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Fire and Ice

The rock struck the flint with incredible force. Sparks exploded everywhere, touching dry grass and bush, glowing brightly before dieing out. The rock came down heavily again, striking the flint in a clumsy yet irrevocably powerful way. Sparks flew again, this time igniting the kindling awkwardly strewn about the ground. Orange and yellow heat sprouted, swaying timidly on the grass. The flame grew bold with the soft encouraging whisper of an ape-like creature and moved on to more vegetation, from grass to needles and from needles to wood. The timid dancing turned impish as fire was born. The hominid with the rock jumped up and down in a primitive dance celebrating his accomplishment.

The "creation" and mastery of fire was one of man's first ways to play God with the world around him. Fire was one of man's first technologies. The birth of fire and the rise of men are not wholly dissimilar. The strikes were hit and man sparked, landing in unknown lands and unclaimed places. Oftentimes he did not last long. The rock kept falling, however, and man kept on sparking. Timid at first, he spread from Africa to Europe and Asia and from Europe and Asia to North America. Man's timid gait across the world's continents turned into an impish grin as society was born. He then rose up in a collective dance in celebration of his own greatness. He was the strongest, fastest, strongest, and most intelligent being on Earth. He was unstoppable. He could even travel to other planets if he so chose. In celebrating himself, man forgot the destruction and devastation he had caused. Like the fire he had tamed so long ago, he turned what was green and beautiful into a charred wasteland devoid of life and soul. Nature retreated into the cold. The cold of winter kept men in their homes and away from their fellow brothers of the Earth. The cold of space kept men from desecrating other worlds as they had done to their own. That safety net of cold, however, was not enough to contain the explosive will of men and eventually they found themselves traversing the total opacity of space.

Though Ray Bradbury is often described as a science-fiction writer, that generalization is misleading. Science-fiction, he said, has "[t]he same attributes that characterize fiction writing in any field [...] namely, observation and truth." (Elliot 86). Gary K. Wolfe agreed with Bradbury, writing,

Bradbury is perhaps the most autobiographical of science-fiction writers, and this, too, seems anomalous: how, after all, can one construct meaningful future worlds from so much reference to the past and so little to the present? One answer, of course, is that Bradbury's science fiction is, in fact, seldom extrapolative, for the values Bradbury seeks to express are the values he associates with his own past. (Wolfe 62)

For Ray Bradbury, in his novel The Martian Chronicles, the connection between the destructive power of man's past use of technology and fire is not lost. Bradbury unceasingly warns about the dangers of technology, not only to the environment but to civilization, society, and the planet as a whole. His protests of technology have gone so far as "even to the point of refusing to drive an automobile or fly an airplane." (Wolfe 62) Donald A. Wolfheim added to that appraisal, writing, "[Ray Bradbury] distrusts science, distrusts technology, [and] fears the complexity of a world deriving its substance from these things." (Wolfheim 43) The "benefit" man gets from his machines and tools oftentimes only comes at the expense of something else, be it history, nature, or other living things. This fact has repeated itself countless times in man's long and bloody history. Just like a fire turns a forest bursting with green life into barren ashes, so does man's technology destroy indiscriminately. Nearly all of the short stories in The Martian Chronicles contain some sort of reference to heat or fire and its destructive powers, but there are several particularly poignant stories that deal directly with heat and its relation to man's destruction of good. Heat, however, is not the only temperature constantly used as a symbol relating to man. Cold is utilized throughout the novel as a symbol for nature and nature's necessity to man.

The Martian Chronicles starts off with a story titled Rocket Summer, subtly hinting from the beginning of the novel at the prevalence of technology's association with heat. The title smacks of irony when compared with the date that this "summer" occurs: January 2030. This seeming contradiction merely highlights technology's ability to wreck havoc with nature and its willingness to destroy convention and tradition. The propensity of technology to change nature in destructive ways was also demonstrated by Bradbury's description of the rocket's exhaust as "warm desert air." The rocket was lifting off in Ohio. For desert air to be in Ohio, there would have had to have been a death of something, be it a city left barren or prairie land transmuted into a lifeless shell. Such death would be catastrophic and work only to further sever the connection man had with nature.

