Ray Bradbury and "The Million Year Picnic"

“’The whole darn planet belongs to us, kids. The whole darn planet.”

-“The Million Year Picnic,” The Martian Chronicles

Ray Bradbury, pg. 179

            There were a lot of quotes from this particular story in The Martian Chronicles that leapt out at me as embodying a sense of colonialist entitlement, but I decided to focus on this particular one because I felt it encapsulated the concepts Bradbury had been putting forward throughout the rest of the text; That is, the enormity of the seemingly available territory of the frontier, the sense of entitlement human ‘pioneers’ seem to have, and the paternalistic bequeathing of both that sense of entitlement and the land itself. I’m not sure Bradbury is criticizing any of these sentiments, exactly, but he does utilize them repeatedly in relation to sermonizing over the horrors of war and depicting the desire to escape from a cultural madness that is presented as all-encompassing. The Thomas Family has been preparing for years to abandon Earth in favor of Mars, which they view as a clean slate upon which to rewrite human history: “We planned this trip years ago, before you were born…” (180). They waited until Earth had truly fallen into chaos before abandoning it and nearly all of its inhabitants, condemning “Earth civilization” as unsalvageable, and William Thomas immolates the ‘things of man’ he’s brought with him as a symbolic (and symmetrical, considering the atomic fire that purged the world of humanity on Earth during the course of the story) rejection of that civilization and everything it stood for, including geographical boundaries. By claiming Mars as the property of the Thomas family, however, Thomas is perpetuating the ethos that lead to nuclear destruction on Earth. Land is to be claimed, cultures to be assimilated, and the same tired old story is continued over and over by these ‘heroic’ blonde-haired ‘idealists.’ 

-LBS 499: Nuclear Apocalypse Sf, Fall 2011

Journal #5