Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed

Closely related to the question of naming is the interest in colonization and how aspects of history repeat themselves. The settlers of Mars replicate their lives on Earth, at least for a time, building a village in an American style, waking up to alarm clocks, eating breakfast, and going to work. Harry participates in this as a kind of civilizational project, saying that these are “colonial days all over again” and looking forward to a day when there will be a million Earth people on Mars (632). He considers it lucky that there are no Martians there to “resent [the settlers’] invasion” (632), evoking the unrealized possibility of a violent encounter. Harry views the Earthmen’s presence on Mars not merely as a refuge from nuclear war but also as an exportation of the Western lifestyle to other planets, the same way that European colonial projects spread a way of life across the North American continent and elsewhere.

However, the eventual dissolution of the settlers’ way of life over the course of the story questions the value, or at least the viability, of the colonial enterprise. When rockets from Earth return at the end of the story, the captain expresses a desire to create “new settlements. Mining sites, minerals to be looked for. Bacteriological specimens taken” (645)—goals in line with historical colonialism, which frequently involved both the establishment of settlements and the extraction of natural resources. However, his ambitions are tempered by his lieutenant staring off into the distance, seemingly bewitched by the foreign environment of Mars that has so changed the Earth settlers. The implication is that the captain’s lofty goals will similarly be laid waste on this strange planet. Whether the story regards this as a good thing is less clear. The assimilation of the settlers into an “indigenous” lifestyle—complete with a physical shift away from whiteness—may reflect colonialist anxieties about the fragility of their culture and race when transplanted abroad. On the other hand, the story takes place against the backdrop of nuclear war, while the “Martians” (i.e., the assimilated settlers) strike the military observers as “surprisingly peaceful.” This juxtaposition at the very least raises questions about whether the colonizers’ culture was worth preserving, tied as it was to mass slaughter and environmental destruction.

More to the point, the story suggests that the rise and fall of civilizations is a mere matter of course—not good or bad, but comparable to the natural processes the story depicts, like fossilization. Bradbury likens the ruins of the ancient Martian civilization around the settler village to “little white chess cities lying for their twelve-thousandth year in the shallows” (638). The description of grand cities made “little” over this large span of time hearkens to Harry’s response when news comes of the bomb hitting New York. Thinking of what had been a web of space travel originating from Earth, he now thinks of “the web gone, the rockets lying in jigsaw heaps of molten girder and unsnaked wire” (634). The similarity between this image and the ruined Martian cities creates a connection between the two fallen civilizations, further questioning such projects’ ability to achieve enduring stability and painting all history as a series of collapses of grand designs.