The Martian Chronicles

Nostalgia is a sticky trap on Mars. Bradbury utilizes it in very specific ways throughout The Martian Chronicles, countering what is expected of nostalgic evocation. The nostalgic tone carries upward from Earth (for example, evoking in “The Rocket Summer” a warm sense of hominess), but the first evocation of nostalgia on Mars in “The Third Expedition,” is an emphatic trap. Throughout the Chronicles, nostalgia is employed with Bradbury’s trademark power, but it is a double-edged use that is best characterized by the warm boyhood spell woven over the early trek in ‘”The Musicians” before Bradbury allows the horror of their purpose to unfold.

Bradbury chooses unsympathetic perspectives to explore the worse aspects of human nature like the violent racism of Samuel Teece or the blatant misogyny of Walter Gripp yet cloaks these uncomfortable narrations with the warmth of his nostalgia so they are more tolerable. Beneath the nostalgia, Bradbury’s narrative stance is skeptical of human nature to the degree of building the work around the idea that human nature will so fundamentally destroy the species that our last hope of salvation is discarding every trace of our life and history on Earth, including, especially, the lie of nostalgia.