Venus in fiction

Works of fiction about the planet Venus have been written since before the 19th century. Its impenetrable cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface; as it is very similar in size to Earth but closer to the Sun, the planet was often depicted as warmer but still habitable by humans. Depictions of Venus as a lush, verdant paradise, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s, when science had revealed some aspects of Venus but not yet the harsh nature of its surface conditions. From the mid-20th century on, as the reality of Venus as a hostile, toxic inferno became known, the early tropes of adventures in Venusian tropics gave way to more realistic stories of the planet's colonization and terraforming.

For the goddess Venus in fiction, see Venus (mythology) § Mythology and literature.
Planet Stories, winter 1939, featuring "Gold Amazons of Venus"

Writers who set their stories on Venus included many of the early major writers of science fiction, such as Isaac Asimov, Edgar Rice Burroughs, Robert A. Heinlein, Otis Adelbert Kline, Henry Kuttner, C. S. Lewis, Frederik Pohl, Clifford D. Simak and Olaf Stapledon. More modern treatments can be found in the works of authors such as Ben Bova and Sarah Zettel.

Early depictions: exotic tropics

Early works of fiction touching on the planet Venus include Athanasius Kircher's Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656) and Emanuel Swedenborg's The Earths in Our Solar System (1758).[1] In time, Venus became one of the most popular planets in early science fiction, perhaps second only to Mars.[1][2]: 12 

The first science fiction novel specifically focused on Venus was Achille Eyraud's Voyage à Venus (Voyage to Venus, 1865).[1] Venus was featured in other early science fiction novels such as the anonymous Paul Aermont's A Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Paul Aermont among the Planets (1873), Gustavus W. Pope’s Romances of the Planets, no 2: Journey to Venus (1895), Fred T. Jane's To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), John Munro's A Trip to Venus (1897), Garrett Serviss' A Columbus of Space (1909), Garrett Smith's Between Worlds (1919), and Stanton A Coblentz's The Blue Barbarians (1931). It was popular enough for entire series to be set there, such as Ralph Milne Farley's that began with The Radio Man (1924), Otis Adelbert Kline's trilogy opening with The Planet of Peril (1929), and Edgar Rice Burroughs' series beginning with Pirates of Venus (1932), set on a fictionalized version of Venus known as Amtor.[1][3]: 547 [4]: 860 [5][6]: xiii–xiv  Venus was also often a setting for short stories in early science fiction magazines. The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction lists in its entry on Venus notable stories penned by John W Campbell Jr ("Solarite", 1930), Clark Ashton Smith ("The Immeasurable Horror", 1931), John Wyndham ("The Venus Adventure", 1932), Stanley G. Weinbaum ("The Lotus Eaters" and "Parasite Planet", 1935), Clifford D. Simak ("Hunger Death", 1931), Lester del Rey ("The Luck of Ignatz", 1939) and Robert A. Heinlein ("Logic of Empire", 1941).[1]

Many of such works were recognized as part of the planetary romance or "sword-and-planet" genre, featuring Venus as one of the places in the Solar System were humans from Earth would be able to travel to and engage in various adventures, from swordfights and dinosaur hunts to romances with alien princesses.[6]: xiii, xv  In addition to Kline and Burrough, prolific writers of stories in this style included C. L. Moore ("Black Thirst", 1934) and Leigh Brackett ("Enchantress of Venus", 1949).[6]: xiv  More serious, solemn treatments included Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930), John W. Campbell Jr.'s "The Black Star Passes" (1930), Heinlein's ("Logic of Empire", 1941 and later works), C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (1943), Henry Kuttner's Fury (1947), A. E. van Vogt's The World of Null-A (1949), Jack Williamson's Seetee series (1949-1951), Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth's novel The Space Merchants (1953) and Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954).[4]: 860 

Early astronomers could see only the vast Venusian cloud cover, leading scholars as well as many writers to speculate that Venus was covered by a gigantic ocean, was a tropical world like prehistoric Earth, or was a desert.[2]: 12 [7]: 43 [8]: 131 [9][10] Many early portrayals of Venus suggest the planet's lifeforms and scenery, with the added twist that, as Venus orbits closer than Earth to the Sun, it may resemble a younger version of Earth.[1][3]: 547 [4]: 860 

A number of the earliest descriptions painted Venus as a beautiful paradisiac planet, a view that was only in time modified by scientific findings.[3]: 547  As observed by Carl Sagan in 1978: "A clement twilight zone on a synchronously rotating Mercury, a swamp‐and‐jungle Venus, and a canal‐infested Mars, while all classic science fiction devices, are all, in fact, based upon earlier misapprehensions by planetary scientists."[11]

Jungle and swamp
Artist's impression of ruins in an alien jungle, a common background in many early stories of adventure on Venus.

