Invaders from Mars, not even a fruit basket from Venus.
Mars needs women, Venus doesn’t need anyone.
There are Martian chronicles, but not even Venusian post-its.
Most famous Martian? You can pick from Marvin, John Carter, J’onn J’onzz, Uncle Martin, and more. Most famous Venusian? Um … Bananarama?
In short, why does Mars get all the pop culture love?
Yes, a number of SF stories have been set on Venus. But the stories that have caught the mass imagination, that reached a broad level of popular awareness, seem to center around Mars, or about planets from beyond our solar system.
Why is that? What makes Mars such a fertile ground for pop aliens, while Venus remains as popularly obscure as its real cloud cover?
It was only until relatively recently that Mars was proven to be inhospitable. Back in the early twentieth century, when most of this stuff was produced, Mars could have been a site of advanced alien civilizations. Venus was put out of the running a bit earlier, and they knew it was covered in clouds, anyway, so it was more boring. There were in fact a decent amount of stories about colonies in the Venusian rainforests, though.
Other reasons are probably H.G. Wells’s book and the fact that War is a bigger hit with pulp sci-fi magazines and comics for kids than Love.
It probably started with the “canals” of Mars: Giovanni Shiaparelli, a 19th century astronomer, saw what he described (in Italian) as “canali” on the surface of Mars. The word just means “channels”, which could be naturally-occuring, but it got mistranslated as “canals”, which implies built things. If there are canals on Mars, then there must be canal-builders. But Venus, with its thick clouds, showed no such evidence, so it was anyone’s guess whether Venus was inhabited
Eventually, of course, it became clear that not only were the canali not canals, but that they weren’t at all. There are channels on Mars, but they aren’t what Shiaparelli was observing (what he saw was a combination of defects in the instrument and the human brain’s natural tendancy to see patterns). But about the same time that the canals went out of vogue, it also became apparent that Mars was much closer to being hospitable to life than was Venus. It’s still just plausible that Mars once supported life, and may conceivably even have some very rugged life buried in some nook or cranny somewhere, but nothing remotely resembling what we know could survive in Venus’s sulfuric acid pressure-cooker.
OP nitpick: John Carter was only an adopted Martian. Dejah OTOH… and let’s be frank: when you can put Ms. Thoris on the cover, without much to cover her with, you’ll sell a heap more books
Oh, and how could you forget:
Santa Claus conquers the Martians; the Venusians don’t even play @*&^#% dreidle.
But yes, Mars always had that hint of plausibility, as you could do more observing and more theorizing on your observations. Visible ice caps that wax and wane with winter and summer, plus what they thought were canals - OK, there’s something happenning! In the archetypes of the late 19th century, a rainy, steamy world would languish, while a dry, cold one would invigorate and challenge. And the clouds of Venus meant the Venusians/Venerans could not look back at us, while the Martians could… so it could be a two-way street.
When you concur a planet people usually take it as war.
For the people writing about aliens, Venus is a hot high pressure world who’s inhabitants would not have a biology compatible with Earth. Why would they invade the Earth? Mars is a lot closer to Earth conditions than Venus. Mars is also closer to Earth.
I think it’s because Mars is red, the color of blood and of war and Communism, through the cheapest telescope and even to the naked eye at times. That just makes it better for metaphors.
My advice though is save your money and don’t go to either. Ceres and Mercury respectively are what Mars and Venus used to be before the tourists and the ridiculous condo boom.
Here’s a Wikipedia entry on Venus is fiction. I agree with Vox that the popularity of Wells’s War of the Worlds helped make Mars the planet of choice for the more popular stories. The obscured nature of what was beneath the clouds could certainly have been made use of by creative people.
Venus is also the setting of one of my favorite scifi short stories, All Summer in a Day, by Ray Bradbury. (Spoilers in the article.)
Mercury’s molten lead springs have nothing on the molten sulfur of Venus. If you want that elsewhere you have to go all the way out to Io and the traffic around Jupiter is murder.
I have to give credit to the “canals” instead of Wells as the reason why Mars rose to preeminence. It was the first sign of life on another world (even if it turned out to be wrong) and it was certainly the spark that fired Wells’s imagination. Of course once Wells got in with his best seller and the Burroughs followed up with him the course was set and nothing for Venus in popular culture could compare.
Edgar Rice Burroughs, who brought us John Carter and the incomparable Dejah Thoris of Mars, also provided us with Carson of Venus, in a series of 5 books about action and adventure (and wimmen!) on the 2nd planet from the sun.
Possibly another point was the 19th century theory that the planets were formed when a contracting Sun spun out matter that coalesced into the planets. So the outer planets would be older than the inner planets. Although disproven as a valid theory by the end of the 19th century, it remained in the popular imagination, especially since the observed facts fit a superficial model of paleontology: Venus= young, warm, cloudy (swampy?) maybe like Earth in the Permian; Earth= middle aged, imtermediate temperature; Mars= old, dry, atmosphere lost to space, evidence of advanced civilization.
So Venus was the place to go if you wanted a dinosaur planet and maybe a cute cave-girl in a fur bikini. Mars was where you went for the planetary equivalent of Egypt, a desert planet with remnants of a lost super-civilization. S.M. Stirling had fun reviving this view in two recent SF novels.
