As settlers progress across Mars, they give places of significance American names, memorializing the former expeditions and those who gave their lives for the cause of human settlement. The Martian names, which were “names of water and air and hills […] names of snows that emptied south in stone canals to fill the empty seas” (136), are contrasted against the American names, which are “all the mechanical names and metal names from Earth” (136). After the natural spaces and towns are named, the graveyards are named next.

Once the landscape has been made “safe and certain” (136), another wave of emigrants arrives. Many are tourists, who shop for trinkets and pose for staged photographs, and others are “sophisticates,” who import from Earth the rules and regulations of their societies and infringe upon the lives of those who had originally fled Earth to escape its social structures and sociological regimes. This creates further pushback, setting up conditions for a culture clash.