The same points apply to this post as to the previous one.
The
Moon is the only planet visited by any of HG Wells' characters. Some
view Mars. Others are attacked by Martians and, later, know that the
Martians have also invaded Venus.
ER Burroughs, writing
not speculative fiction but "sword and science," gives us the Moon,
Mars, Venus, a Martian moon, Jupiter and one extrasolar planet. CS
Lewis, replying to Wells, gives us the Moon, Mars and Venus.
Olaf
Stapledon, Robert Heinlein and Poul Anderson all describe human
colonists of Venus. This is a strong conceptual link between these three
authors' future histories. In Anderson's second future history, the
unpleasant character, Snelund, comes from an inadequately terraformed
Venus. The Venerians of Heinlein's Future History also appear in Space Cadet, one of five of his Scribner Juveniles that I think can be described as the author's "Juvenile Future History."
Larry
Niven, writing after the Venus probes, describes the exploration but
not the colonization of that planet. The Venus that either is or can be
made to become habitable remains a part of sf mythology but has ceased
to be a setting for hard sf.
However, we think of Earth
as our mother and our descendants will probably think likewise of any
other planet that they come to inhabit. Thus, one of Anderson's Martian
colonists applies the feminine pronoun to his adopted planet, obviously
entirely forgetting Mars' original masculine persona.
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