Sexy Venusians and other fantasies from the brother world

Venusian women in the movie 'Queen of outer space'.

If there's life on Venus it's not going to look like Zsa Zsa Gabor, unfortunately.

In reality, from what we are intuiting, it will be insignificant and smelly, something more similar to what can be stuck in a shoe than to the voluptuous actress who played the Venusian courtesan Talleah in

(1958).

In the film, Venus appeared as a planet ruled by women fighting each other and to which an expedition of earthlings arrived to live adventures that the National League of Decency of the United States found morally objectionable and full of "unnecessary sicalipsis."

Science fiction has traditionally imagined the planet closest to ours as a kind of sister world (82% of the Earth's mass) but more exuberant, tropical, fertile, full of vegetation and water and with occupants often consistent with those features.

Gender has been very wrong with Venus.

Before the Soviet space probes

(1961-1984) and the

American

(1962) revealed the true nature of the planet, a decidedly inhospitable, infernal world (475 degrees temperature), a furnace in which lead would melt , and I'm not even telling you Zsa Zsa Gabor, which would also be flat (!) due to the pressure of the atmosphere, the fact that the planet was covered by clouds (it was believed that water vapor) and closer to the Sun invited to imagine a canicular scene with Cambrian-looking seas and swamps and dinosaur-like creatures.

HG Welles mentions in the epilogue of

that it is believed that the Martians marched for Venus after failing to conquer Earth: they will not have done very well either.

The sensual and lustful element has also been present in many fables (especially in

cheap literature), not for nothing does the planet be named after the goddess of carnal love and desire, and it can be said that on many occasions Venus has been of women.

There's another classic film,

(1968), which he adapted from a Soviet novel and directed for Roger Corman by none other than Peter Bogdanovich (under an assumed name).

Again a male Earth expedition arrived, in 1998! On Venus and ran into a female population led by the suggestive Mamie Van Doren (former Miss Palm Springs).

Here, that is to say, on Venus, the women were beautiful blonde mermaids in elephant-leg pants and shell bras who worshiped a pterodactyl (shiver Sagan and DeGrasse Tyson!) And freaked out when travelers killed her.

The film, which featured unforgettable dialogue ("did you hear? It almost sounds like a girl," "yes, a girl or a monster"), featured several classic elements of the way much science fiction has viewed. Venus: a mysterious, hot and humid world, largely covered by oceans (

), with swamps, giant plants, a heavy, cloudy, greenish atmosphere, and with a prehistoric fauna.

The worst thing Earth has sent to Venus is Abbott and Costello, who went wrong on their way to Mars in 1953.

In

(1934), the first title in Edgar Rice Burroughs' series about Carson Napier's adventures on the planet - similar to those of his John Carter on Mars - this is a dense arboreal world in which strange beasts thrive and different races of human beings "like ourselves."

Napier's adventures are not very different from those of Flash Gordon, who also frequently visited Venus (

), or those of Buck Rogers, another regular.

Significantly, a devoted science writer like Isaac Asimov also has cliched depictions of Venus in his literary output.

In

(1953), one of the adventures of his hero who chases evildoers through the Solar System, the planet is completely covered by the sea, under the turbulent cloud cover of radiant whiteness that hides everything ( and that paradoxically, by reflecting the sunlight, is what makes Venus shine so much in our sky).

Asimov's earthbound settlers (six million) live in underwater cities dedicated to the export of algae and enlivened by encounters with local aquatic fauna including mentalist frogs and a creature the size of countless whales.

Asimov later apologized, saying he wrote the story while the possibility that the planet contained large amounts of water was still being considered.

From the

measurements

we know that the surface of Venus is arid and scorching.

Asimov made another big mistake: to say that there were no mountains, when the planet has the Maxwell Mountains, which rise 11 kilometers, higher than Everest.

The Maxwells, by physicist James Clerk Maxwell, are, by the way, the only place on Venus with a male name.

All the others (Lakshmi plateau, Geneva plain, Ishtar and Aphrodite continents…) are female names, with a predilection for the way the planet has been called in other cultures.

It will be hell, but there is no denying that there is parity.

CS Lewis in

(1943), the name given to Venus in the novel, also imagined oceans, like Olaf Stapledon, and soaring waves, while Robert A. Heinlein made the planet a slave colony in

one of his various approaches to that world.

Arthur C. Clarke preferred Mars (and Jupiter beyond), a planet that has been much more interested in science fiction and has produced novels and films with more consistent speculation and a more powerful mythology.

All and so, Clarke (who has a moving account,

, about how the fledgling life on Venus succumbs to the garbage left by human astronauts) also succumbed to the siren voice of our neighbor and, when discovered that he did not there were seas, he regretted not being able to go there to practice his favorite sport, diving.

In

(1997), he had humanity launch comet chunks onto Venus to cool it down and make it habitable.

One of the most unforgettable depictions of Venus in science fiction is undoubtedly, although we will always link it more to Mars, that of Ray Bradbury in his ominous story

(1950), included in

.

In the story, a group of astronauts try to reach a hot, dry refuge on the planet while being driven mad by the continually falling rain.

On the Venus of Bradbury there is a single small continent surrounded by the One Sea.

In that portion of jungle land the rain has faded everything to a ghostly white.

The Venusians - who do not appear - stalk the earthlings to drag them into the sea and slowly kill them.

The story was one of those chosen from the book for the 1969 film version of

and was adapted for television in 1992 in which the outdated references to Venus were removed.

In fact, if sulfuric acid rains on Venus (the acid rain known as

, Bradbury was not so misguided with its alienating and lacerating rain, that rain "that drowned out all the rains and even the memory of other rains."

There is another Bradbury tale set on a rainy Venus, the melancholic

about a girl who misses the only time in every seven years when the sun rises on the planet.

In

(1951), by another teacher, Stanislaw Lem, in 2003 there are indications that the Tunguska explosion (1908) was caused not by a meteorite but by the fall of a ship coming from Venus that came with bad intentions;

An expedition then travels to the planet and finds that the aggressive civilization there has destroyed itself in a nuclear war.

The novel had a film version,

(1962).

Venus appears in the splendid and hilarious

(1953), by Frederik Pohl and Cyril K. Kornbluth.

The protagonist, a publicist, has to manage to make emigration to the planet attractive, life in which it is actually a horror.

In the sequel

in 1984, Pohl returned to his Venus in which, despite terraforming (the process of making it habitable), the heat outside the shelters can still melt the grinding wheel filling and the air. it is still poisonous.

It is not uncommon for the colonists to have a grudge against those who led them there.

Clifford Simak has a story,

, in which a doctor investigates a community in a colony of Venus who are the only people immune to a virus.

In general, the interest of science fiction by Venus declined considerably when it was known that it was the way it was, capable of melting the probes and the princesses, and discovering the extreme difficulty of colonizing it or simply visiting it one day.

Nonetheless, Larry Niven got close to that new Venus in

(1965) and Ben Bova on

(2000), while Frank Herbert, the author of

put the Foreign Legion to fight on his hell-clad surface. with super resistant suits

, 1986).

In a very suggestive twist, Garnett Elliott, dubbed the new

master

, has turned Venus into the scene of the Cold War confrontation (

, 2015).

Other authors such as Pamela Sargent (in the series started with

, 1986) and Kim Stanley Robinson himself, who has already adapted Mars, have imagined its terraforming based on scientific ideas.

There are also those who continue to nostalgically describe a fantastic Venus, of wild beauty, in which the fetid smell of phosphine does not dissolve the scent of white roses and citrus of

, the old

perfume

of Zsa Zsa Gabor.