This story by Ray Bradbury is an excerpt from his book The Martian Chronicles. It’s is a deeper and more introspective look into a common trope within Sci-Fi.
In a lot of works, it’s not rare to find a narrative that talks about colonisation in an eerily positive light; stories of pioneering humans going out into alien lands and encountering hostile creatures that they then fight and win over. In ‘And the Moon be still as bright’, the narrative is flipped, the protagonist lands on Mars to find it abandoned, why? Because of chicken pox.
He makes a note that it doesn’t feel right, that an entire society gets wiped out by a bug that doesn’t even kill human infants, and he’s right. But the chicken pox isn’t the only blight the flight team brings to Mars, a number of the crew are disrespectful and crass, annoying and loud and rude to the land they walk on and the corpses they’ve created.
The protagonist ends up killing many of the men, before himself being shot by his captain. While he dies, his message of sanctity lives on in his captain, and in the walls of the dead civilisation around him.
In this moment, the Captain and his crew make their way into the alien city. They wander around for a little, and marvel at how vast it is, how open and strange and communal. This seems to make them think about briefly, what place they’ve arrived at, and how they’re just taking it for granted. The insight doesn’t last long though, because one of the members of the team vomits on the floor, and the others start making comments about the architecture. Spender, meanwhile, is imagining what the place would look like alive, vibrant and bustling, and thinks of the streets full of martians, wandering to and fro.
Within this project I was tasked with fleshing out the martian planet through pre-visual 2D exploration, culminating in a photo-bashed key scene as the final output.
Final Render