XPost: alt.usage.english, rec.arts.books, rec.arts.sf.misc   
   From: commodorejohn@gmail.com   
      
   On Mon, 2 Feb 2026 17:19:53 -0500   
   The True Melissa  wrote:   
      
   > I recall classic Mars as a desert and classic Venus as a jungle, not   
   > barren. Bradbury certainly didn't paint it as barren in "All Summer   
   > In a Day." Pasty white plants tower to the skies, and the temperature   
   > seems about like ours (it must be all that rain).   
      
   It'd be interesting to track the evolution of Mars in popular culture   
   over time, as the accuracy of our astronomical observations improved.   
   The "canals" were always a mistranslation from Schiaparelli's "canali,"   
   but I don't think the idea was conclusively debunked 'til the 1900s.   
   Nevertheless, Burroughs's Barsoom is a dying, desert world, and Welles   
   has implications of the same as the motive for his Martian invasion.   
      
   Bradbury's is interesting in this context; his Mars is a naturally   
   harsh but livable world, partially terraformed by Earth colonists   
   during their settlement phase. He wasn't the first to posit terra-   
   forming as a concept, I gather, but I wonder if anyone before him used   
   it the way he does - as a means to "rationalize" what was already a   
   scientifically dated (if not fully outmoded) popular conception for   
   literary purposes...   
      
   (Lewis's Malacandra is also in the harsh-but-livable category, with   
   scrubby but verdant river-canals and highlands with thin atmosphere   
   barely adequate for the lowland species - but he was hardly concerned   
   with scientific accuracy.)   
      
   --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05   
    * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)