Did I used to be in a class like Social/Fiction... or Social Science... or something?

We didn't have class this week, but reading Jackie's post on race in Star Wars forced me to wonder: in what sense are there actually race relations in The Martian Chronicles? The humans and the martians rarely actually come into contact with each other, and by the time widespread human colonization is happening on Mars, most of the martians have already been wiped out by disease. The first three expeditions failed, resulting in no actual cultural interaction other than either hostility or disbelief. The fourth expedition succeeded, but only because the martian civilization was absent.

The Martian Chronicles shows us little in the way of race relations. Unlike all of our previous texts, Bradbury shows alien races that are only shadows to each other. In the story Night Meeting, the martian and the human traveler pass each other in time, each unable to perceive that his own civilization is either in ruins or non-existent. One of the stories deals (none too subtly) with relations between black and white Americans. But there are no lengthy dealings between the two races.

Here the analogy with the conquest of the American Indians falls flat. Bradbury ignores the possibility of the two races attempting to coexist, forced to face each other in everyday life. He fails to address the crime of systematically driving out and destroying another people and culture. Instead we miss all of the ugly parts of cultural collision, observing two races that brush past each other in the night.