RIDDLE ME A MARTIAN RIDDLE
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A Riddle: What walks on two legs, uses two arms, talks like a human, acts like a human, kills humans, replaces humans, wants to be accepted and loved by a human?
Answer: A Martian!
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A Riddle: What walks on two legs, uses two arms, talks like a human, acts like an animal except that's unfair to animals, kills others of its kind, wages war on its own kind, and destroys its own planet?
Answer: A Human!
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A Riddle: What is built like a succession of linked stories, feels at times like a play by Brecht, feels at times like a mournful and elegiac ode to the dying of small towns, is a wise tale of human nature, is written with melancholy and sighs, is quietly sinister, is gently tragic, yet is also a science fiction novel?
Answer: The Martian Chronicles!
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A Riddle: What is a ball of blue fire, a transcended entity, a being that lives in God's grace, a model of wisdom and goodness, and a terrifying symbol of the unknowable? What is meek and shall inherit their earth - but has lost the inclination?
Answer: A Martian!
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A Riddle: What should have stayed on its own planet? What does not belong on Mars? What persists in persisting? What flees from home? What destroys that home? What flees back to that destruction? What eradicates much of what it comes into contact? What is a hopeless fool? What has a little - just a little - hope for it yet?
Answer: A Human!
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A Riddle: What is science fiction as parable? What creates a series of haunting and haunted tableaux onto which we can project our own desires and fears? What transcends genre trappings? What is a landscape of forgotten plans and failed goals? What is like a waking dream? What is a journey that begins in death and ends with a small, fragile chance that all is not lost? What is like tears painted on a page? What is witty and sardonic and tender and angry and, finally, full of its own strange and painfully human soulfulness?
Answer: The Martian Chronicles!
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