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125 pages 4 hours read

Ray Bradbury

The Martian Chronicles

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1950

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“August 1999: The Summer Night”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“August 1999: The Summer Night” Summary

The night before the arrival of the Second Expedition of humans from Earth, Martian consciousnesses are unsettled by an onslaught of human songs, poems, and nursery rhymes. A singer finds her performance interrupted after she sings lines from the Lord Byron poem “She Walks in Beauty,” alarming the other Martians, who flee to their homes while similar occurrences happen “all around the nervous towns of Mars” (19). Children run in the street, singing the morose final lines of “Old Mother Hubbard,” though they do not understand the language. Throughout the night, women awake, screaming, after their dreams assure them that “‘Something terrible will happen in the morning” (20). As morning breaks, a night watchman begins to sing.

“August 1999: The Summer Night” Analysis

While “Ylla” suggests that only one Martian woman experiences prophetic dreams of the coming humans, this story depicts the human influence as widening across Mars, suggesting that even the brief first contact between humans and Martians has caused an infection to spread. Now, only six months later, all the women and children of Mars appear to have developed a sensitivity to human proximity. Feeding though the channels of natural Martian telepathy, the incoming human consciousnesses prove too oppressive and cause Martian pastimes to disintegrate, fundamentally shifting their culture, and leading to the prophetic conclusion that the humans are not a positive addition to Mars but rather “something terrible” (20).

Moving from Ylla’s positive acceptance of the First Expedition to the darkness and terror of the Martian reception of the Second Expedition, Bradbury initiates an emotional shift in regard to the continuing human efforts to establish a colony on Mars. The initial song which breaks through, the Byron poem, is reflective of the passage at the beginning of the vignette, in that it is richly suggestive of splendor and hope and calm benevolent skies. However, the second allusion, to the barren sparseness of Old Mother Hubbard’s cupboard, underscores the cataclysmic change which is bearing down on the Martians.

The watchman starting to sing at the end of the vignette implies that the human infection has now crossed from women and children to men as well, swallowing the whole culture.

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