Farewell, Fantastic Venus

Farewell, Fantastic Venus is a 1968 American science fiction anthology edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison.

The book contains stories and novel excerpts of Venus in fiction from the time before its true nature became apparent, when the clouded planet could still be imagined as another Earth, albeit a hotter one.

From that point on, few stories would be written which did not recognize Venus as a dry lifeless world with acid clouds and a temperature high enough to melt lead.

Writers such as Larry Niven (author of "Becalmed in Hell") did write about the "new" Venus, but there were to be few more transplanted jungle adventures, imagined world of oceans with monsters, or Venusians.

Later, however, writers avoided this apparent impasse through using hard science fiction premises for future terraforming of Venus, or resorted to alternate world science fiction, where Venus had either been terraformed by aliens in the distant past to provide an Earth-like biosphere, or had undergone different processes of planetary formation to arrive at an inhabitable alternative.