had hoped for in his
dreams; she is unattractive (due to her weight and pallor), foolish, and
insipid. After a sullen day, she slyly proposes marriage to him at
dinner, as they believe they are the last man and the last woman on
Mars. Gripp flees, driving across Mars to another tiny town to spend his
life happily alone, avoiding all contact with Genevieve and ignoring
any phone he hears ringing.
"The Long Years" (April 2026/2057)
First published as "Dwellers in Silence" in Maclean's, September 15, 1948.
Hathaway (the physician/archaeologist from the Fourth
Expedition), now retired, is living on Mars with his wife and children
in the hills above an old, abandoned settlement, vacated many years ago
when everyone returned to Earth at the beginning of the war there. A
gifted inventor and tinkerer, he has wired the old ghost town in the
valley below so that he can make it come alive at night with lights and
sounds as if it were still inhabited. One night, he sees a rocket
approaching Mars and sets fire to the old town to attract the attention
of those on board.
On board the rocket is his old commander, Captain Wilder (also
from the earlier stories about the Fourth Expedition), returning to Mars
after twenty years exploring the outer solar system. He and his crew
land and are met by Hathaway, now old and suffering from heart disease.
Hathaway brings the crew to his house for breakfast and introduces them
to his family. Wilder, who remembers meeting Hathaway's wife many years
earlier, remarks that she looks remarkably young, while Hathaway has
aged considerably. Wilder pales when he and one of his crew realize that
Hathaway's son, who gives his age as 23, must be at least in his
forties. Wilder sends the crewmember off to the local cemetery to check
the headstones. He returns to report that he has found the graves of
every member of the family but Hathaway.
Wilder offers to take Hathaway back to Earth, but he declines.
In the next moment, Hathaway has a heart attack and dies, begging Wilder
not to call his family to his side because they "would not understand".
Wilder then confirms that Hathaway's wife and children are actually androids, created by Hathaway after the originals died years ago.
As Wilder prepares to depart, one of the crew returns to the
house with a pistol, thinking to put an end to the androids, whose
existence seems pointless now that Hathaway is gone, but he returns
shortly, having been unable to bring himself to kill the robotic family
even knowing that they are not truly human. The rocket departs, and the
android family continues on with its meaningless routine.
"There Will Come Soft Rains" (August 4, 2026/2057)
The story concerns a household in Allendale, California, after
the nuclear war has wiped out the population. Though the family is dead,
the automated house that had taken care of the family still functions.
The reader learns a great deal about what the family was like
from how the robots continue on in their functions. Breakfast is
automatically made, clothes are laid out, voice reminders of daily
activities are called out, but no one is there. Robotic mice vacuum the
home and tidy up. As the day progresses, the rain quits, and the house
prepares lunch and opens like a flower to the warm weather. A starving
dog, apparently the family pet, whines at the door, is admitted and
dies. Outside, a vivid image is given: the family's silhouettes were
permanently burned onto the side of the house (as occurred at Hiroshima)
when they were vaporized by the nuclear explosion. That night, a storm
crashes a tree into the home, starting a fire that the house cannot
combat, as the municipal water supply has dried up and failed. By the
next morning, the entire house has collapsed except for one wall that
announces the date over and over.
The title of the story comes from a randomly selected bedtime poem called "There Will Come Soft Rains", which is an actual poem by Sara Teasdale published in 1920. In the original story in Collier's, the story takes place 35 years in the future.
A family saves a rocket that the government would have used in
the nuclear war and leaves Earth on a "fishing trip" to Mars. The family
picks a city in which to live and call home, destroying the rocket so
that they cannot return to Earth. They enter and the father burns tax
documents and other government papers in a campfire, explaining that he
is burning a misguided way of life. A map of Earth is the last thing to
be burned. Later, he offers his sons a gift in the form of their new
world. He introduces them to the Martians — their own reflections in a
canal.
