Setting Your Science Fiction Story on Venus

Our reading group recently read a story set on Venus. I don’t want to mention it specifically because this essay isn’t about criticizing such stories, but I want to discuss science fiction set on Venus in general. Before we knew what Venus was like, science fiction writers often used that planet. In the 1930s, Edgar Rice Burroughs began a series of books set on Venus. The first novel was called The Pirates of Venus. This series was never as famous as his Mars and Tarzan stories, or even his Pellucidar books. Burroughs’ used Venus to satirize communism. He imagined it as a watery world. C. S. Lewis started his Space Trilogy in 1938. The second volume, Perelandra, is set on Venus. Like Burroughs, Lewis makes his Venus a watery world. Lewis used his story to explore religion. Ray Bradbury was famous for his Mars stories, but he wrote short stories set on Venus, too, one where it never stopped raining. Bradbury and Leigh Brackett wrote a famous planetary romance, “Lorelei of the Red Mist”…