The planet Venus has been used as a setting in fiction since before the 19th century. Its opaque cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface—a "cosmic Rorschach test", in the words of science fiction author Stephen L. Gillett. The planet was often depicted as warmer than Earth but still habitable by humans. Depictions of Venus as a lush, verdant paradise, an oceanic planet, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like beasts or other monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly between the 1930s and 1950s. Some other stories portrayed it as a desert, or invented more exotic settings. The absence of a common vision resulted in Venus not developing a coherent fictional mythology, in contrast to the image of Mars in fiction.

When included, the native sentient inhabitants, Venusians, were often portrayed as gentle, ethereal and beautiful. The planet's associations with the Roman goddess Venus and femininity in general is reflected in many works' portrayals of Venusians. Depictions of Venusian societies have varied both in level of development and type of governance. In addition to humans visiting Venus, several stories feature Venusians coming to Earth—most often to enlighten humanity, but occasionally for warlike purposes.

From the mid-20th century on, as the reality of Venus's harsh surface conditions became known, the early tropes of adventures in Venusian tropics mostly gave way to more realistic stories. The planet became portrayed instead as a hostile, toxic inferno, with stories changing focus to topics of the planet's colonization and terraforming, although the vision of tropical Venus is occasionally revisited in intentionally retro stories.

Early depictions

The earliest use of the planet Venus as the primary setting in a work of fiction was Voyage à Venus (Voyage to Venus, 1865) by , though it had appeared centuries earlier in works depicting multiple locations in the Solar System such as Athanasius Kircher's Itinerarium Exstaticum (1656) and Emanuel Swedenborg's The Earths in Our Solar System (1758). Science fiction scholar Gary Westfahl considers the mention of the "Morning Star" in the second-century work True History by Lucian of Samosata to be the first appearance of Venus—or any other planet—in the genre.

Venus has a thick layer of clouds that prevents telescopic observation of the surface, which gave writers free rein to imagine any kind of world below until Venus exploration probes revealed the true conditions in the 1960s—Stephen L. Gillett describes the situation as a "cosmic Rorschach test". Venus thus became a popular setting in early science fiction, but that same versatility meant that it did not develop a counterpart to the image of Mars in fiction made popular by Percival Lowell around the turn of the century—with supposed Martian canals and a civilization that built them—and it never reached the same level of popularity. On the subject, Westfahl writes that while Mars has a distinctive body of major works such as H. G. Wells's The War of the Worlds (1897) and Ray Bradbury's fix-up novel The Martian Chronicles (1950), Venus largely lacks a corresponding canon.

One of the many visions was of a tidally locked Venus with half of the planet always exposed to the Sun and the other half in perpetual darkness—as was widely believed to be the case with Mercury at the time. This concept was introduced by Italian astronomer Giovanni Schiaparelli in 1880 and appeared in Garrett P. Serviss's A Columbus of Space (1909) and Garret Smith's Between Worlds (1919), among others. A common assumption was that the Venusian clouds were made of water, as clouds on Earth are, and consequently the planet was most often portrayed as having a wet climate. This sometimes meant vast oceans, but more commonly swamps and/or jungles. Another influential idea was the early version of the nebular hypothesis of Solar System formation which held that the planets are older the further from the Sun they are, meaning that Venus should be younger than Earth and might resemble earlier periods in Earth's history such as the Carboniferous. Scientist Svante Arrhenius popularized the idea of Venus being swamp-covered with flora and fauna similar to that of prehistoric Earth in his non-fiction book The Destinies of the Stars (1918). Whereas Arrhenius assumed that Venus had unchanging climatic conditions that were similar all over the planet and concluded that a lack of adaptation to environmental variability would result only in primitive lifeforms, later writers often included various megafauna.

Jungle and swamp Early treatments of a Venus covered in swamps and jungles are found in Gustavus W. Pope's Journey to Venus (1895), Fred T. Jane's To Venus in Five Seconds (1897), and Maurice Baring's "Venus" (1909). Following its popularization by Arrhenius, the portrayal of the Venusian landscape as dominated by jungles and swamps recurred frequently in other works of fiction; in particular, Brian Stableford says in Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia that it became "a staple of pulp science fiction imagery". Clark Ashton Smith's "The Immeasurable Horror" (1931) and Lester del Rey's "The Luck of Ignatz" (1939) depict threatening Venusian creatures in a swamp-and-jungle climate. "In the Walls of Eryx" (1936) by H. P. Lovecraft and Kenneth Sterling features an invisible maze on a jungle Venus.

In the planetary romance subgenre that flourished in this era, Ralph Milne Farley and Otis Adelbert Kline wrote series in this setting starting with The Radio Man (1924) and The Planet of Peril (1929), respectively. These stories were inspired by Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian Barsoom series that began with A Princess of Mars (1912); Burroughs later wrote planetary romances set on a swampy Venus in the Amtor series, beginning with Pirates of Venus (1932). Other authors who wrote planetary romances in this setting include C. L. Moore with the Northwest Smith adventure "Black Thirst" (1934) and Leigh Brackett with stories like "The Moon that Vanished" (1948) and the Eric John Stark story "Enchantress of Venus" (1949).

