The Martian Chronicles

A wealthy man named William Stendhal meets with Mr. Bigelow, an architect who has finished building a strange house to Stendhal’s explicit specifications, most of which are drawn from Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). Bigelow is unaware of the story of Poe due to an intellectual purge thirty years previous on Earth called the Great Fire during which all creative works of the imagination, including Stendhal’s 50,000 title library, were destroyed by political and religious groups. Stendhal is pleased with Bigelow’s work on the house (which he calls the House of Usher) and the property but is disgusted by his ignorance and angrily dismisses the man.

Stendhal is next visited by a man named Mr. Garrett, an Investigator of Moral Climates from an administrative body on Earth. Stendhal distastefully greets the man, and Garrett informs him that the “Dismantlers and Burning Crew” (142) will be there in a couple hours to demolish the House of Usher, quoting a law against books, houses, and anything “produced which in any way suggests ghosts, vampires, fairies, or any creature of the imagination” (143). The only permissible artistic works, Stendhal reveals, are those which deal in realism, such as the works of Ernest Hemingway. While they await the Dismantlers, Stendhal suggests Garrett tour the property. Garrett is impressed by the House, and the life-like robots populating it, particularly a large ape, likely modeled after the ape in the Poe story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1831). At Stendhal’s command, the ape kills Garrett.

Stendhal and his associate Pikes, a former expert at cinema special effects, prepare a robot of Garrett to send back to Moral Climates to buy themselves enough time to host a party in the House. Pikes is also aggrieved against conventional society because he is not allowed to practice his passion, the creation of monstrous special effects.

The party guests arrive and are instructed to enjoy the House, which is stocked with dozens of robots resembling characters from fiction and fairy tales. Pikes informs Stendhal that the Garret they killed was actually a robot, Stendhal predicts that the human Garrett will soon arrive. When Garret arrives, he agrees to look over the party. Garrett observes a woman strangled by an ape, her body stuffed up a chimney, but an identical woman soon appears claiming that the murdered woman was a robotic version of herself. Garrett and Stendhal witness several other murders, all of which are modelled after Poe’s stories, and each time a person claims the victim is a robotic version of themselves.

Stendhal then asks Garrett if he would like to see what Stendhal had planned for him, and Stendhal agrees. Stendhal then chains up Garret in a small chamber. Stendhal says that the murder victims were real people, and the survivors were robots. Not having read Poe’s stories, the victims were unable to predict and prevent their deaths. Stendhal and Pikes board a helicopter and watch the House collapse on itself and sink into the ground, echoing the end of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”