Venus appears in many [[pulp science fiction stories. Seen here is the winter 1939 cover of Planet Stories, featuring "The Golden Amazons of Venus".|thumb|alt=Refer to caption]]
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
<imagemap>
File:Solar system.jpg|alt=A photomontage of the eight planets and the Moon|thumb|Some early depictions of Venus in fiction were part of tours of the Solar System. Clicking on a planet leads to the article about its depiction in fiction.
circle 1250 4700 650 Neptune in fiction
circle 2150 4505 525 Uranus in fiction
circle 2890 3960 610 Saturn in fiction
circle 3450 2880 790 Jupiter in fiction
circle 3015 1770 460 Mars in fiction
circle 2370 1150 520 Earth in science fiction
circle 3165 590 280 Moon in science fiction
circle 1570 785 475 Venus in fiction
circle 990 530 320 Mercury in fiction
</imagemap>
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 , 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. 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.
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).
thumb|Cover of [[Fantastic Adventures, November 1941, featuring the Amtor story "The Living Dead" from Burroughs's Escape on Venus|alt=Refer to caption]]
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. These stories were inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian Barsoom series that began with A Princess of Mars (1912); Bradbury revisited the rainy vision of Venus in "All Summer in a Day" (1954), where the Sun is only visible through the cloud cover once every seven years. In German science fiction, the Perry Rhodan novels (launched in 1961) used the vision of Venus as a jungle world, while the protagonist in K. H. Scheer's sixteenth ' novel Raumpatrouille Nebelwelt (1963) is surprised to find that Venus does not have jungles—reflecting then-recent discoveries about the environmental conditions on Venus. Early treatments of an oceanic Venus include Harl Vincent's "Venus Liberated" (1929) and Leslie F. Stone's "Women with Wings" (1930) and Across the Void (1931). C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (1943) retells the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden on floating islands in a vast Venusian ocean. Dean McLaughlin's The Fury from Earth (1963) likewise features a dry, hostile Venus, this time rebelling against Earth. While these inhospitable portrayals more accurately reflected the emerging scientific data, they nevertheless generally underestimated the harshness of the planet's conditions. In the Space Age, space probes starting with the 1962 Mariner 2 found that Venus's surface temperature was in the range of , and atmospheric pressure at ground-level was many times that of Earth's.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). The nostalgic image of Venus has also occasionally resurfaced several decades later: S. M. Stirling's The Sky People (2006) takes place in an alternate universe where the pulp version of Venus is real, and the anthology Old Venus (2015) edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois collects newly written works in the style of older stories about the now-outdated vision of Venus.
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). In Simak's "Hunger Death" (1938) colonists on Venus contend with a plague deliberately introduced by Martians, and S. Makepeace Lott's Escape to Venus (1956) depicts a colony that has turned into a dystopia. An early treatment of the concept is found in Stapledon's Last and First Men, where the process destroys the lifeforms that already existed on the planet. Anderson's "The Big Rain" (1954) revolves around an attempt to bring about rain on a dry Venus, and in his "To Build A World" (1964), a terraformed Venus becomes the site of countless wars for the more desirable parts of the surface. Robinson's later novel 2312 (2012) features Venus in the process of being terraformed. Gillett suggests that the theme of terraforming Venus reflects a desire to recapture the simpler, traditional fantasy of early prose about the planet.
<!-- Humans and dinosaurs coexisting -->
Prehistoric creatures sometimes coexist with primitive humanoids in depictions of Venus. 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.
<!-- Exotic lifeforms -->
Science fiction author Jerry Pournelle noted that early science fiction was rife with images of exotic Venusian life: "thick fungus that ate men alive; a world populated with strange animals, dragons and dinosaurs and swamp creatures resembling the beastie from the Black Lagoon". while the Dan Dare comics that launched in 1950 feature a race of kidnapped humans that have been genetically engineered to survive on Venus. Comics superhero Tommy Tomorrow in "Frame-Up at Planeteer Academy" (1962) has a blue-skinned but otherwise humanoid Venusian sidekick called Lon Vurian. In Simak's "Tools" (1942), a native Venusian is portrayed as "a blob of disembodied radon gas captured in a lead jar". Homer Eon Flint's "The Queen of Life" (1919) depicts an anarchist society on Venus, Conversely, in Clarke's "History Lesson" (1949) Venusians come to Earth and find humanity already extinct from environmental causes. 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.
<!-- Coming to Earth -->
A theme of a Venusian visitor to Earth is seen in some works, such as Lach-Szyrma's A Voice from Another World and William Windsor's Loma, a Citizen of Venus (1897).
See also
- Venus in culture