The vignette “The Summer Night” depicts the mass hysteria on Mars as its telepathic inhabitants sense the incoming human consciousnesses of the second expedition. The first human expedition is killed by a jealous Martian husband, whose wife has been excited by dreams of the captain, in “Ylla.” In “Rocket Summer,” the warmth from a departing rocket melts the snow in a small Ohio town, creating a summer day during winter.
The collection opens with an epigraph, an ostensible quote from an unnamed philosopher which positions the stories as thought experiments. This guide refers to the 2012 Simon & Schuster Paperbacks edition. Instead, he inverted the structure to show the perspective of the invaders, which allowed him to explore the failed grandeur of empire, the destructiveness of human nature, and the consequences of unbridled technology. Bradbury worked against typical stories of alien invasion in the tradition of The War of the Worlds (1898), which fed into the paranoid, persecutorial atmosphere of the Cold War. Typically, the vignettes appear between each story and contextualize the story which precedes them. The text unfolds in a series of chronicles depicting the human campaign to colonize Mars, from the earliest meeting of the humans and the Martians through to the destruction of both species.
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