125 pages 4 hours read

The Martian Chronicles

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1950

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“August 2005: The Old Ones”Chapter Summaries & Analyses

“August 2005: The Old Ones” Summary

Once Mars has been colonized by the early settlers, then the tourists and the “aromatic sophisticates” (157) who reform society into its sanitized version, the elderly population of the Earth, “the dry and crackling people” (157), travel to Mars.

“August 2005: The Old Ones” Analysis

Bradbury’s descriptions of the elderly Earthlings, as “the dried-apricot people”, “the mummy people” (157), and particularly the “dry and crackling people” (157), evoke the remains of the Martians witnessed in “The Musicians,” whose bodies had become like autumn leaves, signaling the end of human ascendancy on Mars, and the pivot of the wider narrative towards the failed extents of human colonization.

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