Venus in Fiction - Desert

Desert

Descriptions of a hot, humid planet were already considered scientifically doubtful as early as 1922, when Charles Edward St. John and Seth B. Nicholson, failing to detect the spectroscopic signs of oxygen or water in the atmosphere, proposed a dusty, windy desert Venus. The model of a planet covered in clouds of polymeric formaldehyde dust was never as popular as a swamp or jungle, but featured in several notable stories, like Poul Anderson's The Big Rain (1954), and Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth's novel The Space Merchants (1953).

However, the more optimistic notions of Venus were not definitely disproved until the first space probes were sent to Venus. Data from the fly-by of Mariner 2 (December 1962) as well as radio astronomy from the same time pointed to a hot, dry Venus, but as late as 1964, Soviet scientists were still designing Venus probes for the possibility of landing in liquid water. It was not until Venera 4 and Mariner 5 reached Venus (October 18–19, 1967) that it was confirmed beyond doubt that Venus was actually an extremely hot, dry desert with a lot of sulfuric acid in its atmosphere. Stories about wet tropical Venus vanished at that point, except for intentionally nostalgic "retro-sf", a passing which Brian Aldiss and Harry Harrison marked with their 1968 anthology Farewell Fantastic Venus.

As scientific knowledge of Venus advanced, so science fiction authors endeavored to keep pace, particularly by conjecturing human attempts to terraform Venus. For instance James E. Gunn's 1955 novella "The Naked Sky” (retitled the "The Joy Ride") starts on a partial terraformed Venus where the colonists live underground to get away from the still deadly atmosphere. Arthur C. Clarke's 1997 novel 3001: The Final Odyssey, for example, postulates humans lowering Venus's temperature by steering cometary fragments to impact its surface. A terraformed Venus is the setting for a number of diverse works of fiction that have included Star Trek, Exosquad, the German language Mark Brandis series and the manga Venus Wars. In L. Neil Smith's Gallatin Universe novel The Venus Belt, Venus was broken apart by a massive man-made projectile to form a second asteroid belt suitable for commercial exploitation.