Venus in fiction

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

Fictional representations of the planet Venus have existed since before the 19th century. Its impenetrable cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface; all the more so when early observations showed that not only was it very similar in size to Earth, it possessed a substantial atmosphere. Closer to the Sun than Earth, the planet was frequently depicted as warmer, but still habitable by humans. The genre reached its peak between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when science had revealed some aspects of Venus, but not yet the harsh truth of its surface conditions. From the mid-20th century onwards, as the reality of Venus as a hostile, toxic inferno became known, the early tropes of adventures in a lush, verdant paradise gave way to more realistic stories of colonization and terraforming of Venus.

Early depictions: alive and hospitable[]

Among the earliest representations of the planet Venus in fiction is Athanasius Kircher's Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656) and Emanuel Swedenborg's The Earths in our Solar System (1758).[1] The first science fiction novel concerned specifically with Venus was 's Voyage à Venus (1865).[1] Many other followed, and in time, Venus became one of the most popular planets portrayed in early science fiction, perhaps second only to Mars.[2]: 12  It was a common setting for many works of the scientific romance genre.[1] It was featured among others in novels such as 's A Narrative of the Travels and Adventures of Paul Aermont Among the Planets (1873), Fred T. Jane's To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), Garrett Serviss's A Columbus of Space (1909), 's Between Worlds (1919), and Stanton A Coblentz's The Blue Barbarians (1931). Venus was large enough for entire series to be set there, such as the Ralph Milne Farley's series that begun with The Radio Man (1924), Otis Adelbert Kline's trilogy opening with the The Planet of Peril (1929), and Edgar Rice Burroughs's "sword-and-planet" series beginning with Pirates of Venus (1932), set on a fictionalized version of Venus known as Amtor.[1][3]: 547 [4]: 860  More serious, solemn treatments included Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930 ) and Henry Kuttner's Fury (1947).[4]: 860  In addition to novels, Venus was also a common feature in short stories published in the early science fiction magazines, with notable stories by writers such as 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]

Early astronomers could only see the vast Venus cloud cover, which led many writers, as well as established scholars, to speculate that Venus is covered by a gigantic ocean, or is a tropical world resembling prehistoric Earth (for example, chemist and Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius argued in 1918 that Venus is likely a "lush, steamy" planet abundant with lower life forms), or perhaps a desert.[2]: 12 [5]: 43 [6]: 131 [7][8] Many of the early portrayals of Venus and associated tropes relate to the life and landscape of Venus, with the added twist that as Venus orbits closer to the Sun, it was expected to resemble a younger version of Earth.[1][3]: 547 [4]: 860 

Venusian landscape[]

A number of the earliest descriptions of Venus portrayed it is as a beautiful, paradise-like planet, a view that only in time because modified by scientific findings.[3]: 547 

Jungle and swamp[]

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

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.

— Carl Sagan, 1978[9]


Many writers and scientists expected that the planet would have land masses, but not dry ones.[6]: 131 [3]: 547  An early treatment of Venus of swamps and jungles can be found in ’s Romances of the Planets, no 2: Journey to Venus (1895), followed by Fred T. Jane’s To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), and Maurice Baring’s ‘‘Venus’’ (1909).[3]: 547  In 1918, scholar Svante Arrhenius, deciding that Venus's cloud cover was necessarily water, decreed 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 tropical rain forests of the Congo. Because of what he assumed was constantly uniform climatic conditions all over the planet, the life of Venus lived under very stable conditions and did not have to adapt to changing environments like life on Earth. As a result of this lack of selection pressure, it would be covered in prehistoric swamps. Venus thus became, until the early 1960s, a place for science fiction writers to place all manner of unusual life forms, from quasi-dinosaurs to intelligent carnivorous plants. Comparisons often referred to Earth in the Carboniferous period.[7][8]

This has been reflected in other works or fiction and became "a staple of pulp science fiction imagnery".[3]: 547  Several of Stanley G. Weinbaum short stories of the 1930s are set in the tropical jungles of Venus.[2]: 12  Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote several novels set on "swampy landscapes" of Venus, beginning with Pirates of Venus (1934) and followed by several more sequels.[10]: 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 jungle is also featured in Ray Bradbury's "Death-by-Rain" (1950).[1]