In the opening lines of Rocket Summer, Bradbury said the many, "housewives lumber[ed] like great black bears in their furs along the icy streets." (Bradbury 1) This link of ice and cold with the nature-created black bears creates an obvious contrast with heat's association with man-made technology. Even the color of the housewives' coats help emphasize the contrast; black is the color of a dead fire, not one alive and dancing about, killing as it goes. Bradbury's diction also helped with forming early positive and negative associations by describing the bears that the housewives resembled as "great." He could have just as easily called the bears "large" or "big." If he were going for negative connotations to be drawn from them, he could said "monstrous" or "gargantuan." No, instead he chose "great," summoning up images of a noble beast worthy of dignity or-perhaps more importantly-life, something technology is not overly concerned with.

As the rocket engine fired again and again in the small Ohio town, "the icicles dropped, shattering, to melt." (Bradbury 1) The word "shattering" carries with it a strong connotation of destruction. Here again is a man-made technology destroying something produced by nature. Icicles are similar to much in nature; most people do not think about them or their importance, but they still contain within themselves a certain aspect of beauty unattainable by man. They are a tell-tale sign that the land has slipped into its natural weather-dictated cocoon. The rocket's exhaust killed that canary of the winter. The icicles' deaths exemplified the disturbance the rocket caused to Ohio's environment.

Not only did the rocket engines mercilessly destroy icicles, but "[t]he housewives shed their bear disguises" (Bradbury 1) because of the increase in temperature. When the housewives were wearing their disguises, they were in some small way connected with nature. In order to have a proper disguise, one needs not only to look like the imitation, but act and feel like one as well. Not to say the housewives would stand in the middle of a stream to catch spawning salmon any time soon, but to have any semblance of a bear as Bradbury contended they did, they would have needed some connection with the bears. Removing their disguises severed that connection they had with nature. That removal was caused by the disruption of nature's intentions. The rocket engines-man's technology-caused that severance.

After killing winter's icicles and severing the housewives' brief connections with nature, the aforementioned desert air worked in "changing the frost patterns on the windows, erasing the art work." (Bradbury 1) Now the cold does not merely have a bond with nature; cold is an art form. This comparison is surprising, as it is man who oftentimes prides himself on his ability to be artistic. Art has been lauded in certain circles as a true window into the human soul and psyche. Perhaps this is Bradbury's message, then, that man can never truly see what he has become through a technology of his own creation, but rather must look at the nature created outside of himself to see a reflection not tainted by bias or ego. If this does indeed hold true, perhaps that would explain why man as a whole is so nonchalant about raping the environment around him; he is merely ridding himself of an image, true or not, that is not the perfect likeness of what he has built himself up to be.

Perfection was on the mind of a man sitting on the porch, the morning surrounding him as the sun slowly peeked over the horizon. The land filled with blues and pinks and oranges and grays; the palette of colors contrasted each other enough to provide a smooth transition from the night's darkness. For those who have experienced the sun rising in early morning, this setting would be familiar. What a surprise, then, to have this chapter be named The Green Morning. Green is not a color normally associated with the early part of the day. This odd couple of word pairings is not without mistake. Morning is typically the coldest part of the day, as a night's slumber is sloughed off in an attempt to get prepared for the day ahead. Being a native of Illinois as Bradbury was, he could probably remember many a morning spent standing at a bus stop in the frigid cold, walking to school in knee-deep snow, or scraping frost off of a car or bike. All these are ritualistic events in a typical Illinois morning and they are not easily forgotten. Morning is also a beginning, not an end, much like nature. Nature provided the beginning of life; man's technology, in Bradbury's book, provides the end in a great ball of nuclear flames. Here again, the date plays a vital role in not only emphasizing cold's association with nature, but now with beginnings as well, further distancing itself with technology, heat, and destruction. The Green Morning takes place in December 2032. December works on several levels on connecting with the word "morning" as a beginning. December is traditionally thought of as the first of the winter tripartite of months. Oftentimes God is described as synonymous with nature; it is no accident, then, that December is also the date of His Son's birth. Though this religious reference may seem out of place among all the varying temperatures, technology, and nature, it fits quite well with all of them. "Ultimately," wrote Willis E. McNelly, "the religious theme is the end product of Bradbury's vision of man; the theme is implicit in man's nature." (McNelly 71) While I personally do not agree with McNelly's assessment that religion is implicit in man's nature, his interpretation of Bradbury's writing does merit some respect. Religion does indeed deal with man's fulfillment and satisfaction with life. Those dual pillars of humanity are also what nature and technology (and, consequently, the cold and fire representative of those two things) deal with. All this association with beginnings comes on the heels of the customary feeling of cold one gets when thinking about December. The close relationship that cold has with nature is further emphasized by this comparison with beginnings.

