VENUS

   Because Earth's inner neighbour presented a bright and featureless face to early astronomers, it became something of a mystery planet. 19th-century astronomers and early-20th-century sf writers generallyimagined that, as the featureless face was a permanent cloud layer, the surface beneath must be warm and wet; the Venus of the imagination became a planet of vast oceans (perhaps with no land at all) or sweltering jungles. In the 1960s, however, probes revealed that Venus has no liquid water at its surface, and that its clouds - mostly composed of carbon dioxide - create a greenhouse effect in the lower atmosphere which generates temperatures of several hundred degrees Celsius.Early planetary tours to take in Venus - including Athanasius KIRCHER's Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656), Emanuel SWEDENBORG's The Earths in our Solar System(1758) and George GRIFFITH's A Honeymoon in Space (1901) - were influenced by the planet's longtime association with the goddess of love: its inhabitants were frequently characterized as gentle and ethereal, after the fashion of Bernard le Bovyer de FONTENELLE's Entretiens sur la pluralite des mondes habites (1686; trans J. Glanvill as A Plurality of Worlds 1929). The first novel concerned specifically with Venus wasAchille Eyraud's Voyage a Venus ("Voyage to Venus") (1865). A winged Venusian arrived on Earth in W. LACH-SZYRMA's A Voice from Another World (1874), and was later the protagonist of an interplanetary tour in the form of a series of 9 "Letters from the Planets" (1887-93). A detailed description of a Venusian civilization is featured in History of a Race of Immortals Without a God (1891 as by Antares Skorpios; vt The Immortals'Great Quest as by James W. BARLOW). Early SCIENTIFIC ROMANCES set on Venus include Gustavus W. POPE's Romances of the Planets, No. 2: Journey to Venus (1895) and John MUNRO's A Trip to Venus (1897). Fred T. JANE's earlySATIRE on the interplanetary romance was To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), and Venus was also the world visited by Garrett P. SERVISS's A Columbus of Space (1911). A brief vision is featured in "Venus" (1909) by MauriceBaring (1874-1946). Edgar Rice BURROUGHS's chief imitator, Otis Adelbert KLINE, set his principal series of exotic romances on Venus - a trilogy comprising The Planet of Peril (1929), The Prince of Peril (1930) and The Port of Peril (1932; 1949). Burroughs's own Venusian series, begun withPirates of Venus (1934), is weak self-pastiche. Other PULP-MAGAZINE romances set on Venus include Homer Eon FLINT's "The Queen of Life" (1919; in The Lord of Death and the Queen of Life, coll 1966) and Ralph Milne FARLEY's series begun with The Radio Man (1924; 1948; vt An Earthman onVenus). The early sf pulps made abundant use of Venusian scenarios. Notable examples include John W. CAMPBELL's "Solarite" (1930), Clark Ashton SMITH's "The Immeasurable Horror" (1931) and John WYNDHAM's story of COLONIZATION, "The Venus Adventure" (1932 as by John Beynon Harris). Stanton A. COBLENTZ used Venus as the setting for his satire The BlueBarbarians (1931; 1958) and for the more sober The Planet of Youth (1932; 1952). Some of Stanley G. WEINBAUM's best stories of LIFE ON OTHER WORLDS are set on Venus, including "The Lotus Eaters"(1935) and "Parasite Planet" (1935). Clifford D. SIMAK used Venusian milieux imaginatively in "HungerDeath" (1938) and "Tools" (1942), as did Lester DEL REY in "The Luck of Ignatz" (1939) and Robert A. HEINLEIN in "Logic of Empire" (1941).The image of Venus as an oceanic world was extensively developed in the 1940s, most memorably by C.S. LEWIS in Perelandra (1943; vt Voyage to Venus), in which ISLANDS of floating vegetation serve as a new Garden of Eden for a replay of the myth of ADAM AND EVE. The most enduring pulp image of the same species was that provided by Lawrence O'Donnell (Henry KUTTNER and C. L. MOORE) in "Clash by Night" (1943) and its sequel Fury (1947; 1950).Here mankind lives in the submarine "keeps" of Venus after Earth has died, and is faced with the terrible task of colonizing the inordinately hostile land-surface; a more recent sequel to "Clash by Night", incorporating the earlier story, is The Jungle (1991) by David A. DRAKE. The notion that Venus might be an appropriate home for mankind after Earth becomesuninhabitable had earlier been advanced in J.B.S. HALDANE's visionary essay "The Last Judgment" (1927), and was taken up from there by Olaf STAPLEDON in LAST AND FIRST MEN (1930), where humanity spends an ecstaticperiod of its future history as a winged creature on the Venusian floating islands. Other stories deploying the watery image include Isaac ASIMOV's Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954 as by Paul French; vt The Oceansof Venus) and Poul ANDERSON's "Sister Planet" (1959). The alternative image of Venus the jungle planet, perpetually beset by fierce wet weather, is featured in Ray BRADBURY's "Death-by-Rain" (1950; vt "The Long Rain").Although MARS was much more popular as a setting for exoticromances, Venus had the advantage of being rather more versatile: the clouds of Venus could hide exotic wonders. For this reason, some of the gaudiest romances of GENRE SF are set on Venus: C.L. Moore's "Black Thirst" (1934), Leigh BRACKETT's and Ray Bradbury's "Lorelei of the RedMist" (1946), Brackett's "The Moon that Vanished" (1948) and "The Enchantress of Venus" (1949; vt "City of the Lost Ones") and Keith Bennett's "The Rocketeers Have Shaggy Ears" (1950). The other side of the coin was that there never grew up a consistent "Venusian mythology" comparable in power to the MYTHOLOGY of Mars.As with Mars, during the 1950s there was a change in the main concern of stories about Venus, sothat it was more often seen as a tough challenge to would-be colonists. In THE SPACE MERCHANTS (1953) by Frederik POHL and C.M. KORNBLUTH it is the"Gravy Planet" which has to be "sold" to the public by high-pressure advertising; Pohl continued the story in The Merchants' War (1984), having earlier presented a somewhat different image in "The Merchants of Venus" (1971). Other stories of colonization from the 1950s are Heinlein'sBetween Planets (1951), Chad OLIVER's "Field Expedient" (1955) and a trilogy by Rolf Garner (Bryan BERRY): Resurgent Dust (1953), The Immortals (1953) and The Indestructible (1954). Philip LATHAM's Five Against Venus(1952) is a Venusian ROBINSONADE.Since the discovery of the true nature of the Venusian surface the interest of sf writers in the planet has waned considerably. The new Venus shows its intimidating face in Larry NIVEN's "Becalmed in Hell" (1965), contrasting poignantly with Roger ZELAZNY'sflorid farewell to the world of the great ocean, "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) and with Thomas M. DISCH's brief jeremiad "Come to Venus Melancholy" (1965). The idea that Venus might beterraformed (TERRAFORMING) has, however, renewed interest in the notion of colonization, and such a project is celebrated on an appropriately massive scale in a series of novels by Pamela SARGENT begun with VENUS OF DREAMS (1986) and continued in Venus of Shadows (1988).2 theme anthologiesare The Hidden Planet (anth 1959) ed Donald A. WOLLHEIM and Farewell, Fantastic Venus! (anth 1968; cut vt All About Venus) ed Brian W. ALDISSand Harry HARRISON.

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   See also: UNDER THE SEA.