Science Fiction & Fantasy class essays: Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles

Science fiction and fantasy stories are always placed together, and with good reason. Fantasy uses magic and myth to explain or drive its stories along, while science fiction uses science. To me, fantasy is dreaming about the past, back when things were shadowy, mysterious, holy, when there were any number of gods and spirits and fey folk. Science fiction is dreaming about the future, when technology makes all kinds of things possible and the limit has blasted past the sky. However, science fiction is sometimes only fantasy with a light dusting of science, mythology set in space. Stories like The Martian Chronicles blur the line between the two and act as a sort of transition.

Ray Bradbury posits in his introduction to The Martian Chronicles that his stories are "pure myth", which lends to them staying power: "If it had been practical technologically efficient science fiction, it would have long since fallen to rust by the road. But since it is a self-separating fable, even the most deeply rooted physicists at Cal-Tech accept breathing the fraudulent oxygen atmosphere I have loosed on Mars. [...] Myth, seen in mirrors, incapable of being touched, stays on."

In "And the Moon Be Still As Bright", Spender says of the Martians, "They blended religion and art and science because, at base, science is no more than an investigation of a miracle we can never explain, and art is an interpretation of that miracle." Stories are literature and literature is art. No matter the setting, we tell ourselves and each other stories, reaching toward the miracle, trying to explain it and capture it and understand it better. Within that miracle lies the key to who we are.