Air, in The Green Morning, moves into a position of importance. Benjamin Driscoll spends day after day planting seeds that he hopes will grow into trees that give life-giving air. Throughout the story, however, the air is not alone: cold is tagging right along with it. Benjamin gushed, "most of all the trees would distill an icy air for the lungs," (Bradbury 101). At the end of the story, when all the trees had finally arisen after the martian rains, Benjamin described it as, "[o]xygen, fresh, pure, green, cold oxygen [...] people would come run out through the new miracle of oxygen, sniffing, gusting in lungfuls of it, cheeks pinking with it, noses frozen with it" (Bradbury 106). The connection in these descriptions of cold, nature and life is unmistakable. People did not merely breathe the oxygen, they "gusted" it in. Normally, a gust of air is undesirable: it blows out of place carefully combed hair, it blows papers in a thousand different directions, making it impossible to retrieve them all, it causes things to bang together, making an unbearable racket. To those souls on Mars cut off from nature and overloaded with technology, a gust would have been-quite literally-a breath of fresh air.

The Green Morning did not only touch on man and his desire for nature, but also the constant conflict between fire and nature. While Benjamin sat alone next to his campfire, he noted, "[t]he fire was a ruddy, lively companion that snapped back at you, that slept close by with drowsy pink eyes warm through the chilly night." (Bradbury 101) Bradbury's word choice there set up an interesting dichotomy. The fire was a "companion," a rather familiar term, but "snapped back at you," an action more akin to a random grumpy stranger one meets on the street. Which portrayal represents the true "fire"? Man, especially in this modern world, regards technology, as Bradbury said, with companionship. Technology is the friend one wants on his side in an intramural, the one who cracks the funny jokes, and the one in the center of attention. That friend, however, hides a dark secret. Technology is a filler, a garnish, a Pringles chip: it may be flashy and pretty, but it, as Benjamin said, "doesn't satisfy." (Bradbury 102) The true face of technology is the second picture that Bradbury painted; the unfamiliar irritable stranger ready to loose its anger at any moment. Later it began to rain, having an effect on Benjamin's fire so it, "looked as though an invisible animal were dancing on it, crushing it, until it was angry smoke." (Bradbury 105) Soon after the fire was killed by that invisible animal, the trees began to grow. Only after technology's death was nature able to grow on Mars; the same holds true for Earth. Whenever the fire was lit and active on Mars, the land was barren, unable to hold satisfied human life. Upon the death of the fire, the people rejoiced, flying out of their homes to enjoy the final coming of something that could truly satiate their spirits. Their dreams were finally satisfied and they were content.

Of the many American dreams fluttering about the nation's psyche, there is perhaps none more coveted than finding someone one loves and growing old with them. Frail and fragile testaments to technology's effect on humanity, the story The Old Ones wondered,

what more natural than that, at last, the old people come to Mars, following in the trail left by the loud frontiersmen, the aromatic sophisticates, and the professional travelers and romantic lecturers in search of new grist. And so the dry and crackling people, the people who spent their time listening to their hearts and feeling their pulses and spooning syrups into their wry mouths, these people who once had taken their chair cars to California in November and their third-class steamers to Italy in April, the dried-apricot people, the mummy people, came at last to Mars. (Bradbury 182)

