make the setting and the characters alien and strange, here we can identify some
specific "exotic" touches.
The Summer Night.
This tale is linking similar in theme
to “Ylla”.
She Walks in Beauty
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was written by Lord Byron in 1815 as a deliberate contrast to the tradition
praising only "fair" that is, blonde, light-skinned women as beautiful. Here
Bradbury highlighted the beauty of the Martian woman Ylla who absolutely
does not fit this description of stereotyped beautiful woman on the Earth. She
is dark-skinned and golden-eyed, but every step she took is described as the
goddess walk. The author breaks the stereotype, amazingly plays on the
contrasts between two different nations, if second could possibly exist. On the
other hand the problems which were discussed in this part of the novel are still
similar to ours. The Earth people are able to love, to hate, to betray, to feel
sorry then... This sad story could be a nice metaphor to our own real life. The
third story is about us, normal people which is named
The Earth Men.
In this
section Bradbury works against the standard expectations of a “first contact”
story, belief in telepathy which is direct mind-to-mind communication of
thoughts has little or no scientific basis, but it is a staple of science fiction
because it makes possible interesting plots and because it solves the knotty
problem of how alien races can communicate with each other. The main
problem here is the skeptical attitude, cold mind and chilly reception of the
Martians; that prevents the Martians from realizing that the men were really
from Earth. In the previous stories the Martians had no problem in perceiving
that the thoughts invading their minds were alien; in this case aliens viewed
the earth men as manifestations of their own minds because they looked ill and
were afraid to catch any harmful mental disease. The Martians in
The Earth
Men
seem to have acted out of confusion rather than malice.
In
The Third Expedition
Bradbury nostalgically evokes his early 20th- century
Midwestern small-town upbringing in many stories, notably those collected in
Dandelion Wine.
Yet for all its sentimental appeal, he also repeatedly uses the
setting for the evocation of nightmares. Here he
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portrays America which by 1950 was already vanishing and would be quite
unlike the background familiar to any probable astronaut young enough to be
sent to Mars in the year 2000. Because we are reading this story long after it
was written, this incongruity strikes us more forcefully than it would have
struck those who first read it, for they shared Bradbury's nostalgic memory.
The music mentioned was popular during the first two decades of that century.
When this story was first published, it was titled "Mars is Heaven." In
comparison to these Martians we can see an obvious distinction, in
The Earth
Men
people were just indifferent to the earth people, however, in this situation
people looked cheerful and nice “relatives” at first until the period when earth
