"Go back and kill Hitler and the Japanese and Soviet leaders - maybe someone shrewder would take their place. Maybe atomic energy would lie fallow, and the glorious flowering of the Venusian Renaissance never happen. The devil we know...."
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 3, p. 17.
"Piet Van Sarawak (Dutch-Indonesian-Venusian, early twenty-fourth A.D.)..."
-Poul Anderson, "Delenda Est" IN Time Patrol, pp. 173-228 AT 1, p. 174.
Both these stories were published in 1955. In 1967, a Russian probe showed that Venus was in no shape to be colonized or to flower in a Renaissance any time soon. SM Stirling's "A Slip in Time," published 2014, shows that the Venus that we know had to be drastically terraformed before Van Sarawak could live there in 2332.
2 comments:
Note that Poul was canny when describing Venus in the Time Patrol series; he was carefully nonspecific -- he didn't say that Venus -was- naturally habitable, IIRC.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
True, but Anderson did revert to older hopes that Venus at least had liquid water in "Sister Planet."
And we see Venus being terraformed in "The Big Rain," with Jerry Pournelle later writing an essay using that title to argue for how Venus could be terraformed. His proposals might well need some updating, but I love the idea of making Venus habitable!
And Mars as well!
Ad astra! Sean
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