Where have all the Venusians gone?

[somecalmetim]

I found a box in the back of my favorite used book store packed full of old scifi magazines...

I have been reading them voraciously ever since...I ended up buying almost all of them...there was a 5 or 6 issues of "Startling Stories" from the 50's, 2 issues of "Worlds of IF", a whole bunch of "Magazine Of Fantasy & Science Fiction" ranging from the 50's through the 80's and 5 issues of "Nebula Science Fiction" also from the 50s...

Its been amazing to read the different stories and visions of the future from before the moon landing, the space race and alot of recent discoveries...In some the main characters are flying to Venus in rockets for a day or terraforming mars in a couple years for high end hotel/orgy getaways while other stories actually hit on some more modern ideas...

Like one story of a colonist from Venus who returns to earth to find that everybody has been put to sleep in embriotic fluid chambers fed through tubes by the world controlling AI computer because it was the only way the computer can follow its hedonistic rules and keep everybody "Happy"...OK so its not "exactly" like the matrix but as I read it, I found parts of it very "matrixy"...without the fetish clothing, Keanu or unecessary 2nd and 3rd movie.

When I read "Berzerker Planet" in "Worlds Of If" and found out it was to be continued the next issue I almost died until I found that the only other issue of "Worlds Of If" that the store had actually had the second part in it...

I advise everybody scour their neighbourhood firetrap of a used book store for some of these treasures...even the alien described in the books are different...so many aliens now adays are bipedal-humanoidish-cyborgy or bugs...why not "Disky" a 2 dimensional alien that can read your thought by turning sideways so you cant see him and passing through you...or something like a desk with a face...weird shaped ones that look like a hairy "Murphy The Molar" but 8 feet tall...and you could always solve downtown traffic congestion by making parked cars hover 10 feet off the street and driving underneath them...

[Windup]

Here's a thought:  If at least some Steampunk is set in the universe as the Victorians thought it was -- Moon with an atmosphere, "Luminiferous aether," etc.  is there room for a sub-genre in the universe we thought we had immediately after WWII?  Venus as a swamp, Mars as an old, but habitable desert, etc.? 

Granted, it didn't last long, though it lasted longer in fiction -- where genre conventions kept much of the solar system "warm and earth-like" long past the point where scientists knew that just wasn't true. But did it last long enough to create a compelling world view?

Or would an author attempting that today just look like somebody who couldn't get their facts straight?

[Corydon]

Windup, that's a great idea!  I'd love to see somebody run with it.  The problem, I think, is that there's not really nostalgia for the early Cold War in the way that there is for the Victorian era.  Still, it's neat to imagine people writing stories about cigarette-smoking scientists (and their lovely secretaries) taking trips to Mars...

[Windup]

And of course the tough, football-playing, all-American hero...

[Tango Alpha Delta]

And of course the tough, football-playing, all-American hero...

...whose arse is saved by the computer designed by the British homosexual.

[Windup]

And of course the tough, football-playing, all-American hero...

...whose arse is saved by the computer designed by the British homosexual.

That's the other place where this would get you into trouble.  Would you preserve all the conventions of that era -- just assume that many of those troublesome minorities simply don't exist, or clearly stick to their "assigned" places in the social order -- as an ironic fillip?   And if you did, would people understand what you were doing, or would they just assume you were a rabid reactionary?  (OK, the answer is "yes" for at least some, but most? Almost all? A few? How many will be armed and capable of finding your physical residence?)