Back in sixth grade, back when literature assignments were from a reader that collected all these short stories, my class started “The Naming of Names” by Ray Bradbury. It’s a little odd, ever since 1963 the story was titled “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed” and the reader was definitely published after that. but I digress…
It was about the Bittering family who are among the American humans who go to live on Mars, because of nuclear war on Earth. The father feels uneasy about Mars, it’s too different, and he wants to return to Earth. However, New York City and all the spaceships are destroyed by a nuclear bomb, and the humans are stranded on Mars. Over time, the plants and the animals they brought with them change. The people also change. They are turning into Martians. The father becomes terrified, no one else is, and he tries to convince everyone to build a rocket back to Earth. Eventually, he stops resisting, and the people move into the Martian villas in the hills. Years later, American astronauts come to Mars to tell the people the war is won and they can return home. However, they are met only by Martians. The military makes plans to recolonize Mars, but the same sense of unease plagues them too.
Almost certainly, this was not the first science fiction story I read. However, it was the first that I truly enjoyed.
I cannot pinpoint exactly what it is about the story, perhaps it’s the subtlety of it all, the slow and casual shifts in the people, in the story itself. The story doesn’t seem to go anywhere with any kind of speed, and so in the same way the Earthlings become Martians. “Change. Change. Slow, deep, silent change. And isn’t that what it is up there?”
Perhaps it was the vivid description of Mars and the Earth people who colonized it, and the changes that happen to them:
The nights were full of wind that blew down the empty moonlit sea meadows past the little white chess cities lying for their twelve-thousandth year in the shadows. In the Earth Men’s settlement, the Bittering house shook with a feeling of change.
Lying abed, Mr. Bittering felt his bones shifted, shaped, melted like gold. His wife, lying beside him, was dark from many sunny afternoons. Dark she was, and golden-eyed, burnt almost black by the sun, sleeping, and the children metallic in their beds, and the wind roaring forlorn and changing through the old peach trees, the violet grass, shaking out green rose petals.
After it all, this is the story that convinced me to love science fiction. And for that it, and Ray Bradbury, always have a special place in my heart.
