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Ray BradburyA 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.
Summary
“January 1999: Rocket Summer”
“February 1999: Ylla”
“August 1999: The Summer Night”
“August 1999: The Earth Men”
“March 2000: The Taxpayer”
“April 2000: The Third Expedition”
“June 2001: —And the Moon Be Still as Bright”
“August 2001: The Settlers”
“December 2001: The Green Morning”
“February 2002: The Locusts”
“August 2002: Night Meeting”
“October 2002: The Shore”
“February 2003: Interim”
“April 2003: The Musicians”
“June 2003: Way in the Middle Air”
“2004-2005: The Naming of Names”
“April 2005: Usher II”
“August 2005: The Old Ones”
“September 2005: The Martian”
“November 2005: The Luggage Store”
“November 2005: The Off Season”
“November 2005: The Watchers”
“December 2005: The Silent Towns”
“April 2026: The Long Years”
“August 2026: There Will Come Soft Rains”
“October 2026: The Million-Year Picnic”
Character Analysis
Themes
Symbols & Motifs
Important Quotes
Essay Topics
Chapter Summaries & Analyses
The Fourth Expedition lands on Mars in the middle of a cold night. Jeff Spender, the archaeologist, collects scattered wood and starts a small fire while Captain Wilder, Hathaway, and Sam Parkhill—who will all reappear in later stories—explore the landing zone on the “dead, dreaming world” (63). Other crew members question why Spender isn’t using the chemical fire from the ship, but Spender refuses to answer. Instead, he thinks, “it would be a kind of imported blasphemy” (64). The rest of the crew is raucous in their landing, celebratory after surviving the long space voyage.
A secondary rocket lands after an exploratory fly-over and reports that most Martian cities appear to have been abandoned for centuries but several bear fresh Martian corpses dead from chicken pox brought by the previous expeditions. The disease “burnt them black and dried them out to brittle flakes” (66).
Spender grows increasingly annoyed with the crass celebration of the rest of the crew, and the evening culminates with him punching a man named Biggs who is tossing empty bottles into a Martian canal. Captain Wilder chastises Spender and fines him but indicates that he shares Spender’s sympathies with the vanished Martian culture.
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