by Arturo Serrano

It's an unfortunate cliché that an artistic temperament tends to prefer mystery over fact, as most famously expressed by Keats when he chastised Newton for figuring out rainbows. This attitude stems from the unhealthy mental habit of judging the real world to be dull. I'll be the first to agree that the real world can be unfair, disappointing, infuriating, but it's never dull. Disappointment with brute facts is a sign of distorted expectations. I suspect a similar mindset hides at the core of nostalgia: an unwillingness to learn, to let reality prove you wrong.

I had my first inkling of this type of nostalgia after spending many afternoons rereading the first science fiction publication I ever bought with my own salary: a used copy of the March 1960 issue of Fantastic magazine. The story featured in the cover illustration is Lloyd Biggle Jr.'s The Botticelli Horror, a murder mystery involving a shapeshifting mollusk from the swampy jungles of Venus. The year is a key detail: back then, it was still possible to write science fiction about the swampy jungles of Venus, as no one knew any better. Just as the conceptual realm used to distinguish "the morning star" from "the evening star" before it became known that in the physical realm both terms referred to the same object, science fiction authors used to write about a livable Venus, intending to suggest to the reader a notion of the real Venus, when people on Earth didn't know what the real Venus was like.

But soon after, people on Earth would be proved wrong.

Ziff-Davis Publishing Company, 1960.

In December 1962, NASA's robot spacecraft Mariner 2 reached the vicinity of Venus. It detected no protective magnetosphere, which means that the entire spectrum of solar and cosmic radiation reaches the planet unimpeded; and measured temperatures exceeding 300 °C on the night side, which are lethal for lifeforms like us, full of water in every cell. But that's not all the bad news. In October 1967, the Soviets also studied Venus, with the robotic probe Venera 4, which found no free oxygen in the air, at the same time that Mariner 5 was reporting that the atmospheric pressure is at least 75 times greater than on Earth. The picture that emerged couldn't be more the opposite of that imagined by the writers of planetary romance: it's inconceivable that anything lives on Venus, and if you're foolish enough to set foot there, it's a macabre exercise to try to predict what will kill you first: will the cosmic radiation cause massive organ failure quicker than the pressure can crush your body into a formless lump, or will you die of asphyxiation before the heat turns your blood to steam?

You've surely noticed what this revelation has meant for science fiction. The old Venus of swampy jungles where loinclothed barbarians ride dinosaurs into battle no longer exists. Or rather, in the spirit of epistemic accuracy, it never existed in the first place. And a general air of lamentation can be perceived among enthusiasts of the genre, a misplaced nostalgia for the unreal, a prime example of the fascinating phenomenon of fiction meeting fact and refusing to cede ground. The problem, they'll say, is that we know too much now. Of course, literature has no obligation to mirror reality; our new knowledge won't stop authors from imagining more tales of a habitable Venus, but those won't be science fiction; that subgenre of science fiction is henceforth closed off. Any author living today who wants to write about a habitable Venus has to be aware that they're creating fantasy.

This suggests to me a curious question that involves both the philosophy of language and literary taxonomy: when Mariner and Venera transmitted the data that showed us the true face of Venus, did every single pulp tale written thus far and set in a habitable Venus change its genre instantly—in the blink of a camera, as it were? Or, if we wanted to adopt a more nitpicking mood, should we say that it took us until this moment in the Space Age to learn that those stories had always been fantasy? There's an argument to be made that the effect can be retroactive: if the function of language is to refer to things, then the meaning of a text has to change (even if the text stays the same) when the things turn out to not match what the language was trying to point at.

Panther Books, 1971.

All this brings us to the main topic of this article. Farewell, Fantastic Venus! is a 1968 compilation (my edition is a reprint from this year) that collects some twenty pieces of fiction and nonfiction written before we received the first data from Venus. There's a loud statement in the choice of a melancholic title for the collection: those stories were originally meant to sound believable, but now they've become stories about a lie, about an implicit promise that was broken. Livable Venus occupies a place next to Lilliput in the history of descriptions of the impossible disguised in the language of the possible, with the difference that the creator of Lilliput knew he was lying, whereas Venus used to be a blank space where writers could project anything. I wonder whether sailors felt similarly cheated when the map of the world was filled in and all fantastical lands were exiled to the realm of imagination.

Continue reading [September 2, 1971] Cytherean Elegy (Farewell, Fantastic Venus!) →