The Other Martian Tales
The Martian Chronicles: The Complete Edition published by Subterranean Press (2010) contains The Other Martian Tales section:
Boucher and McComas praised Chronicles as "a poet's interpretation of future history beyond the limits of any fictional form". In his "Books" column for F&SF, Damon Knight listed The Martian Chronicles on his top-ten science fiction books of the 1950s. Algis Budrys
called it "a beautiful Bradbury collection which owes part of its charm
to the loose connecting passages", and an exception to the many
poor-quality fixups of the 1950s. L. Sprague de Camp, however, declared that Bradbury would improve "when he escapes from the influence of Hemingway and Saroyan",
placing him in "the tradition of anti-science-fiction writers [who] see
no good in the machine age". Still, de Camp acknowledged that
"[Bradbury's] stories have considerable emotional impact, and many will
love them".
Sagan listed The Martian Chronicles as among the "rare few science‐fiction novels [that] combine a standard science‐fiction theme with a deep human sensitivity".
Robert Crossley (University of Massachusetts Boston) has suggested that
the story "Way in the Middle of the Air" might be considered "the
single most incisive episode of black and white relations in science
fiction by a white author."
Adaptations
Theater
The theater debut of The Martian Chronicles
was at the Cricket Theater (The Ritz) in Northeast Minneapolis in 1976.
A musical version is being developed in New York City in 2017.
Film
MGM bought the film rights in 1960 but no film was made.
The Uzbek filmmaker Nozim To'laho'jayev made two films based on sections from the book: 1984's animated short There Will Come Soft Rains (Russian: Будет ласковый дождь) and 1987's full-length live action film Veld (Russian: Вельд), with one of the subplots based on The Martian.
The Martian Chronicles was adapted as a full-length contemporary opera by composer Daniel Levy and librettist Elizabeth Margid.
This is the only musical adaptation authorized by Bradbury himself, who
turned down Lerner and Loewe in the 1960s when they asked his
permission to make a musical based on the novel. The work received its initial readings from the Harriet Lake Festival of New Plays at the Orlando Shakespeare Theater in 2006, and was presented in workshop form in the inaugural season of the Fordham University Lincoln Center Alumni Company in 2008. The NIGHT MEETING episode was presented at Cornelia Street Cafe's ENTERTAINING SCIENCE series on June 9, 2013. The entire work was presented as a staged reading with a cast of Broadway actors at Ars Nova NYC on February 11, 2015.
Three scenes were presented as a workshop production with immersive
staging, directed by Carlos Armesto of Theatre C and conducted by
Benjamin Smoulder at Miami University, Oxford OH on September 17–19,
2015.
Radio
The Martian Chronicles was adapted for radio in the science fiction radio series Dimension X.
This truncated version contained elements of the stories "Rocket
Summer", "Ylla", "–and the Moon Be Still as Bright", "The Settlers",
"The Locusts", "The Shore", "The Off Season", "There Will Come Soft
Rains", and "The Million-Year Picnic".
"—and the Moon Be Still as Bright" and "There Will Come Soft
Rains" were also adapted for separate episodes in the same series. The
short stories "Mars Is Heaven" and "Dwellers in Silence" also appeared
as episodes of Dimension X. The latter is in a very different form from the one found in The Martian Chronicles.
A very abridged spoken word reading of "There Will Come Soft Rains" and "Usher II" was made in 1975 with Leonard Nimoy as narrator.
A BBC Radio 4 adaption, produced by Andrew Mark Sewell as an hour-long programme and starring Derek Jacobi as Captain Wilder, was broadcast on 21 June 2014 as part of the Dangerous Visions series.
The cable television series The Ray Bradbury Theater adapted some individual short stories from The Martian Chronicles including "Mars is Heaven", "Usher II", "And the Moon Be Still as Bright", "The Long Years" and "The Martian". Video releases of the series included a VHS tape entitled Ray Bradbury's Chronicles: The Martian Episodes with some editions with three episodes and others with five.
Comic books
Several of the short stories in The Martian Chronicles were adapted into graphic novel-style stories in the EC Comics magazines, including "There Will Come Soft Rains" in Weird Fantasy #17, "The Million-Year Picnic" in Weird Fantasy #21 and "The Silent Towns" in Weird Fantasy #22.
In 2011, Hill & Wang published Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: The Authorized Adaptation as a graphic novel, with art by Dennis Calero.
