Old Venus

Introduction

Return to Venusport

BY GARDNER DOZOIS

DAWN ON VENUS:

The sleek, furry heads of the web-footed amphibious Venusians break water near one of the rare archipelagos in the world-girdling ocean. Nearby, the toothy head and long, snaky neck of a Plesiosaur-like sea creature momentarily rears above the waves. Elsewhere, vast swamps are pocked and shimmered by the ceaseless, unending rain, while immense dinosaurian shapes grunt and wallow in the mud. Elsewhere, tall, spindly people in elaborate headdresses and jewel-encrusted robes walk across rope bridges strung between huge trees, bigger by far than any Terrestrial Redwood or Sequoia, and the spreading ashen light reveals that there’s an entire city up there, up in the trees. Elsewhere, shining silver rockets are landing at the spaceport at Venusport. Still elsewhere, the thick, fetid, steamy jungle is ripped asunder by a dinosaur-like beast, reminiscent of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, who emerges from the dripping vegetation and opens his massive, dagger-studded mouth to roar defiance at the morning.

Then, one day in 1962, all these dreams abruptly vanish, like someone blowing out a candle.

People have always noticed Venus (and sometimes worshipped it), perhaps because it’s the brightest natural object in the night sky, other than the Moon. In ancient times, they thought Venus was two separate objects, the Morning Star and the Evening Star—the Greeks called them Phosphoros and Hesperos, the Romans Lucifer and Vesper. By Pythagoras’s day in the sixth century B.C., it was recognized as a single celestial object, which the Greeks called Aphrodite, and the Romans called Venus, after the goddesses of love in their respective religions. Somehow, Venus has always been associated with goddesses, perhaps in contrast with the second-brightest object in the night sky, Mars, which because of its ruddy color was associated with war, usually the province of men and of male gods. The Babylonians, who realized it was a single celestial object hundreds of years before the Greeks, called it “the Bright Queen of the Sky,” and named it Ishtar, after their goddess of love, the Persians would call it Anahita after a goddess of their own, and Pliny the Elder associated Venus with Isis, a similar Egyptian deity. This earned it a nickname, still occasionally used, the Planet of Love.

When telescopes were invented, Venus could be seen to present a bright but featureless face to observation, and the idea slowly developed that Venus was shrouded in a permanent layer of clouds, unlike Mars or Mercury or the Moon, and speculation as to what might be beneath the swaddling clouds began, earning Venus its other nickname, the Planet of Mystery.

Clouds meant rain, and a planet permanently shrouded in clouds must certainly be a planet where it rained. A lot.

Just as future speculation about Mars was shaped by American astronomer Percival Lowell, who trained telescopes on Mars and believed that he saw canals there, most future speculation about what lay beneath the clouds of Venus was shaped and given direction by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who speculated, in his 1918 book, The Destinies of the Stars, that the Venusian clouds must be composed of water vapor, and went on to say that “everything on Venus is dripping wet … A very great part of the surface of Venus is no doubt covered with swamps, corresponding to those of the Earth in which the coal deposits were formed … The temperature on Venus is not so high as to prevent a luxuriant vegetation. The constantly uniform climatic conditions which exist everywhere result in an entire absence of adaptation to changing exterior conditions. Only low forms of life are therefore represented, mostly no doubt, belonging to the vegetable kingdom; and the organisms are nearly of the same kind all over the planet.”

This idea, that the surface of Venus was covered with swamps, making it resemble Earth in the Carboniferous Period, would be the ruling paradigm for almost the next fifty years, along with the related idea that Venus was an ocean world, perhaps consisting only of one world-encircling sea. So pervasive was this vision that as late as 1964, Soviet scientists were still designing the Venera Venus probes for the possibility of landing in liquid water.

As the subgenre of the Planetary Romance slowly precipitated out of the older body of pulp adventure, the swamps grew jungles and dinosaurs, and the seas grew monsters.

