Some Familiar Ideas

Fury.

Human beings are living on Venus because:

"Science had perfected interplanetary travel and had destroyed Earth..."

-INTRODUCTION, p.5.

Sf futures in which Earth, or at least life on it, has been destroyed but human beings survive elsewhere:

After Doomsday by Poul Anderson;

a short story by John Wyndham which I have seen televised although I do not know the title!

(We often remember ideas from sf stories without remembering titles or authors. CS Lewis thanked unknown authors for ideas - and had an oceanic Venus.)

The surface of Venus is going through the "fury" of its Jurassic so people live under domes on the bottom of shallow seas. We need hardly list authors, including Poul Anderson, who imagined seas on Venus or indeed authors, including Anderson, who imagined a bone dry Venus. A Venus at an earlier stage of evolution is also a familiar idea although it did not occur to me in the 1960's to question whether planetary evolutions should parallel each other. In those days, not being scientifically oriented, I just accepted whatever ideas any given author presented.

There are mutants with a life-expectancy of two to seven hundred years. We have recently discussed works by Heinlein, Anderson and Blish in which such longevity exists. But why should such a mutation have occurred at the time when human beings have had to migrate to Venus? Again, "mutant" was one of those ideas that sf authors could arbitrarily draw upon.

Addendum: The mutations were caused by radiation on Earth. See also Poul Anderson, Twilight World.