Wikipedia:Today's featured article/October 17, 2023
The planet Venus has been used as a setting in fiction since before the 19th century. Its impenetrable cloud cover gave writers free rein to speculate on conditions at Venus's surface, which was often depicted as warmer than Earth's but habitable. Images of a lush, verdant paradise, an oceanic planet, or fetid swampland, often inhabited by dinosaur-like beasts or other monsters, became common in early pulp science fiction, particularly from the 1930s to the 1950s. Some stories portrayed the surface as a desert, or invented more exotic settings. Venusians were often portrayed as gentle, ethereal, beautiful, and female, after the Roman goddess Venus. Since the discovery of Venus's harsh surface conditions, the planet has mostly been portrayed as a hostile, toxic inferno. Some stories have imagined the planet's colonization and terraforming, although the vision of a tropical Venus has occasionally been revisited in intentionally retro stories. (Full article...)