Ray Bradbury's short stories "The Long Rain" and "All Summer in a Day" also depicted Venus as a habitable planet with incessant rain. In Germany, the Perry Rhodan novels used the vision of Venus as a jungle world.[11]

Ocean[]

Others envisioned Venus as Panthalassa ("all ocean"), with perhaps a few islands. Large land masses could not exist, they said, because they would generate vertical atmospheric currents breaking up the planet's solid cloud layer.[6]: 131 [3]: 547 

An early treatment of oceanic Venus is found in 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 Venus, populated by aquatic descendants of homo sapiens, as being mostly ocean and having fierce tropical storms.[1][12] Works such as d Clifford D. Simak’s ‘‘Rim of the Deep’’ (1940), C. S. Lewis's 1943 Perelandra and Isaac Asimov's 1954 Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus drew from a vision of a Cambrian-like Venus covered by a near-planet-wide ocean filled with exotic aquatic life. Isaac Asmov's 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), described in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction as "the most enduring pulp image" of oceanic Venus, portrays mankind survivors from devastated Earth living in Venusian submarines, and has even inspired a 1991 sequel (The Jungle, by David A. Drake).[1][3]: 548 

Desert[]

The third group of early theories about conditions on Venus explained the cloud cover with a hot, dry planet, on which the atmosphere holds water vapor and the surface has dust storms.[6]: 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 [7][13]: 79–81  The vision of desert Venus was never as popular as that of a swamp or jungle one, but featured in several notable stories, like Poul Anderson's The Big Rain (1954), Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth's novel 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, Venus was just a warmer, more cloudy Earth.[3]: 548  However, the Venusian cloud cover, preventing observation from the outside, gave a number of writers ideas for novel settings, with various natural or artificial exotic wonders dominating the Venusian landscapes. As a result, according to The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, "some of the gaudiest romances of Genre SF are set on Venus".[1] Among the more original visions of Venus is that from one of the early novels set on there, namely Garrett Serviss' A Columbus of Space, which depicted a tidal-locked Venus.[2]: 12  On the other hand, the lack of common vision of Venus resulted in less consistent, or non-existent, mythology of Venus (particularly compared to the image of Mars in fiction).[1] Stephen L. Gillet described the situation as a writer equivalent of a "cosmic Rorschach test", with numerous authors populating the land Venusian featureless clouds with various exotic but usually habitable settings, and stories ranging from adventure to satire.[4]: 861 

Later depictions: a hostile inferno[]

Even before the era of space probes, scientific discourse of the prospects of life on Venus dimmed from 1930s onward, as the advanced methods of observation of Venus suggested its atmosphere lacks any oxygen.[5]: 43  After the onset of the space race in the early second half of the 20th century, space probes like Mariner 2 in 1962 that found that the planet's surface temperature was 800 °F (427 °C), and ground atmospheric pressure was many times that of Earth's, rendered obsolescent earlier fiction that depicted the planet with exotic but habitable settings.[1][3]: 548 [6]: 131 [4]: 860  The theme does occasionally resurfaces in intentionally nostalgic "retro-sf", visible in works such as Roger Zelazny’s ‘‘The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth’’ (1965) and Thomas M. Disch’s ‘‘Come to Venus Melancholy’’ (1965), and the works included in the 1968 anthology Farewell Fantastic Venus edited by Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison.[3]: 548 

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

Some new tropes that emerged with the developing scientific understanding of venus include exploration and survival of the hostile Venus, as seen in Larry Niven’s ‘‘Becalmed in Hell’’ (1965), ’s ‘‘Crazy Oil’’ (1975), Bob Buckley’s ‘‘Chimera’’ (1976) and Ben Bova’s Venus (2001). Other enduring concepts include the topics of colonization of Venus and terraforming of Venus.[1][3]: 548-549 

Colonizing Venus[]

While the idea of colonizing Venus has been 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 that colonization of Mars.[3]: 548  It became a major theme in works such as 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), the trilogy by (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 Venus[]

