Venus in fiction

The planet Venus has been used as a setting in fiction since before the 19th century. Its opaque cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface—a "cosmic Rorschach test", in the words of science fiction author Stephen L. Gillett. The planet was often depicted as warmer than Earth but still habitable by humans. 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. Some other stories portrayed it as a desert, or invented more exotic settings. The absence of a common vision resulted in Venus not developing a coherent fictional mythology, in contrast to the image of Mars in fiction. When included, the native sentient inhabitants, Venusians, were often portrayed as gentle, ethereal and beautiful. The planet's associations with the Roman goddess Venus and femininity in general is reflected in many works' portrayals of Venusians. Depictions of Venusian societies have varied both in level of development and type of governance. In addition to humans visiting Venus, several stories feature Venusians coming to Earth—most often to enlighten humanity, but occasionally for warlike purposes. 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. The planet became portrayed instead as a hostile, toxic inferno, with stories changing focus to topics of the planet's colonization and terraforming, although the vision of tropical Venus is occasionally revisited in intentionally retro stories.

Early depictions

The earliest use of the planet Venus as the primary setting in a work of fiction was Voyage à Venus (Voyage to Venus, 1865) by Achille Eyraud, though it had appeared centuries earlier in works depicting multiple locations in the Solar System such as Athanasius Kircher's Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656) and Emanuel Swedenborg's The Earths in Our Solar System (1758). 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. Venus has a thick layer of clouds that prevents telescopic observation of the surface, which gave writers free rein to imagine any kind of world below until Venus exploration probes revealed the true conditions in the 1960s—Stephen L. Gillett describes the situation as a "cosmic Rorschach test". Venus thus became a popular setting in early science fiction, but that same versatility meant that it did not develop a counterpart to the image of Mars in fiction made popular by Percival Lowell around the turn of the century—with supposed Martian canals and a civilization that built them—and it never reached the same level of popularity. 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.

One of the many visions was of a tidally locked Venus with half of the planet always exposed to the Sun and the other half in perpetual darkness—as was widely believed to be the case with Mercury at the time. This concept was introduced by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1880 and appeared in Garrett P. Serviss's A Columbus of Space (1909) and Garret Smith's Between Worlds (1919), among others. A common assumption was that the Venusian clouds were made of water, as clouds on Earth are, and consequently the planet was most often portrayed as having a wet climate. This sometimes meant vast oceans, but more commonly swamps and/or jungles. Another influential idea was the early version of the nebular hypothesis of Solar System formation which held that the planets are older the further from the Sun they are, meaning that Venus should be younger than Earth and might resemble earlier periods in Earth's history such as the Carboniferous. 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.

Jungle and swamp Early treatments of a Venus covered in swamps and jungles are found in Gustavus W. Pope's Journey to Venus (1895), Fred T. Jane's To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), and Maurice Baring's "Venus" (1909). Following its popularization by Arrhenius, the portrayal of the Venusian landscape as dominated by jungles and swamps recurred frequently in other works of fiction; in particular, Brian Stableford says in Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia that it became "a staple of pulp science fiction imagery". 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. "In the Walls of Eryx" (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling features an invisible maze on a jungle Venus.

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