Dark They Were, and Golden Eyed

Bradbury was born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920 and in high school moved with his family to Los Angeles, where he became interested in Hollywood. His first professionally published short stories appeared in the early 1940s in science fiction magazines and later in the decade in mainstream magazines like American Mercury, Harper’s, and The New Yorker. His first book was a collection of fantasy and science fiction short stories called Dark Carnival (1947), and his second, called The Martian Chronicles (1950), explored an imagined colony on Mars at the turn of the 21st century. While later famous works like Fahrenheit 451 (1953) and Dandelion Wine (1957) diverged from his interest in space exploration, it remained a topic he returned to throughout his career in both short stories and in Hollywood screenwriting.

While the Space Age proper did not begin until the Soviet Union’s launch of the Sputnik satellite in 1957, Bradbury’s short stories from the late 1940s and early 1950s reflect the cultural interest in space that preceded this breakthrough. Bradbury himself was deeply interested in advances in space exploration, befriending many of the leading astrophysicists of his day. However, Bradbury was insistent that the aim of his fiction was not to speculate about potential technology or real scientific events. Many of his stories involve events that are scientifically impossible, like the epigenetic changes experienced in “Dark They Were, and Golden-Eyed,” or suggest ideas later found to be false, such as the existence of intelligent alien life on Mars. The point, for Bradbury, was not to write about possible developments in science but instead to consider stories set in space that explore what it means to be human.