The universe had been unfolding for about 10 billion years. Luckily for us, the forecast called for rain.Īs even-tempered as it grew up to be, Earth started off 4.6 billion years ago as a red-faced and hellish infant. While the ancient oceans of Venus and Mars vaporized into space, Earth kept its life-giving water. It’s that we held on to it, and that we still do. What’s exceptional about our blue marble is not that we had water. All three boasted the same remarkable feature: water. Earth, Mars, and Venus were born of the same batch of flying fireballs. Modern scientists have good evidence that Earth did not develop as the sole wet and watery orb in our solar system. But the Earth-as-exceptional-blue-marble story many of us grew up with is, in some ways, as much a product of the human imagination as the warm Mars sea of The Martian Chronicles. Life as we define it required a wet and watery planet. Everyone knows that life could not have developed without water. So often making rain the mise-en-scène for life, Bradbury was onto something. In his short story “The Long Rain,” he made rain a character all its own: “It was a hard rain, a perpetual rain, a sweating and steaming rain it was a mizzle, a downpour, a fountain, a whipping at the eyes, an undertow at the ankles it was a rain to drown all rains and the memory of rains.” It could create moods of gloom, mania, or joy. A Bradbury rain could set a gentle scene or a creepy one. And in his eighty years of writing every day, raindrops tap-tap-tapped from the typewriter keys into many a short story and every book. Hawking newspapers on a Los Angeles street corner as a teen, Bradbury never minded a late-afternoon deluge. As a boy, he had loved the summer rains of Illinois, and those that fell during family vacations in Wisconsin. It fit his melancholy like a favorite wool sweater. He created a rain-soaked Venus, too, but not because scientists then considered it a galactic swamp. On any planet, he was much more interested in the human story. Scientists viewed Mars as chokingly dry, impossibly harsh-and far too cold for rain.īradbury didn’t care to conform to the scientific views of the day. But by the time The Martian Chronicles was published in 1950, those odds had changed. Wells who borrowed from their work to give sci-fi a tantalizing authenticity-had seen Mars as Earthlike, odds-on favorite for life on a planet other than our own. In the previous century, astronomers-and writers like H. When Ray Bradbury gave Mars rain and a livable atmosphere in The Martian Chronicles, science fiction purists grumbled that it was completely implausible. One night, rain fell so marvelously upon the fourth planet from the sun that thousands of trees sprouted and grew overnight, breathing oxygen into the air. The rain on Mars was gentle, and welcome. The following is an excerpt from the book. Blending scientific analysis with thoughtful discussion of rain’s role in culture, Barnett tells the story of rain’s effect on humans, and now, humans’ effect on rain.
Her book traces the history of rain from the drops that filled the oceans to the present storms of climate change. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award for Rain: A Natural and Cultural History. Cynthia Barnett is a finalist for the PEN/E.O.
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