The Martian Chronicles

A subtler yet more enduring conquering occurs when the dominant language is impressed across the land. The hills and forests and mountains, all named for members of previous expeditions, are fully taken from their indigenous inhabitants when they bear the names of their conquerors. Those previous, are rendered silent, voiceless in future generations. The choices of names betray the values of both species. The Martian names are drawn from the land and operate in harmony with it while the humans choose self-glorying names, meant to declare the victorious efforts of human occupation. That a hill is named after Jeff Spender, the archaeologist in “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” is kind of cultural dramatic irony, for he predicted this very behavior with absolute derision.

The vignette grows even darker at the end with the intrusion of Earth authorities, their red tape likened to a weed brought to Mars to flourish. The exact sort of governmental intervention that the early settlers left Earth to avoid has now claimed territory on Mars, and the imperial nature of the colonization grows starker. Socially enforced conformities and government censorship of the arts were antithetical to Bradbury’s beliefs, and he allows them into his work to display the corrosiveness of the colonialist enterprise, the close-minded practices which doom it to inevitably crumble from within.