This chapter is poetic in its intensity, absolutely bursting with imagery of heat and technology that glares out at the reader. As with all the other stories in The Martian Chronicles, a date accompanied the title: August 2036. Even before the story has begun, the reader knows it should be hot. Bradbury then wove a web of words with the oppressive weight of summer hanging on the reader. He wrote of the "loud frontiersmen" who came "in search of grist," paving the way for the coming of the elders. The words "frontiersmen" and "grist" conjure up images of the wild west, with the hot Santa Ana winds blowing a bramble bush across a dusty trail. Bradbury does not stop there, continually pounding away with the heat imagery, calling the olds ones "dry and crackling." Reading the words makes even the reader's mouth dry as if he too were sitting on desert sands. Having fully acclimated the reader to the fact that the old ones were to be bound to heat, he then spoke of how they spent their time. "Spooning syrup into their wry mouths," does not sound particularly appealing and is actually somewhat depressing, as the old ones seem helpless. They have become obsessed with their eventual deaths, constantly "feeling their pulses," exposing the fact that their lives are not ones of quality. Even technology's greatest gift to man was not one that most would want to receive.

Bradbury referred to the old ones as "the mummy people," reminiscent of the Pyramids of Giza, the greatest stretch of human technology in the ancient world. The Egyptians are considered by many as the birthmothers of society and technology; it is not without a sense of irony that they chose to live next to the largest desert on the planet. The deserts of Earth are much like that of Bradbury's fictional Mars. Seemingly void of life, the living find a way to survive beneath the surface of man's radar. Entire ethnic groups and races of beings have grown, lived, and died on the deserts of Earth and Bradbury's Mars. Both earthly and martian desert life alike had been destroyed by man's technology; Earth and Mars bore mutual witness to irrigation, cities, suburbs, and people that encroached on what was previously there, pushing the original habitants to near obliteration. The ancient civilizations of Mars, like the alligators of the Nile, were helpless to hold back the tsunami of people, materiel, and technology rushing into their respective homes. Bringing "the mummy people" to Mars signified the final nail in the martian civilization's collective coffin. Technology's grip on Mars as a whole was complete enough for its most fragile to come.

The old ones, as Bradbury so called them, had once traveled to California and Italy on steamships and railway cars. California and Italy are both notorious for their hot weather. The canals used as transportation by the martians are similar to those in Venice and the mountains in which the martians hide after the genocide of their people are reminiscent of the mountains of northern Italy. The steamships and railway cars used by the old ones were, at their time, top-of-the-line technology, so naturally they traveled to places that bore resemblance to and suffered similar fates as Mars.

The Martian Chronicles was nearly poetic its subtle hammering away of both heat and cold throughout the "book-of-stories-pretending-to-be-a-novel" (Bradbury, x). Each word had meaning and every phrase had nuance attached to it. Heat was consistently shown to be a destructive force closely associated with man's technology. Likewise, technology and heat's work in separating man from nature and the cold associated with it were driven home. Cold formed nice company for nature, helping in contrast starkly with the heat of technology. Heat and technology continually suffered from negative word couplings while coldness benefited greatly from the positive images painted about it. Due to the fact that Bradbury's writings often draw comparisons to poetry, the possibilities of consistency in heat and cold imagery through an entire novel is next to impossible. The only possible conclusion to draw is that the imagery was, in fact, purposeful in its portrayal of heat and cold and their relations to technology and nature. Technology and nature have both been vital parts to man's history, not only affecting the modern human but stretching way back to a time before even communication was a far-off goal.

A hominid with a rock sat silently on the edge of a river. The sun was just poking up above the horizon; the chilly air barely stirred. Life itself seemed to be in a deep slumber. The ape-like creature took a deep breath, cool crisp air filling his lungs. The jubilation he had felt at making his fire had not lasted long; it burned brightly and quickly, killing itself with its fervent thirst for fuel before any use could be made of it. The loss of the fire had left the animal with an empty feeling. Sitting there then, on the bank of the river, the feeling was different. It felt serene and peaceful. The air was clear and it seemed that nature itself was peering into his soul. That did not bother the former ape, however: he had become man.

Article:Fire and Ice: An Analysis of Ray Bradbury's "The Martian Chronicles" - Synopsis

Fire and Ice

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