Many writers and scientists thought Venus would have land masses, and a humid climate.[8]: 131 [3]: 547  Early treatments of a Venus covered in swamps and jungles are found in Gustavus W. Pope’s Romances of the Planets, no 2: Journey to Venus (1895), Fred T. Jane’s To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), and Maurice Baring’s ‘‘Venus’’ (1909).[3]: 547  In 1918, Nobel-laureate chemist Svante Arrhenius, concluding that Venus' cloud cover must be water vapor, declared in The Destinies of the Stars that "A very great part of the surface of Venus is no doubt covered with swamps" and compared Venus' humidity to the Congo's tropical rain forests. Because of what he assumed to be uniform climatic conditions all over the planet, he supposed that the Venusian lifeforms lived under very stable conditions and did not have to adapt to changing environments as did life on Earth. Due to the absence of selective pressure, Arrhenius supposed, it much of its land mass would resemble ancient swampland found in the Earth's past. Over the next few decades, descriptions of Venus often made reference to Earth in the Carboniferous period, and Venus thus became, until the early 1960s, a place for science fiction writers to put all manner of extraordinary lifeforms, from quasi-dinosaurs to intelligent carnivorous plants.[9][10][6]: xii 

The portrayal of Venusian landscape as dominated by jungles and swamps recurred in other works of fiction and became "a staple of pulp science fiction imagery".[3]: 547  Several of Weinbaum's short stories from the 1930s are set in Venusian jungles.[2]: 12  Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote several novels set on the planet's swampy landscapes, beginning with Pirates of Venus and followed by several sequels.[12]: 64–65 [4]: 860  Kline's trilogy likewise is set on swampy Venus.[4]: 860  Robert A. Heinlein's "The Green Hills of Earth" (1947), Space Cadet (1948), Between Planets (1951) and Podkayne of Mars (1963) portray the fungal, fetid Venusian swamps.[1][4]: 860  Venusian jungles are also featured in Ray Bradbury's short stories "The Long Rain" (1950) and "All Summer in a Day" (1954), which depicted Venus as a habitable planet with incessant rain.[1][13] In Germany, the Perry Rhodan novels used the vision of Venus as a jungle world.[14]

Ocean

Others envisioned Venus as similar to Panthalassa (All-Ocean), with perhaps a few islands. Large land masses were thought impossible due to the assumption that they would have generated atmospheric updrafts that would have broken up the planet's solid cloud layer.[8]: 131 [3]: 547 

An early treatment of an oceanic Venus is Harl Vincent’s ‘‘Venus Liberated’’ (1929).[3]: 548  In Olaf Stapledon’s 1930 science fiction novel Last and First Men, humanity is forced to migrate to Venus, hundreds of millions of years in the future, when astronomical calculations show that the Moon will soon spiral down to crash into Earth. Stapledon describes a Venus, populated by aquatic descendants of Homo sapiens, as mostly oceanic, with fierce tropical storms.[1][15] Works such as Clifford D. Simak’s ‘‘Rim of the Deep’’ (1940), Lewis's Perelandra, (1943), Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954) and Poul Anderson's "Sister Planet" (1959) likewise portray an ocean-covered Venus.[1][2]: 12 [3]: 548 [4]: 860  Henry Kuttner's and C. L. Moore "Clash by Night" (1943), called in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction "the most enduring pulp image" of an oceanic Venus, describes human survivors from a devastated Earth as living beneath Venusian oceans, and inspired a 1991 sequel, The Jungle by David A. Drake.[1][3]: 548 

Desert

A third group of early theories about conditions on Venus explained the cloud cover with a hot, dry planet where the atmosphere holds water vapor and the surface has dust storms.[8]: 131 [4]: 860  In 1922 Charles Edward St. John and Seth B. Nicholson, failing to detect the spectroscopic signs of oxygen or water in the atmosphere, proposed a dusty, windy, desert Venus, and in 1940 Rubert Wildt discussed how a greenhouse effect might result in a similar outcome.[4]: 860 [9][16]: 79–81 

The vision of a desert Venus was never as popular as that of a swampy or jungle one, but featured in several notable works such as Poul Anderson's The Big Rain (1954), Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1953), Robert Sheckley's "Prospector Planet" (1959), Dean McLaughlin's The Fury from Earth (1964), and Arthur C. Clarke's "Before Eden" (1961).[4]: 860–861 

Other

For some writers, Venus was merely a warmer, cloudier Earth.[3]: 548  However, Venus' cloud cover, in preventing observation from outside, gave others a license for exotic natural or fanciful scenery.[1] Already in 1909 Serviss' A Columbus of Space (1909) depicted a tidally-locked Venus, with half of the planet always exposed to the Sun, and the other half, in perpetual darkness.[2]: 12  The absence of a common vision of Venus resulted in the less coherent mythology of Venus, particularly compared with the image of Mars in fiction.[1] As a result of the setting's versatility, according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "some of the gaudiest romances of Genre SF are set on Venus".[1] Stephen L. Gillet describes the situation as a writers' "cosmic Rorschach test", with numerous authors populating the land beneath Venus' featureless clouds with exotic but usually habitable settings, and producing stories ranging from adventure to satire.[4]: 861 

