The Martian Chronicles

The different is the other, and the recognition of that difference is the awareness of the alterity: the discovery of the feeling that is supplied by symbols of culture in order to say that not everything is what I am used to and not everyone is like me.
Man and woman, white and black, master and servant, civilized and Indian ... The other is a different and, therefore, attracts and frightens. You need to tame it, and then we must tame the domineering spirit’s ghost: translate it, explain it, or reduce it. So the other must be deciphered somehow, but we have to use OUR standards. Let the philosophers and scientists try to define their life and culture, so they can be taken care of.
In “The Martian Chronicles”, the common thread is the relation between the different, in that particular case, the Martians and the men from Earth. But these two groups allude to the reaction the Europeans might have had when they met the American Indians.
Man and woman, white and black, master and servant, civilized and Indian (who were, from the European perspective, just wildlings), martian or from Earth ... The other is a different and, therefore, attracts and frightens.The human being needs to feel safe and that is why he tries to order and catalog a world that seems obtuse to him. In order to do that, the "civilized" judges the other group based on his "civilized" values. In “The Earth Men”, for example, one group judges the other one crazy by their standards.
In order to understand somebody else’s culture, you have to use the ones you had already previously known. And that is what both the Martians and the terrestrials do when they meet.
There is an implied critic when is mentioned the reactions of the humans towards the Martians (especially in “And the Moon Be Still as Bright”). When it is said that it is a shame that such an advanced civilization as the one that used to inhabit Mars would perish from chickenpox, it infers that if it was a rudimentary group, there would be no problem. That echoes the destruction of the Incas, Mayas, and Aztecs civilizations. But the past mirrors the present and reflects the problems to see the other (from a different country, or religion…) not as martian.