Mars And Martians

(I have maligned CS Lewis but first let us follow through the logic of the current post.)

Wells, Lewis and Anderson: what a trio of different imaginative authors!

Mars and Martians can be detachable items. Thus, HG Wells' The War Of The Worlds and Poul Anderson's The War Of Two Worlds are about Martians but are set on Earth - because, in both cases, the Martians have invaded Earth, obviously. Anderson never set an entire novel on the surface of Mars although there are scenes on the planet in a few of his works. Readers are invited to remember which. 

When Heinlein or Anderson wrote about Martians, it must still have been scientifically possible that Martians existed? - although Isaac Asimov acknowledged in The Early Asimov that Martians, Venerians and inhabitants of other Solar planets remained a convention in sf after they had ceased to be feasible. So much has been learned so recently with probes. 

Lewis, writing Out Of The Silent Planet before World War II - thus, in a very different era - does a very good job of explaining why Mars, which had been fertile a long time ago, appears inhospitable when observed by Terrestrial astronomers although air, water and life still persist within deep crevasses - the canali. Similarly, Lewis' oceanic Venus was no more counterfactual at the time of writing than versions of the planet written by Heinlein or Anderson.

So I was wrong to put Lewis in the same category as Bradbury.