The Martian Chronicles

Wilder stands in contrast to Spender, depicting a moderate path which allows for and acknowledges differences, without feeling the need to alter them to one’s taste. It is an indication of Spender’s dark charisma that by the end of “—And the Moon Be Still as Bright,” Wilder has lost his humane conviction of accepting the members of the crew for who they are and is attempting to police the behavior of Parkhill through violence. Wilder’s ability to straddle both Spender’s extremism and Biggs’ and Parkhill’s base humanity, however, situates him as a moderate, and the Chronicles seems to consider his position as an ideal response to the colonial horror it otherwise depicts.

The revelation in “The Long Years,” that Wilder has been exiled to space travel so that he will not interfere with the colonialist policy further, positions him as spanning both sympathies, that with the human effort and with the traces of the civilization which fell to that effort. Wilder is constantly depicted in action, attempting to stop Spender, police Parkhill, rescue Hathaway and Gripp, and sparing Hathaway’s robots from destruction, suggesting that human victory is less important than positive human effort, and positioning Wilder as the moral center of the whole collection. 

As one of the last vestiges of Martian life, the Martian that takes on Tom’s appearance in “The Martian” comes to stand for the failed effort of its species to survive the multi-faceted human invasion, and for the beleaguered relationship Mars itself has with the humans who have exploited its surface. Martian Tom’s death, wrenched apart by the storm of human desire which surrounds it, is an evocative image for what the human settlers have done to the planet.

Their demand that Mars resemble Earth, realized through constructing towns infused with nostalgia, is symbolized in Martian Tom’s frantic effort to resemble their loved ones, while Martian Tom’s inability to control its own shape, depicts the degraded state of the planet and the intrinsic harm that has been done to it. It is fitting that Martian Tom should die during a nostalgic town, on a night evocative of pleasurable Earth activities, with none of its own people around it. Bradbury presents its death knell as an indictment of what human nature, human effort and hope, have done to Mars.