Robert A. Heinlein portrayed Venusian swamps in several unrelated stories including "Logic of Empire" (1941), Space Cadet (1948), and Podkayne of Mars (1963). On television, a 1955 episode of Tom Corbett, Space Cadet depicts a crash landing in a Venusian swamp. Bradbury's short story "The Long Rain" (1950) depicts Venus as a planet with incessant rain, and was later adapted to screen twice: to film in The Illustrated Man (1969) and to television in The Ray Bradbury Theater (1992)—though the latter removed all references to Venus in light of the changed scientific views on the planet's conditions. Bradbury revisited the rainy vision of Venus in "All Summer in a Day" (1954), where the Sun is only visible through the cloud cover once every seven years. In German science fiction, the Perry Rhodan novels (launched in 1961) used the vision of Venus as a jungle world, while the protagonist in K. H. Scheer's sixteenth novel Raumpatrouille Nebelwelt (1963) is surprised to find that Venus does not have jungles—reflecting then-recent discoveries about the environmental conditions on Venus.

Ocean Others envisioned Venus as a panthalassic planet, covered by a planet-wide ocean with perhaps a few islands. Large land masses were thought impossible due to the assumption that they would have generated atmospheric updrafts disrupting the planet's solid cloud layer. Early treatments of an oceanic Venus include Harl Vincent's "Venus Liberated" (1929) and Leslie F. Stone's "Women with Wings" (1930) and Across the Void (1931). In Olaf Stapledon's Last and First Men (1930), future descendants of humanity are modified to be adapted to life on an ocean-covered Venus. Clifford D. Simak's "Rim of the Deep" (1940) likewise features an oceanic Venus, with the story set at the bottom of Venusian seas, featuring pirates and hostile Venusian aliens. C. S. Lewis's Perelandra (1943) retells the Biblical story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden on floating islands in a vast Venusian ocean. Isaac Asimov's Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus (1954) depicts human colonists living in underwater cities on Venus. In Poul Anderson's "Sister Planet" (1959), migration to an oceanic Venus is contemplated as a potential solution to Earth's overpopulation. "Clash by Night" (1943) by Lawrence O'Donnell (joint pseudonym of C. L. Moore and Henry Kuttner) and its sequel Fury (1947) describe survivors from a devastated Earth living beneath Venusian oceans. Those two works have been called in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction "the most enduring pulp image" of an oceanic Venus, and the former received another sequel decades later, The Jungle (1991) by David A. Drake. Roger Zelazny's "The Doors of His Face, the Lamps of His Mouth" (1965) was the last major depiction of an ocean-covered Venus, published shortly after that vision had been rendered obsolete by advances in planetary science.

Desert A third group of early theories about conditions on Venus explained the cloud cover with a hot, dry planet where the atmosphere holds water vapor and the surface has dust storms. The idea that water is abundant on Venus was controversial, and by 1940 Rupert Wildt had already discussed how a greenhouse effect might result in a hot Venus. The vision of a desert Venus was never as popular as that of a swampy or jungle one, but by the 1950s it started appearing in a number of works. Frederik Pohl and Cyril M. Kornbluth's The Space Merchants (1952) is a satire that depicts Venus being successfully marketed as an appealing destination for migrants from Earth in spite of its hostile environment. In Robert Sheckley's "Prospector's Special" (1959), the desert surface of Venus is mined for resources. Arthur C. Clarke's "Before Eden" (1961) portrays Venus as mostly hot and dry, but with a somewhat cooler climate habitable to extremophiles at the poles. Dean McLaughlin's The Fury from Earth (1963) likewise features a dry, hostile Venus, this time rebelling against Earth. While these inhospitable portrayals more accurately reflected the emerging scientific data, they nevertheless generally underestimated the harshness of the planet's conditions.

Paradigm shift

In scientific circles, life on Venus was increasingly viewed as unlikely from the 1930s on, as more advanced methods for observing Venus suggested that its atmosphere lacked oxygen. In the Space Age, space probes starting with the 1962 Mariner 2 found that Venus's surface temperature was in the range of , and atmospheric pressure at ground-level was many times that of Earth's. This rendered obsolete fiction that had depicted a planet with exotic but habitable settings, and writers' interest in the planet diminished when its inhospitability became better understood.Some works go so far as to portray Venus as a mostly ignored part of an otherwise thoroughly explored Solar System; examples include Clarke's Rendezvous with Rama (1973) and the novel series The Expanse (2011–2021) by James S. A. Corey (joint pseudonym of Daniel Abraham and Ty Franck).

Nostalgic depictions