Zero Hour

Foreshadowing is a literary device in which the author plants warnings of various levels of subtlety throughout the text, suggesting to readers what might come next. Every time that Mink and the other children reference the Invasion, they’re telling the reader exactly what is going to happen, down to a chilling level of specificity: “They’re going to let us run the world. Well, not just us, but the kids over in the next block, too. I might be queen” (Paragraph 104). The children are direct about what is going to happen; the adults simply don’t believe them. As a result, the adults’ moments of dismissal also serve as foreshadowing. Each time Mrs. Morris blithely shakes her head or smiles at what an imagination Mink has, the adults’ ignorance is reinforced to the reader, building up to the moment when their false ideas about the world come crashing down.

Allusion is a literary device in which the author references other texts, common knowledge, or popular culture. In “Zero Hour,” as in many of his other works, Bradbury alludes to tropes and themes that were popular in the broader realm of mid-20th-century science fiction. The most direct allusion is the idea of the aliens as “Martians.” The first popular alien-invasion narrative was H. G. Wells’s novel The War of the Worlds. Serialized in Cosmopolitan magazine in 1898 and later famously performed on CBS radio in 1938 (convincing some listeners that an alien invasion was actually taking place), Wells’s novel became so influential—spawning countless other fictional Martians—that for much of the 20th century, to mention an alien was, in the minds of many people, to mention a Martian. In “Zero Hour,” Mink specifically states that Drill and the other invading aliens are not from Mars, but they are nonetheless referred to multiple times as Martians—an ironic reference to this trope’s enduring hold on the popular imagination.