Old Venus is a work of fiction. Names, places, and incidents either are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.
Copyright © 2015 by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois
Introduction copyright © 2015 by Gardner Dozois
Story copyrights appear on this page
All rights reserved.
Published in the United States of America by Bantam Books, an imprint of Random House, a division of Random House LLC, a Penguin Random House Company, New York.
Title page illustration by Stephen Youll
BANTAM BOOKS and the HOUSE colophon are registered trademarks of Random House LLC.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Old Venus / edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois.
pages cm
ISBN 978-0-345-53728-7
eBook ISBN 978-0-8041-7985-0
1. Science fiction. I. Martin, George R. R., editor. II. Dozois, Gardner R., editor.
PN6071.S33O43 2015
808.83’8762—dc23 2014020453
www.bantamdell.com
Jacket design: David G. Stevenson
Jacket illustrations: © Stephen Youll
v3.1
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Copyright
Introduction: Return to Venusport
Gardner Dozois
FROGHEADS
Allen M. Steele
THE DROWNED CELESTIAL
Lavie Tidhar
PLANET OF FEAR
Paul McAuley
GREEVES AND THE EVENING STAR
Matthew Hughes
A PLANET CALLED DESIRE
Gwyneth Jones
LIVING HELL
Joe Haldeman
BONES OF AIR, BONES OF STONE
Stephen Leigh
RUINS
Eleanor Arnason
THE TUMBLEDOWNS OF CLEOPATRA ABYSS
David Brin
BY FROGSLED AND LIZARDBACK TO OUTCAST VENUSIAN LEPERS
Garth Nix
THE SUNSET OF TIME
Michael Cassutt
PALE BLUE MEMORIES
Tobias S. Buckell
THE HEART’S FILTHY LESSON
Elizabeth Bear
THE WIZARD OF THE TREES
Joe R. Lansdale
THE GODSTONE OF VENUS
Mike Resnick
BOTANICA VENERIS: THIRTEEN PAPERCUTS BY IDA COUNTESS RATHANGAN
Ian McDonald
Dedication
Story Copyrights
Other Books by This Author
About the Editors
Introduction
Return to Venusport
BY GARDNER DOZOIS
DAWN ON VENUS:
The sleek, furry heads of the web-footed amphibious Venusians break water near one of the rare archipelagos in the world-girdling ocean. Nearby, the toothy head and long, snaky neck of a Plesiosaur-like sea creature momentarily rears above the waves. Elsewhere, vast swamps are pocked and shimmered by the ceaseless, unending rain, while immense dinosaurian shapes grunt and wallow in the mud. Elsewhere, tall, spindly people in elaborate headdresses and jewel-encrusted robes walk across rope bridges strung between huge trees, bigger by far than any Terrestrial Redwood or Sequoia, and the spreading ashen light reveals that there’s an entire city up there, up in the trees. Elsewhere, shining silver rockets are landing at the spaceport at Venusport. Still elsewhere, the thick, fetid, steamy jungle is ripped asunder by a dinosaur-like beast, reminiscent of a Tyrannosaurus Rex, who emerges from the dripping vegetation and opens his massive, dagger-studded mouth to roar defiance at the morning.
Then, one day in 1962, all these dreams abruptly vanish, like someone blowing out a candle.
People have always noticed Venus (and sometimes worshipped it), perhaps because it’s the brightest natural object in the night sky, other than the Moon. In ancient times, they thought Venus was two separate objects, the Morning Star and the Evening Star—the Greeks called them Phosphoros and Hesperos, the Romans Lucifer and Vesper. By Pythagoras’s day in the sixth century B.C., it was recognized as a single celestial object, which the Greeks called Aphrodite, and the Romans called Venus, after the goddesses of love in their respective religions. Somehow, Venus has always been associated with goddesses, perhaps in contrast with the second-brightest object in the night sky, Mars, which because of its ruddy color was associated with war, usually the province of men and of male gods. The Babylonians, who realized it was a single celestial object hundreds of years before the Greeks, called it “the Bright Queen of the Sky,” and named it Ishtar, after their goddess of love, the Persians would call it Anahita after a goddess of their own, and Pliny the Elder associated Venus with Isis, a similar Egyptian deity. This earned it a nickname, still occasionally used, the Planet of Love.
When telescopes were invented, Venus could be seen to present a bright but featureless face to observation, and the idea slowly developed that Venus was shrouded in a permanent layer of clouds, unlike Mars or Mercury or the Moon, and speculation as to what might be beneath the swaddling clouds began, earning Venus its other nickname, the Planet of Mystery.
Clouds meant rain, and a planet permanently shrouded in clouds must certainly be a planet where it rained. A lot.
Just as future speculation about Mars was shaped by American astronomer Percival Lowell, who trained telescopes on Mars and believed that he saw canals there, most future speculation about what lay beneath the clouds of Venus was shaped and given direction by Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius, who speculated, in his 1918 book, The Destinies of the Stars, that the Venusian clouds must be composed of water vapor, and went on to say that “everything on Venus is dripping wet … A very great part of the surface of Venus is no doubt covered with swamps, corresponding to those of the Earth in which the coal deposits were formed … The temperature on Venus is not so high as to prevent a luxuriant vegetation. The constantly uniform climatic conditions which exist everywhere result in an entire absence of adaptation to changing exterior conditions. Only low forms of life are therefore represented, mostly no doubt, belonging to the vegetable kingdom; and the organisms are nearly of the same kind all over the planet.”
This idea, that the surface of Venus was covered with swamps, making it resemble Earth in the Carboniferous Period, would be the ruling paradigm for almost the next fifty years, along with the related idea that Venus was an ocean world, perhaps consisting only of one world-encircling sea. So pervasive was this vision that as late as 1964, Soviet scientists were still designing the Venera Venus probes for the possibility of landing in liquid water.
As the subgenre of the Planetary Romance slowly precipitated out of the older body of pulp adventure, the swamps grew jungles and dinosaurs, and the seas grew monsters.
In the heyday of the Planetary Romance, also called Sword and Planet stories, roughly between the 1930s and the 1950s, the solar system swarmed with alien races and alien civilizations, as crowded and chummy as an Elks picnic, with almost every world boasting an alien race that it would be possible for a Terran adventurer to have swordfights or romances with, even Jupiter and Saturn and Mercury. Mars always claimed pride of place, and was the preferred setting for most Planetary Romances—but Venus wasn’t far behind.