Venus in fiction
Depictions of Venus as a lush, verdant paradise, an oceanic planet, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like beasts or other monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s.
From the mid-20th century on, as the reality of Venus's harsh surface conditions became known, the early tropes of adventures in Venusian tropics mostly gave way to more realistic stories.
[1] Science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl considers the mention of the "Morning Star" in the second-century work True History by Lucian of Samosata to be the first appearance of Venus—or any other planet—in the genre.
[1][3]: 164–165 [6]: 12 On the subject, Westfahl writes that while Mars has a distinctive body of major works such as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1897) and Ray Bradbury's fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles (1950), Venus largely lacks a corresponding canon.
[3]: 165–166 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.
[3]: 166 [5]: 860 Scientist Svante Arrhenius popularized the idea of Venus being swamp-covered with flora and fauna similar to that of prehistoric Earth in his non-fiction book The Destinies of the Stars (1918).
Whereas Arrhenius assumed that Venus had unchanging climatic conditions that were similar all over the planet and concluded that a lack of adaptation to environmental variability would result only in primitive lifeforms, later writers often included various megafauna.
[10]: 547 Clark Ashton Smith's "The Immeasurable Horror" (1931) and Lester del Rey's "The Luck of Ignatz" (1939) depict threatening Venusian creatures in a swamp-and-jungle climate.
[12][13]: 483 In the planetary romance subgenre that flourished in this era, Ralph Milne Farley and Otis Adelbert Kline wrote series in this setting starting with The Radio Man (1924) and The Planet of Peril (1929), respectively.
[11]: xiv [12] Robert A. Heinlein portrayed Venusian swamps in several unrelated stories including "Logic of Empire" (1941), Space Cadet (1948), and Podkayne of Mars (1963).
Large land masses were thought impossible due to the assumption that they would have generated atmospheric updrafts disrupting the planet's solid cloud layer.
[5]: 860 "Clash by Night" (1943) by Lawrence O'Donnell (joint pseudonym of C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner) and its sequel Fury (1947) describe survivors from a devastated Earth living beneath Venusian oceans.
Those two works have been called in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction "the most enduring pulp image" of an oceanic Venus, and the former received another sequel decades later, The Jungle (1991) by David A.
[1][10]: 548 Roger Zelazny's "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) was the last major depiction of an ocean-covered Venus, published shortly after that vision had been rendered obsolete by advances in planetary science.
[8]: 672 [5]: 860 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.
[6]: 12 [5]: 860 Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952) is a satire that depicts Venus being successfully marketed as an appealing destination for migrants from Earth in spite of its hostile environment.
[10]: 548 [11]: xv [20]: 131 Some works go so far as to portray Venus as a mostly ignored part of an otherwise thoroughly explored Solar System; examples include Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (1973) and the novel series The Expanse (2011–2021) by James S. A. Corey (joint pseudonym of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck).
[3]: 168 Stories about survival in less extreme conditions had appeared in works such as John W. Campbell's "Solarite" (1930), where the surface temperature exceeds 150 °F (70 °C); Clifton B. Kruse's "Menace from Saturn" (1935), where the atmosphere is toxic; and Philip Latham's Five Against Venus (1952), a Robinsonade.
[1][10]: 548–549 Following the Space Age discoveries about the conditions on Venus, fiction about the planet started to mainly focus on survival in the hostile environment, as in Larry Niven's "Becalmed in Hell" (1965).
[27]: 96 Colonizing Venus is a major theme in Jack Williamson's Seetee series (1949–1951), Rolf Garner's trilogy beginning with Resurgent Dust (1953), and Soviet science fiction writers Arkady and Boris Strugatsky's The Land of Crimson Clouds (1959).
[19]: 79 [23][32][33] Gillett suggests that the theme of terraforming Venus reflects a desire to recapture the simpler, traditional fantasy of early prose about the planet.
[35]: 249 The Soviet film Planeta Bur (1962) features an American–Soviet joint scientific expedition to Venus, which finds the planet teeming with various lifeforms, many resembling terrestrial species, including sentient if primitive Venusians.
[1][12][22]: 29 Perhaps due to an association of the planet Venus with the Roman goddess of love whose name it shares, 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).
[8]: 673 The films Abbott and Costello Go to Mars (1953) and Queen of Outer Space (1958) feature the trope of Venus being populated by beautiful women,[1][36]: 448 and Voyage to the Planet of Prehistoric Women (1968), the second of two English-language adaptations of Planeta Bur (the first being Voyage to the Prehistoric Planet, 1965), portrays the Venusians as "half-naked sex-appealing blond sirens" with supernatural or psychic powers.
[8]: 673 Venusians infiltrating Earth by posing as humans appear in several works including Eric Frank Russell's Three to Conquer (1956) and Windsor's Loma, a Citizen of Venus.
