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.Ultimately, both kinds of development are stagnant; both representfailures of the earthbound imagination.Just as the bomb locks internationalrelations into a cold war, so do the gadgets lock family life into a mechanicalparody of the suburban life style.Each in its own way oppresses the imagi-nation and the freedom which that imagination represents, a freedom thatcan be reborn only on the frontier.Strength of imagination, then, becomes the key to survival on Brad-bury s frontier the ability to achieve the new perspective demanded by thenew environment.Few of Bradbury s characters are capable of this; at theend of the Chronicles, nearly all the settlers return to the dying Earth,unwilling or unable to cut the umbilical cord to the past.As the proprietorin The Luggage Store says: I know, we came up here to get away from things politics, theatom bomb, war, pressure groups, prejudice, laws I know.But 122 GARY K.WOLFEit s still home there.You wait and see.When the first bomb dropson America the people up here ll start thinking.They haven tbeen here long enough.A couple of years is all.If they d beenhere forty years, it d be different, but they got relatives downthere, and their home towns. In other words, the frontier hasn t yet taken ; most settlers are not yetready to think of themselves as Martians.When the pleas to return homearrive in appropriately frontier fashion Morse code they abandon thenew world.When asked to explain his rationale for having the settlersreturn in the face of atomic war, Bradbury replied: we had just come outof World War II, where a hell of a lot of foreigners went home to be killed.They could have stayed in the United States. A similar analogy might bemade to the number of western settlers who returned to fight in the Amer-ican Civil War, which interrupted the settlement of the West in much thesame way that atomic war interrupts the settlement of Mars.In any event,the liberating, democratizing influences of Bradbury s frontier is nevergiven a chance to develop its full potential.We are left with a few isolatedsettlements, only one of which the family in The Million-Year Picnic realizes the Martian promise of freedom.In The Highway, a story published the same year as The MartianChronicles, Bradbury describes a Mexican peasant who is puzzled when hefinds the highway beside his hut crowded with cars filled with Americansfrantically heading north.One of the Americans stops for water, and thepeasant asks the reason for the sudden migration homeward. It s come, responds the American, the atom war, the end of the world! As in TheMartian Chronicles, the Americans choose to go home to almost certain deathrather than stay in Mexico.Unimpressed by the talk of nuclear war, thepeasant returns to his plow, muttering: What do they mean, the world? What indeed? After all, the world is nothing more than what an indi-vidual s perspective makes it circumscribed by a plot of land for a Mexicanpeasant, defined as a way of life by an American in an alien land.In both The Exiles and The Martian Chronicles the end of the world is actuallythe destruction of America, of the culture that gave birth to the myth of thefrontier.With the end of this culture, Mars ceases to exist as a frontier, as theleading edge of a growing civilization.If, as Henry Nash Smith suggests,Turner s myth of the frontier which, as we have seen, is shared by Brad-bury did have its foundations in the Edenic myth of the new world, thenthe conclusion of The Martian Chronicles brings the myth full circle.In TheMillion-Year Picnic, what was once the frontier land of Mars literallybecomes the new Eden, giving birth to a new human civilization out of the The Frontier Myth in Ray Bradbury 123ashes of the old.Two civilizations have died to make this new birth possible,and we are left with the slight hope that the new one will synthesize what wasbest about the Martian and Earth societies.The frontier sensibility that hasgoverned most of the book is replaced by a utopian sensibility.We can onlyspeculate as to the society Bradbury hoped to evolve from his five lonelyMartians, staring at themselves in the rippling water of a Martian canal. KEVI N HOSKI NSONRay Bradbury s Cold War NovelsIn a discussion about the thematic content of The Martian Chronicles withinterviewer David Mogen in 1980, Ray Bradbury stated, The MartianChronicles and Fahrenheit 451 come from the same period in my life, when Iwas warning people.I was preventing futures. In this pairing of the twobooks, Bradbury suggests a deep kinship between the pieces and indicates theprobability that they are more than just successive novels in his overall bodyof work.Though the two fictions are usually read as separate entities, if readas complementary works, they provide a more comprehensive view of alarger whole.As consecutive arrivals in Bradbury s postwar publications, andin their mutual attraction to similar major themes of the cold war era, TheMartian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451 distinguish themselves as Bradbury s cold war novels. The two works are on the surface entirely different kinds of fiction.TheMartian Chronicles is a collection of twenty-six chapters (most originallypublished as short stories), written between 1944 and 1950 and linkedprimarily by their setting on the planet Mars between the years 1999 and2026.Since many of the stories were separately conceived, most of the char-acters in the finished book are contained within their individual tales and donot cross over into other chapters.And though Mars itself is in many waysthe centerpiece of the book, and its treatment by the humans is chronicled From Extrapolation 36, no.4.© 1995 by The Kent State University Press.(Originally publishedas The Martian Chronicles and Fahrenheit 451: Ray Bradbury s Cold War Novels. )125 126 KEVIN HOSKINSONover a twenty-seven-year period, there is no protagonist in the pure senseof the term, nor is there a plot common to the separate sections
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