In the heyday of the Planetary Romance, also called Sword and Planet stories, roughly between the 1930s and the 1950s, the solar system swarmed with alien races and alien civilizations, as crowded and chummy as an Elks picnic, with almost every world boasting an alien race that it would be possible for a Terran adventurer to have swordfights or romances with, even Jupiter and Saturn and Mercury. Mars always claimed pride of place, and was the preferred setting for most Planetary Romances—but Venus wasn’t far behind.

Venus had appeared as a setting in religious allegories and Fabulous Journey stories throughout the nineteenth century, but the first Planetary Romance to take us there, something recognizable as what we’d today consider to be science fiction, was probably Otis Adelbert Kline’s 1929 novel Planet of Peril (and its sequels The Prince of Peril and Port of Peril), in which Earthman Robert Grandon is telepathically transported into the mind of a Venusian, gets involved with warring native races, and has many sword-swinging adventures on a Venus that features forests of giant trees (due to the lower gravity) and dinosaur-like monsters. Kline’s novels were almost certainly inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs’s A Princess of Mars, which took a similarly swashbuckling Earthman to the Red Planet, called Barsoom by Burroughs, and which had been a sensation upon its publication in 1915. Burroughs would retaliate by sending his own Terran adventurer, Carson Napier, to Venus in 1932 in his Pirates of Venus (and its four sequels), and the era of the Planetary Romance was launched.

The purest expression of the Planetary Romance story was probably to be found between 1939 and 1955 in the pages of Planet Stories, which featured work by Jack Vance, Ray Bradbury, A. E. Van Vogt, Poul Anderson, and many others, and which (unusually for a subgenre that had been heavily male-dominated) may have found its finest practitioners in two female authors, C. L. Moore and Leigh Brackett. Ray Bradbury published some of his famous Martian Chronicles stories in Planet Stories, and although Bradbury visited Venus there as well in stories like “The Long Rain” and “All Summer in a Day,” he remained mostly best known for his Martian stories. Although both wrote about Mars as well, Venus belonged to Moore and Brackett. C. L. Moore’s hard-bitten spaceman Northwest Smith adventured there in company with his Venusian sidekick Yarol in stories like “Black Thirst,” and Leigh Brackett’s heroes quested for adventure and fabulous treasures across a swampy, sultry Venus full of decadent Venusian natives, dangerous low bars where the unwary might get their throats slit, lost civilizations, and forgotten gods, in stories like “Enchantress of Venus,” “Lorelei of the Red Mist” (with Bradbury), and “The Moon That Vanished.”

Venus also featured as a setting in somewhat more mainline science fiction as well, outside of the confines of the pure Planetary Romance story (which, truth to tell, was looked down upon as somewhat raffish and déclassé by the core science-fiction fans), being visited by Olaf Stapledon in Last and First Men, C. S. Lewis in Perelandra, John W. Campbell in “The Black Star Passes,” Henry Kuttner in Fury, Jack Williamson in Seetee Ship and Seetee Shock, Isaac Asimov in the YA series of Lucky Starr books, A. E. Van Vogt in The World of Null-A, Robert A. Heinlein in “Logic of Empire,” Space Cadet, Between Planets, and Podkayne of Mars, Fredrick Pohl and C. M. Kornbluth in The Space Merchants, Poul Anderson in “The Big Rain” and “Sister Planet,” and no doubt in hundreds of other stories, most long forgotten.

Then, abruptly, the Venus bubble burst.

On December 14, 1962, the American Mariner 2 probe passed over Venus, and the readings from its microwave and infrared radiometers were dismaying for anyone holding out hope for life on the planet’s surface, showing Venus to be much too hot to support life. These findings were later confirmed by the Soviet Venera 4 probe, and by other probes in both the Mariner and Venera series, and the picture they painted of Venus was very far from salubrious. In fact, far from being a planet of world-girdling oceans or vast swamps and jungles, far from being a home for mysterious alien civilizations, Venus was revealed as being one of the places in the solar system that was the most hostile to life: with a surface temperature averaging 863 degrees Fahrenheit, it was the hottest planet in the solar system, hotter even than the closest planet to the Sun, Mercury; the famous permanent cloud cover was composed of clouds of sulphuric acid, not water vapor; the atmosphere was composed of 96.5 percent carbon dioxide, and the atmospheric pressure at the planet’s surface was ninety-two times that of Earth, as severe as on the bottom of the Earth’s oceans.

