This is a favorite book of mine which I revisit every few years, and in light of reports about Trump considering selling off part of Yosemite to a private developer, not to mention the "Lake America" debacle, the short story "—And the Moon Be Still as Bright" felt especially relevant and emotional to read. In general, I've found Bradbury's works to be enduringly prescient, though often in regrettable ways.
"'They're all here. All the things which had uses. All the mountains which had names. And we'll never be able to use them without feeling uncomfortable. And somehow the mountains will never sound right to us; we'll give them new names, but the old names are there, somewhere in time, and the mountains were shaped and seen under those names.
The names we'll give to the canals and mountains and cities will fall like so much water on the back of a mallard. No matter how we touch Mars, we'll never touch it. And then we'll get mad at it, and you know what we'll do? We'll rip it up, rip the skin off, and change it to fit ourselves.'
'We won't ruin Mars,' said the captain. 'It's too big and too good.'
'You think not? We Earth Men have a talent for ruining big, beautiful things. The only reason we didn't set up hot-dog stands in the midst of the Egyptian temple of Karnak is because it was out of the way and served no large commercial purpose. And Egypt is a small part of Earth.
But here, this whole thing is ancient and different, and we have to set down somewhere and start fouling it up. We'll call the canal the Rockefeller Canal and the mountain King George Mountain and the sea the Dupont sea, and there'll be Roosevelt and Lincoln and Coolidge cities and it won't ever be right, when there are the proper names for these places.'"
Additionally, the penultimate story, and my personal favorite, "There Will Come Soft Rains" is set during a future post-apocalyptic August of 2026 (the book was published in 1950), so that was another stirring coincidence/parallel of sorts.
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