Sci vs Fi

Red Planet vs Red Mars

--- Forty-three years separate these two Mars novels, but the real distance between them is a single afternoon. On July 14, 1965, Mariner 4 spent twenty-five minutes photographing the Martian surface and beamed back twenty-one images that ended the Lowell era. No canals. No engineered geometry. An atmosphere less than one percent of Earth's. The Mars that Robert A. Heinlein had imagined in 1949 was suddenly fiction in a way it had not been when he wrote it.…