Silent Towns

green_trilobite is re-watching the tv mini-series of The Martian Chronicles. We've just reached the part I always have trouble buying: when news arrives that Earth is on the verge of a global nuclear war, the response of all the Martian colonists, except for a handful of individuals scattered across the planet, is to drop everything and go back there.

I can see a few people hoping against hope to retrieve loved ones, or at least die with them, but the plot of the latter half of the book is dependent on *everybody*, including families with children, leaving a habitable colony for a dangerous situation. It's like trying to believe a story in which the entire Lower East Side, midway through the 1930s, decides to pack up and go to Europe.