Destination: Venus
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I have a new nonfiction article up on Clarkesworld Magazine, Destination: Venus, a followup to Destination: Mars from last year.
Like the last post, it covers a topic that I've been getting more and more interested in: how did we discover the Solar System, and how did we interpret those findings? Science Fiction is the ideal medium for making sense of the potential for life elsewhere in the galaxy or solar system, and what I'm finding most interesting is how seemingly at ease people were with the idea of life on other planets just a century ago.
It's interesting: Venus is so much different from Mars, and our stories about it are quite a bit different, yet the same. There's more about Mars as a potential second Earth, even though it's smaller and colder.
Like Mars, though, as we learned more about Venus, the stories changed. We couldn't live on Venus and nothing could, but SF has the enthusiastic optimism about the world: maybe we can terraform it, live in floating cities, or merely study it.