As scientific knowledge of Venus advanced, so science fiction authors endeavored to keep pace,[9] particularly by conjecturing human attempts to terraform Venus.[14]: 134–135 [4]: 861  An early treatment of the concept is already found in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men (1930).[3]: 524, 548  Terraforming of Venus was subsequently featured in, amongst others, Henry Kuttner's Fury (1950) and Poul Anderson's "The Big Rain" (1954).[14]: 135  Pamela Sargent's Venus of Dreams (1986) and Venus of Shadows (1988) are set against the background discuss the topic of terraforming of Venus into a more Earthlike world.[2]: 12 [14]: 136 [4]: 861  Other more recent works on this topic include '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 paying homage to the "traditional" science-fictional Venus.[4]: 861 Nordley's "Dawn Venus" (1995) already features a terraformed, Earth-like Venus.[4]: 861 

Stephen L. Gillet suggested that the theme of terraforming Venus reflects both the scientific aspect of science fiction, particularly popular in hard science-fiction, but also a desire to recapture the setting for a simpler, traditional, fantasy-like setting of the early prose about the planet.[4]: 861 

Life on Venus[]

Cover of 1950 Avon comic adaptation of The Radio Man titled An Earth man on Venus

Dinosaurs and other beasts[]

Early works, in which Venus was often depicted as a younger Earth, would often populate it with large beasts. 's Journey to Venus (1895) is a classic early science fiction depiction of Venus, a tropical world populated by dinosaurs and other creatures similar to those known from Earth's history.[2]: 12  Roger Zelazny’s ‘‘The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth’’ (1965) revolves around an encounter with the giant Venusian sea monster.[4]: 860  In the second half of the 20th century, as hellish conditions of Venus became better known, depictions of life on Venus became more nuanced, with ideas such as "living petroleum" of Brenda Pearce’s ‘‘Crazy Oil’’ (1975) and telepathic jewels of John Varley's "In the Bowl" (1975), and more mundane cloud-borne microbes of Ben Bova's Venus (2000).[4]: 860 

Venusians[]

Perhaps owing to the association of Venus with the goddess of love: intelligent natives of Venus, known as Venusians, have been often portrayed as gentle, ethereal, and beautiful, an enduring image first portrayed in 's Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes habités (1686; translated to English by J Glanvill as A Plurality of Worlds in 1929).[1][9][3]: 547  This trope has been repeated in later works such as George Griffith's A Honeymoon in Space (1900).[1]

Other early depiction of Venusians include W. Lach-Szyrma's A Voice from Another World (1874), whose winged, angel-like Venusian arrives on Earth, and is later the protagonist of an interplanetary tour in the form of a series of nine Letters from the Planets (1887-1893). A similar trope, of a Venusian visitor to Earth, is seen in 's Loma, a Citizen of Venus (1897). Both and John Munro penned in-depth descriptions of Venusian civilizations in their, respectively, A History of a Race of Immortals Without a God (1891) and A Trip to Venus (1897).[1]

See also[]

References[]

  1. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t "SFE: Venus". sf-encyclopedia.com. Retrieved 2021-12-17.
  2. ^ a b c d e f g Miller, Ron (2002-01-01). Venus. Twenty-First Century Books. ISBN 978-0-7613-2359-4.
  3. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t Stableford, Brian M. (2006). Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia. Taylor & Francis. ISBN 978-0-415-97460-8.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q r s t u 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. ^ a b Dick, Steven (2001), Life on Other Worlds: The 20th-Century Extraterrestrial Life Debate, Cambridge University Press, ISBN 0-521-79912-0
  6. ^ a b c d e Ley, Willy (April 1966). "The Re-Designed Solar System". For Your Information. Galaxy Science Fiction.
  7. ^ a b c 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.
  8. ^ a b 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.
  9. ^ a b c Sagan, Carl (1978-05-28). "Growing up with Science Fiction". The New York Times. p. SM7. ISSN 0362-4331. Retrieved 2018-12-12.
  10. ^ D'Ammassa, Don (2005). Encyclopedia of Science Fiction. Facts On File. ISBN 978-0-8160-5924-9.
  11. ^ Freistetter, Florian (2021-04-15). A History of the Universe in 100 Stars. Quercus. p. 74. ISBN 978-1-5294-1013-6.
  12. ^ 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.
  13. ^ Woszczyk, A.; Iwaniszewska, C. (2012-12-06). Exploration of the Planetary System. Springer Science & Business Media. ISBN 978-94-010-2206-4.
  14. ^ a b c Seed, David (2005), A Companion to Science Fiction, Blackwell Publishing, ISBN 1-4051-1218-2
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