125 pages • 4 hours read
Ray BradburyThe Martian Chronicles
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1950A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
“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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