Saturn in fiction

The moons of Saturn have been depicted in a large number of stories, especially Titan with its Earth-like environment suggesting the possibility of colonization by humans and alien lifeforms living there.

In all of these stories, one can discern no general image of the planet, except for the usual tendency to suspect its inhabitants are more advanced than humans.

[2] The earliest depiction of Saturn in fiction was in the 1752 novel Micromégas by Voltaire, wherein an alien from Sirius visits the planet and meets one of its inhabitants before both travel to Earth.

[2] In the 1890 novel The Auroraphone by Cyrus Cole Saturnians face a robot uprising, and in the 1900 novel The Kite Trust by Lebbeus H. Rogers they built the Egyptian pyramids.

[4][5][9] Exceptions to this general trend include the 1886 novel Aleriel, or A Voyage to Other Worlds by W. S. Lach-Szyrma where the planet's ecosphere is dominated by fungi and invertebrates and the 1901 novel A Honeymoon in Space by George Griffith where it is populated by seaweed, reptiles, and primitive humanoids.

[2] Nevertheless, Saturn remains a popular setting in modern science fiction for several reasons including its atmosphere being abundant with sought-after helium-3 and its magnetosphere not producing as intense radiation as that of Jupiter.

[4][5] One of the rings is painted red by a religious group in the 1977 short story "Equinoctial" by John Varley, while another faction seeks to undo the colour change.

[2][4][5] The satellite system hides a large circular sentient artificial world in John Varley's 1979–1984 Gaea trilogy that begins with the novel Titan.

[4][5][14][15] As a comparatively Earth-like world, Titan has attracted attention from writers as a place that could be colonized by humans and inhabited by extraterrestrial life.

[2][5] Stanley G. Weinbaum's 1935 short story "Flight on Titan" features telepathic threadworms, the first appearance of what would later become a recurring image of Titanian life as similar to terrestrial slugs.

Following this, science fiction writers' interest waned, and Titan was more often portrayed as one location among many in the outer Solar System rather than being the primary focus.