| Typology Venusian |
| Total Entries 30 |
| Representative Lup |
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In the early days of science fiction, the one thing most people knew about the planet Venus (or rather, most people who knew anything about Venus or any other planet in our Solar System for that matter, which at the time included only a very limited group of enthusiasts with university education) was that it has a permanent cloud cover over its entire surface. This led to many depictions of Venus as a planet where it rains a lot, often to the point where it’s a “Single-Biome Planet” covered in oceans, or at least swamps or rainforests. Relatedly, there was a theory at the time that the planets were formed in reverse order from their proximity to the sun — therefore, just as Mars was thought of as a much older world than Earth (and a glimpse of its possible future), Venus was believed to be a younger planet, with all the humidity and heat of our world’s distant past. Therefore, speculation on what sort of life might be found on Venus tended towards stereotypes about the tropics and the ancient past: Venus was often imagined as going through its own “Age of Reptiles”, full of “Living Dinosaurs” or “Lizard Folk”, and any “Human Aliens” encountered would be very much of the “Nubile Savage Green-Skinned Space Babe” variety. All this dovetailed nicely with the planet’s Roman namesake, as it seemed very appropriate that a planet named for a goddess of fertility and femininity (who was born from seafoam) should be so fecund and watery. In the 1960s, the planet was visited by unmanned probes which definitively established that the clouds were sulfuric acid, the atmosphere was largely carbon dioxide, and that due to the resulting greenhouse effect, the temperature at the planet’s dry and barren surface was nearly 900 degrees Fahrenheit (480°C). Instead of being able to walk around on Venus, anyone foolish enough to somehow set foot on its surface would be quickly crushed flat by the immense weight and pressure of the planet’s atmosphere, then reduced to a seething puddle of blood and gore under the effects of Venus’s incredible temperatures and the sulfuric acid present everywhere in its air. As a result, this is now a “Dead Horse Trope” used only by authors deliberately harking back to the old days of science fiction, or in works involving terraforming. Otherwise, the modern stereotype of Venus is as our friendly neighbourhood “Death World”… This trope, “Once-Green Mars”, and “Strolling on Jupiter” are subtropes to “Science Marches On” and therefore, more common in sci-fi works of the “Two-Fisted Tales” or “Planetary Romance” varieties. May overlap with “Hungry Jungle” and “Swamps Are Evil”… ~ Venus Is Wet – TV Tropes
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