Later depictions: hostile inferno

Even before the era of space probes, scientific discourse on the prospects for life on Venus dimmed from the 1930s on, as advanced methods for observing Venus suggested that its atmosphere lacks oxygen.[7]: 43  After the onset of the space race in the early second half of the 20th century, space probes such as Mariner 2, in 1962, which found that Venus' surface temperature was 800 °F (427 °C), and ground atmospheric pressure was many times that of Earth's, rendered obsolete fiction that had depicted a planet with exotic but habitable settings.[1][3]: 548 [8]: 131 [4]: 860 [6]: xi  (Although the designs for the Soviet Venera probes still considered the possibility of a water landing as late as 1964).[6]: xiii 

The theme of Earth-like, warm Venus occasionally resurfaces in deliberately nostalgic "retro-sf" such as Roger Zelazny’s ‘‘The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth’’ (1965), Thomas M. Disch’s ‘‘Come to Venus Melancholy’’ (1965), and works collected in dedicated anthologies, such as Farewell Fantastic Venus (1968), or Old Venus: A Collection of Stories (2015).[3]: 548 [6]: xv–xvii 

Artist's impression of a hypothetical floating outpost studying colonization of Venus, around 40 km above Venus' surface, supported by tori full of hydrogen and oxygen

Following a brief period of disinterest in writing stories set in the Solar System, now known to be a rather hostile environment, new tropes that emerged with the developing scientific understanding of Venus include exploration of, and survival in, the hostile environment of Venus, as pictured in Larry Niven’s ‘‘Becalmed in Hell’’ (1965), Brenda Pearce’s ‘‘Crazy Oil’’ (1975), John Varley's "In the Bowl" (1975), Bob Buckley’s ‘‘Chimera’’ (1976), Ben Bova’s Venus (2001) and Geoffrey A. Landis's The Sultan of the Clouds (2010). Such stories would feature domed or floating cities and space stations, protected against or isolated from the planet's hostile atmosphere. Other enduring concepts include colonization and terraforming of Venus.[1][3]: 548–549 [6]: xvi 

Colonization

While the idea of colonizing Venus was penned as early as J. B. S. Haldane’s ‘‘The Last Judgment’’ (1927) and John Wyndham's "The Venus Adventure" (1932), it grew in popularity in subsequent decades.[1][3]: 547  Following emerging scientific evidence of Venus' harsh conditions, colonization of Venus was increasingly portrayed as more challenging than colonization of Mars.[3]: 548 

It became a major theme in Robert A. Heinlein’s ‘‘Logic of Empire’’ (1941), Frederik Pohl's and C. M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952) and Pohl's The Merchants' War (1984), Rolf Garner's trilogy (beginning with Resurgent Dust, 1953), and Philip Latham's Robinsonade Five Against Venus (1952).[1][3]: 548  Sarah Zettel's The Quiet Invasion (2000) features colonization of Venus by extraterrestrials.[4]: 860 

Terraforming

As scientific knowledge of Venus advanced, so science fiction authors endeavored to keep pace,[11] particularly by conjecturing about possible human attempts to terraform Venus.[17]: 134–135 [4]: 861  An early treatment of the concept is Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930).[3]: 524, 548  Terraforming of Venus subsequently featured in Henry Kuttner's Fury (1950) and Poul Anderson's "The Big Rain" (1954).[17]: 135  Pamela Sargent's Venus of Dreams (1986) and Venus of Shadows (1988) discuss terraforming Venus into a more Earthlike world.[2]: 12 [17]: 136 [4]: 861 

Other recent writings on the topic include Bob Buckley's "World in the Clouds" (1980), Raymond Harris’ Shadows of the White Sun (1988), and G. David Nordley's "The Snow of Venus" (1991).[4]: 861 [3]: 549  Marta Randall's "Big Dome" (1985), featuring a rediscovered domed colony abandoned during a prior terraforming project, has been described as an homage to the "traditional" image of Venus found in early science fiction.[4]: 861 Nordley's "Dawn Venus" (1995) features a terraformed, Earth-like Venus.[4]: 861 

Stephen L. Gillet suggests that the theme of terraforming Venus reflects both the scientific aspect of science fiction, particularly popular in hard science fiction, as well as a desire to recapture the simpler, traditional fantasy of early prose about the planet.[4]: 861 

Lifeforms
1950 Avon comic-book adaptation of The Radio Man, titled An Earth Man on Venus

