I've been reading the anthology "Mars Probes" over the past couple of weeks and found a decent number of entertaining stories in it. Mars, due to its proximity to Earth and the whole canals thing, has always had a certain mystique, and it was interesting how many authors chose to bypass the cold, hard realities of Mars as we know it today (which have gotten even colder and harder since the book was written, with the discovery of megadoses of radiation on the surface), in favor of the Mars of Burroughs, Brackett and Bradbury, as Moorcock puts it in the author bios. Moorcock, in fact, goes so far as to say that the Mars depicted in the those classic stories turns out to be the real one, and his own story is subtitled an homage to Leigh Brackett, although its just as much as pastiche. Or maybe it was Gene Wolfe who said that, I don't have the book in front of me, his story is also a Burroughs flashback. My favorites stories in the book are probably the ones that diverged from that theme the most, in different directions. Ian Macdonald's "The Old Cosmonaut and the Construction Worker Dream of Mars" is a typically lyrical, evocative, poignant story from that author, delving a little into the "might-have-beens" of Mars missions as attempted by the former Soviet Union. Alastair Reynolds' story, "The Real Story", shows a journalist assigned to write the memoirs of a former Mars astronaut who is near death, and weighs in on the perception of space exploration vs. the reality, and what people really want to hear. My other favorite was "The War of the Worldviews" by James Morrow, written before 9/11 but depicting a New York City devestated by an ongoing war between the six-inch high inhabitants of the Martian moons over the existence of God. I still think he's underappreciated (Morrow, that is).