Ray Bradbury “August 2002: Night Meeting”

Introduction

The Martian Chronicles (TMC) of the event August 2002: Night Meeting is possibly the best known and most critically acclaimed of Bradbury's work. First published in 1950, TMC has been continuously in print, in both America and Britain, ever since. TMC has been marketed as science fiction, but it more closely fits what some critics call science fantasy. As Patrouch, a scholar of fantastic literature, argues in “Symbolic Settings in Science Fiction: H. C. wells, Ray Bradbury, Harlan Ellison,” Bradbury's Mars is “scientifically inaccurate by the science” of the 1940s; instead, it reflects the “rural, small-town Midwest of Bradbury's childhood". Bradbury makes it clear in one of his introductions that he never intended to write a scientifically accurate version of the colonization of Mars because such a vision would go out of date in a few years. Despite the implausibility of his vision, Bradbury notes in his introduction to the 1997 Avon edition that he is still regularly invited to speak at the California Institute of Technology, this shows the enduring Power of myth. Further evidence of this mythic power is the recent adaptation of TMC as a computer game. (Johnson, pp. 106-119)

About the Stories

Most of the stories in TMC are set on Mars, with a few exceptions. The first story, “Rocket Summer,” is set in Ohio when the first rocket to Mars is launched. The fifth story, “The Taxpayer,” returns to that location as Mr. Pritchard yells through the fence surrounding the Third Expedition's rocket that he wants to go to Mars, fearing an atomic war and other ills of Earth. Both “The Fire Balloons” and “The Wilderness” (added to the revised edition) and “way in the Middle of the Air” (removed from the revised edition) begins on Earth, but describes groups leaving to colonize Mars (specifically, the Episcopal Fathers; women engaged to, or hoping to marry, men on Mars; and African Americans in the South). Otherwise, no stories are set on Earth until the twenty-sixth, which describes what happens to an electronically controlled house after the atomic war. With the exception of this story, each story with an Earth setting shows characters who want to go to Mars.

Narration Point of View

August 2002: Night Meeting is the story which is told in the third-person, limited omniscient point of view. This narrative perspective describes not only the actions and speech of all characters but can also report the feelings and thoughts of selected “Point of view” characters. In The Martian Chronicles the stories tend to have a single point of view character, focusing attention and empathy on that character and showing readers events through this individual's perceptions and beliefs.

August 2002: Night Meeting is written in third-person objective, or “fly on the wall,” perspective, which places the narrative focus on exterior events, without reference to any character's feelings or emotions. Through the use of these multiple narrative perspectives, Bradbury presents a complex and multi-layered view of humans colonizing Mars.

Advantages and Disadvantages of Narration

Advantages

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