Beasts

Early writings, in which Venus was often depicted as a younger Earth, often populated it with large beasts. Gustavus Pope's Romances of the Planets, no 2: Journey to Venus (1895) depicted a tropical world featuring dinosaurs and other creatures similar to those known from Earth's history.[2]: 12  Zelazny’s ‘‘The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth’’ (1965) revolves around an encounter with a giant Venusian sea monster.[4]: 860  In the second half of the 20th century, as the hellish conditions of Venus became better known, depictions of life on Venus became more nuanced, with ideas such as the "living petroleum" of Brenda Pearce’s ‘‘Crazy Oil’’ (1975) and the telepathic jewels of Varley's "In the Bowl" (1975), and the more mundane cloud-borne microbes of Ben Bova's Venus (2000).[4]: 860 

Venusians

Perhaps due to an association of the planet Venus with the Roman goddess of love, sentient Venusians have often been portrayed as gentle, ethereal, and beautiful – an image first presented in Bernard le Bovyer de Fontenelle's Conversations on the Plurality of Worlds (1686; translated into English by J Glanvill in 1929 as A Plurality of Worlds).[1][11][3]: 547  This trope was repeated, among others, in W. Lach-Szyrma's A Voice from Another World (1874) and Letters from the Planets (1887-1893), about an interplanetary tour of a winged, angel-like Venusian, as well as in George Griffith's A Honeymoon in Space (1900), where human visitors to Venus encounter flying Venusians communicating through music.[1][3]: 547 [18]: 671 

A Venusian visitor to Earth is seen in some works, such as Lach-Szyrma's A Voice from Another World (1874) and William Windsor's Loma, a Citizen of Venus (1897). James William Barlow and John Munro penned descriptions of Venusian civilizations, respectively, in A History of a Race of Immortals without a God (1891) and A Trip to Venus (1897).[1][18]: 671 

See also

References
  1. "SFE: Venus". sf-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
  2. Miller, Ron (2002-01-01). Venus. Twenty-First Century Books. ISBN 978-0-7613-2359-4.
  3. Stableford, Brian M. (2006). Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-97460-8.
  4. Gillet, Stephen L. (2005). "Venus". In Westfahl, Gary (ed.). The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Science Fiction and Fantasy: Themes, Works, and Wonders. Greenwood Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-313-32951-7.
  5. Caryad; Römer, Thomas; Zingsem, Vera (2014-09-15). Wanderer am Himmel: Die Welt der Planeten in Astronomie und Mythologie (in German). Springer-Verlag. p. 78. ISBN 978-3-642-55343-1.
  6. Dozois, Gardner (2015-03-03). "Return to Venusport". In Martin, George R. R.; Dozois, Gardner (eds.). Old Venus: A Collection of Stories. Random House Publishing Group. ISBN 978-0-8041-7985-0.
  7. Dick, Steven (2001), Life on Other Worlds: The 20th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-79912-0
  8. Ley, Willy (April 1966). "The Re-Designed Solar System". For Your Information. Galaxy Science Fiction.
  9. Launius, Roger D. (2012-09-19). "Venus-Earth-Mars: Comparative Climatology and the Search for Life in the Solar System". Life (Basel). 2 (3): 255–273. Bibcode:2012Life....2..255L. doi:10.3390/life2030255. ISSN 2075-1729. PMC 4187128. PMID 25371106.
  10. Taylor, F.; Grinspoon, D. (2009). "Climate evolution of Venus". Journal of Geophysical Research: Planets. 114 (E9). Bibcode:2009JGRE..114.0B40T. doi:10.1029/2008JE003316. ISSN 2156-2202.
  11. Sagan, Carl (1978-05-28). "Growing up with Science Fiction". The New York Times. p. SM7. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-12-12.
  12. D'Ammassa, Don (2005). Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Facts On File. ISBN 978-0-8160-5924-9.
  13. Keim, Brandon. "Horny Dinosaurs, Venutian Rains and a Rorschach Shirt: Ray Bradbury's Science". Wired. ISSN 1059-1028. Retrieved 2022-04-12.
  14. Freistetter, Florian (2021-04-15). A History of the Universe in 100 Stars. Quercus. p. 74. ISBN 978-1-5294-1013-6.
  15. Maslen, Rob (September 2018). "Towards an Iconography of the Twentieth Century: C. S. Lewis and the Scientific Humanists, Part 1". The City of Lost Books. Retrieved 2022-01-19.
  16. Woszczyk, A.; Iwaniszewska, C. (2012-12-06). Exploration of the Planetary System. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-94-010-2206-4.
  17. Seed, David (2005), A Companion to Science Fiction, Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 1-4051-1218-2
  18. Westfahl, Gary (2021-07-19). Science Fiction Literature through History: An Encyclopedia [2 volumes]. ABC-CLIO. ISBN 978-1-4408-6617-3.
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