I was in the third grade, at home sick with the measles in the era before the MMR vaccine. I was reading a book my parents had bought for me and my brother Bruce, A Child's Book of Stars by Sy Barlowe, and I became fascinated by a picture on the first page showing a caveman looking up at the sky. The fur-clad Neanderthal peered out into the wondrous, star-studded night sky, blacker than anything we have ever seen because all those shopping malls and street lights weren't to appear for tens of thousands of years. But then I turned a few pages, and I was drawn into a fantasy that changed my life. A veiled, crescent Venus loomed on one corner of the page, but at the bottom was a scene of what the surface of Venus might look like. A low fog clung to rugged canyon lands, and in the foreground were fern trees and exotic plants. “The temperature is possibly not too extremely hot nor too extremely cold and plants and animals could live there,” the text declared (Figure 2.1). The landscape just pulled me in – I could imagine being there and exploring this tropical world. Enclosed in my little bedroom, I was simply awed by this enlargement of my world. The idea was firmly planted in my mind that one day we must go to this planet.

Many other children's books showed a lush Venus. Space Cat Visits Venus by Ruthven Todd has Space Cat and his human guide – a gun-toting cowboy type – cavorting among exotic jungle plants. Encounter Near Venus by Leonard Wibberley shows a flying saucer taking off from a swamp. Heinlein's Podcayne of Mars takes place partly on Venus, but this Venus is run by a latter-day monopoly where money isn't only the only currency, but the only everything. In adult science fiction, just about every human activity is replicated on Venus, in stories that underscore both the scientific and cultural labels of their times and their authors. Under the pen name William Tenn, UFO researcher Philip Klass wrote the short story On Venus Have We Got a Rabbi! – which takes the “who is a Jew?” question into outer space.