There couldn’t possibly be any life on Venus. No dinosaurs. No web-footed amphibious natives. No ferocious warriors to have swordfights with or beautiful green-skinned princesses in diaphanous gowns to romance. It was just a ball of baking-hot rock and scalding poisonous gas, duller than a supermarket parking lot.

Almost at once, science-fiction writers lost interest.

There was one last great Venus story published, the nostalgic and deliberately retro (since the author certainly knew better by then) “The Doors of His Face, The Lamps of His Mouth,” by Roger Zelazny, published in 1965.

By 1968, Brian W. Aldiss and Harry Harrison had edited a retrospective anthology called Farewell, Fantastic Venus!, bidding a nostalgic farewell to the Venus story.

And after that, the Venus story effectively disappeared.

For a while.

Few if any stories set on Venus—or, for that matter, on Mars, or on any of the other planets of the solar system—were published in science fiction in the seventies. By the eighties, though, and in an accelerating fashion throughout the nineties and the oughts, science-fiction writers began to become interested in the solar system again, as subsequent space probes began to make it seem a much more interesting and even surprising place than it had initially been thought to be. They even returned to Venus, as the idea of terraforming Venus to make it conducive to life—something first suggested, as far as I know, in Olaf Stapledon’s Last and First Men in 1930—began to be explored by writers like Pamela Sargent and Kim Stanley Robinson. Dome cities armored against the heat, intense pressure, and poisonous atmosphere of Venus began to appear in stories like John Varley’s “In the Bowl,” as did even more popular options, huge space stations in orbit around the planet or floating cities that hover permanently in the cooler upper layers of Venus’s atmosphere.

So there have been plenty of stories about the New Venus in the last couple of decades. One of them, using the floating-cities model, Geoffrey A. Landis’s “The Sultan of the Clouds,” won the Theodore Sturgeon Memorial Award in 2011.

But some of us missed the Old Venus, the Venus of so many dreams over so many years.

So why not write about it?

After all, as my coeditor George R. R. Martin pointed out in his introduction to this anthology’s companion volume, Old Mars, science fiction is and always has been part of the great romantic tradition in literature, and romance has never been about realism. After all, as Martin says, “Western writers still write stories about an Old West that never actually existed in the way it is depicted; ‘realistic Westerns’ that focus on farmers instead of gunslingers don’t sell nearly as well. Mystery writers continue to write tales of private eyes solving murders and catching serial killers, whereas real life PIs spend most of their time investigating bogus insurance claims and photographing adulterers in sleazy motels for the benefit of divorce lawyers. Historical novelists produce stories set in ancient realms that no longer exist, about which we often know little and less, and fantasy writers publish stories set in lands that never did exist at all.”

So why not rekindle the wonderful, gorgeously colored dream of Old Venus?

So we contacted some of the best writers we know, both established names and bright new talents, and told them that we weren’t looking for pastiches or postmodern satire, or stories set on the kind of terraformed, colonized modern Venus common in most recent science fiction, or orbital space colonies circling the planet high above, or domed cities set in hellish landscapes with poisonous atmospheres, but for stories set in the kind of nostalgic, habitable Venus found in the works of writers like Leigh Brackett, Edgar Rice Burroughs, C. L. Moore, Otis Adelbert Kline, Poul Anderson, Robert A. Heinlein, and so many others, before the hard facts gathered by space probes blew those dreams away. Stories set in the old-style Venus of vast swamps and limitless oceans and steaming jungles and wallowing dinosaurs. And Venusians, another sentient race to interact with, one of the great dreams of science fiction, whether that interaction involved swordfights or romance or close scientific observation or exploitation or uneasy coexistence.

The results of those newly hatched dreams of Venus are to be found in this anthology, stories that will take you to places that you’ve never been—but will not regret having visited.