Ray Bradbury, "The Fire Balloons" (United States)

It’s December 6. Welcome back to the 2021 Short Story Advent Calendar—a literary globetrotting adventure featuring 25 stories from 25 different countries.

Our editor, Alberto Manguel, is providing daily commentary on each of the stories he selected for this year’s calendar.

Here he is on Ray Bradbury’s story, “The Fire Balloons”:

In the sixth century BCE, the Greek philosopher Xenophanes suggested that if cattle or horses or lions had hands and could draw and could sculpt like humans, then the horses would draw their gods like horses, and cattle like cattle. Ray Bradbury extends this notion of spiritual and physical identification by imagining a race of Martians with evanescent bodies and enlightened souls who don’t require salvation (in the Christian sense) because they are perfectly sinless. Perhaps in this story from The Martian Chronicles, in which a Christian missionary lands on Mars intent on saving souls, Bradbury wished to mirror the doubts of a few of the Christian fathers in the New World, attempting to convert indigenous peoples that proved in many cases more spiritually enlightened than their prospective saviours.

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What did you think of today's story? Use the hashtag #ssac2021 on Twitter and Instagram to check in with your fellow advent calendarians. And check back tomorrow for commentary on the next story!