Mars and Malacandra: The Mythopoeic Cosmologies of Ray Bradbury and C. S. Lewis

For centuries, science fiction authors have tried to solve the logistics of a trip to Mars, and debated the wisdom of going there in the first place. This paper focuses on two fictional portrayals of Mars from the first half of the twentieth century. The first is by C. S. Lewis, who in Out of the Silent Planet (1938) imagines an ancient and thriving world with three different species that have all attained rationality. The setting of Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950), by contrast, is a ghostly and dead planet, its former, telepathic inhabitants eradicated by a mysterious illness. Despite these narratological differences, the novels resemble each other in at least two significant ways. For one, both are distinguished by an essentially mythopoeic, or myth-making, approach to Mars, in which its history and relationship with human beings are fitted into a larger cosmology that reflects their respective authors’ religious or philosophical views. In addition, both novels are pessimistic about the sort of grandiose schemes for planetary dominance envisioned by their contemporaries and modern-day successors including Elon Musk. The reckless scientism and anthropocentrism such individuals espouse, Lewis and Bradbury warn, may prove far more devastating to the human race than any disaster against which colonies in outer space might be employed as a defense.