Venus in fiction

Fictional representations of 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.

In 1918, chemist and Nobel Prize winner Svante Arrhenius, deciding that Venus' 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 didn't 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. 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. 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. 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.

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