MEN ON MARS
THE, SILVER LOCUSTS, by Ray Bradbury; Rupert Hart Davis. English price, 12/6. THE SILVER LOCUSTS purports to give a series of vignettes of events occurring in ‘the years following 1999 A.D., when travel begins from the earth to Mars. The "silver locusts" are the gleaming rockets that bring disaster and the inhabitants of earth to the Martians. There is some superficial resemblance between Mr. Bradbury’s work and the fantasies of C. S. Lewis, but Mr. Bradbury, though anxious to point a moral, seems less restrictively pious than Mr. Lewis. He enters with immense gusto into the details of his weirdnesses and shows a very rich visual imagination. The central theme of the reaction of the visitors from earth to the remnants of the immensely old and sophisticated Martian civilisation is worked out energetically and economically. "The next afternoon Parkhill did some target practice in one of the dead cities, shooting out the crystal windows and blowing the tops off the fragile towers. The captain caught Parkhill and knocked his teeth out." The New Statesman and Nation found The Silver Locusts very bad and expressed dismay that it had been praised by Christopher Isherwood, The present reviewer takes his humble stand behind Mr. Isherwood in this matter.
Hubert
Witheford
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New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 669, 2 May 1952, Page 13
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211MEN ON MARS New Zealand Listener, Volume 26, Issue 669, 2 May 1952, Page 13
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Copyright in the work University Entrance by Janet Frame (credited as J.F., 22 March 1946, page 18), is owned by the Janet Frame Literary Trust. The National Library has been granted permission to digitise this article and make it available online as part of this digitised version of the New Zealand Listener. You can search, browse, and print this article for research and personal study only. Permission must be obtained from the Janet Frame Literary Trust for any other use.
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