Stirling writes "...Venusian..." (p. 11), not "Venerian."
The image shows the planet Venus above water on Earth. One version of the goddess Venus rose from the sea. There used to be an idea that there was a lot of water on the planet Venus, the opposite of the truth.
Olaf Stapledon: sea-dwelling Venerians;
Edgar Rice Burroughs: Pirates Of Venus;
CS Lewis: an oceanic Venus, "Perelandra;"
Robert Heinlein: frog-like, swamp-dwelling Venerians;
Ray Bradbury: heavy rain on Venus;
Poul Anderson: an inhabited oceanic Venus in one story and an uninhabited dry Venus in another.
Also, the colonized Venus of Anderson's Time Patrol universe is one factor that does date that series historically. SM Stirling, implausibly, presents the Venus of the Time Patrol timeline as having been terraformed. (Stirling's Time Patrol story is discussed here.)
The Venus of Stirling's 2006 retro novel has an Arctic supercontinent and an Antarctic continent with a chain of islands between (p. 8).
11 comments:
Hi, Paul!
I like how you alluded to Poul Anderson's "Sister Planet" and "The Big Rain." And I think it was in "Delenda est" that we see mention of a colonized Venus in the Time Patrol stories.
"Sister Planet," of course, was such an emotionally gripping story that I could not bear to read it again for years! And "The Big Rain" was based on a sounder scientific understanding of Venus than the older watery world hypothesis.
Sean
IIRC, Poul -did- mention Venus being terraformed sometime in the Time Patrol series. One of the later stories, I believe. Operating from memory but I was working on that assumption.
IIRC, Poul -did- mention Venus being terraformed sometime in the Time Patrol series. One of the later stories, I believe. Operating from memory but I was working on that assumption.
Wow! Thanks.
Mr. Stirling and Paul:
And not just in one of the later Time Patrol stories written by Poul Anderson. Piet van Sarawak, a friend and colleague of Manse Everard is mentioned in "Delenda Est" as being a Venus terraformed futurewards of Manse's native milieu. This is what I found near the beginning of Section 1: "Piet van Sarawak (Dutch-Indonesian-Venusian, early twenty-fourth AD)..."
And "Delenda Est" was first pub. in the MAGAZINE OF SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY, December 1955.
Sean
Sean,
I knew of the passage that you quote but it does not state that that Venus had been terraformed. I took it to mean that van Sarawak's people had colonized an already habitable Venus of the kind that was assumed in pre-1960's sf. Of course, PA may later have added a reference somewhere to Venus having been terraformed...
Paul.
Hi, Paul!
True, I took the text from "Delenda Est" as IMPLYING Venus had been terraformed, altho it does not directly say so.
Sean
I did some Back of the Envelope calculations to estimate how long it might take to bring in enough water (or even just the hydrogen for the water) to make a shallow ocean on Venus. Using only physics as we know it, but assuming some impressive technology (Orbital Rings https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LMbI6sk-62E&t=7s ) I get at least a few millennia.
This makes a terraformed Venus in the 24th century a non-starter, but is not a problem for whoever terraformed Mars & Venus in the backstory to Stirlings 'The Sky People'
Kaor, Jim!
True, because the mysterious "Lords of Creation" terraformed Venus and Mars many thousands of years before THE SKY PEOPLE and IN THE COURTS OF THE CRIMSON KINGS.
Ad astra! Sean
Many millions of years before, judging by the descendants of imported dinosaurs on the terraformed Venus. Also if I recall the relevant part of the novel correctly, geologists among the colonists from earth dated the terraforming to well over 100 million years earlier.
Kaor, Jim! You are correct, I forgot about the dinosaurs. Ad astra! Sean
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