Venus in fiction


Fictional representations of the planet Venus have existed since 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 reality of its surface conditions.

History

Before Mariner 2 explored Venus, scientists expected that Venus would be ocean, swamp, or desert. Space probes that found that the planet's surface temperature was, and ground atmospheric pressure was many times that of Earth's, rendered obsolescent earlier fiction that depicted the planet with exotic but habitable settings.

Ocean

Some scientists envisioned Venus as Panthalassa, with perhaps a few islands. Large land masses could not exist, they said, because land would cause vertical atmospheric currents breaking up the planet's solid cloud layer.
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 as being mostly ocean and having fierce tropical storms. Works such as 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.

Swamp

Others expected that the planet would have land masses, but not dry ones. In 1918, chemist and Nobel Prize winner 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.
In the 1930s, Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote the "sword-and-planet" style "Venus series," set on a fictionalized version of Venus known as Amtor. The Venus of Robert Heinlein's Future History series and Henry Kuttner's Fury resembled Arrhenius' vision of Venus. 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.

Desert

A third group explained the cloud cover with a hot, dry planet, on which the atmosphere holds water vapor and the surface has dust storms. 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. The model of a planet covered in clouds of polymeric formaldehyde dust was never as popular as a swamp or jungle, but featured in several notable stories, like Poul Anderson's The Big Rain, and Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth's novel The Space Merchants.

Venera program

However, the more optimistic notions of Venus were not definitively disproved until the first space probes were sent to Venus. Data from the fly-by of Mariner 2 as well as radio astronomy from the same time pointed to a hot, dry Venus, but as late as 1964, Soviet scientists were still designing Venus probes for the possibility of landing in liquid water. It was not until Venera 4 and Mariner 5 reached Venus that it was confirmed beyond doubt that Venus was actually an extremely hot, dry desert planet with sulfuric acid in its atmosphere. Stories about wet tropical Venus vanished at that point, except for intentionally nostalgic "retro-sf", a passing which Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison marked with their 1968 anthology Farewell Fantastic Venus.
As scientific knowledge of Venus advanced, so science fiction authors endeavored to keep pace, particularly by conjecturing human attempts to terraform Venus. For instance James E. Gunn's 1955 novella "The Naked Sky” starts on a partial terraformed Venus where the colonists live underground to get away from the still-deadly atmosphere. Arthur C. Clarke's 1997 novel , for example, postulates humans lowering Venus's temperature by steering cometary fragments to impact its surface. A terraformed Venus is the setting for a number of diverse works of fiction that have included Exosquad, the German language Mark Brandis series and the manga Venus Wars. In L. Neil Smith's Gallatin Universe novel The Venus Belt, Venus was broken apart by a massive man-made projectile to form a second asteroid belt suitable for commercial exploitation.

Stories set on Venus

The following list divides stories about Venus into those which reflect the older view of Venus, and the more accurate ones reflecting Venus science since the mid-1960s.

"Old Venus"

The term Venusian has been used for hypothetical and fictional inhabitants of Venus, whether located on the planet or found elsewhere.