The novel's villains, the Thorists, start a revolution in the nation of Vepaja for their own good only, cheating the uneducated masses and killing or driving away those doctors and other highly educated that form the foundation of the society.

Throughout the book the Thorists remain distant and unreal, and those few that the hero Carson Napier meets are often stupid or incompetent.

[2] Floyd C. Gale of Galaxy Science Fiction in 1963 said that "despite his usual penchant for coincidence and gratuitously fortuitous happenstances (whew!

[3] The copyright for this story has expired in Australia, Canada and the United States, and thus now resides in the public domain in those countries.

Poul Anderson, in the Dominic Flandry novel A Plague of Masters, depicts a community of dissidents and rebels against a tyrannical regime, living on the branches of enormous giant trees - strongly reminiscent of the setting in Pirates of Venus.