The Oceans of Venus

Paperback. English. NEL. 1974. In good condition. Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus is the third novel in the Lucky Starr series, six juvenile science fiction novels by Isaac Asimov that originally appeared under the pseudonym Paul French. The novel was first published by Doubleday & Company in 1954. Since 1972, reprints have included a foreword by Asimov explaining that advancing knowledge of conditions on Venus have rendered the novel's descriptions of that world inaccurate. Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus was written in the mid-1950s, when little was known about Venus apart from its mass, volume, orbital characteristics, and the fact of its unbroken cloud cover. Asimov assumes that Venus has a temperate climate, with a period of rotation of 36 hours, a planet-wide ocean covering the surface, and an atmosphere that is 90% nitrogen and 10% carbon dioxide. He also assumes that the planetary ocean is covered with blue-green native vegetation, and that native animals inhabit the ocean. These animals, many of them phosphorescent, include an aggressive carnivore called an orange patch that shoots a jet of water at its prey, and the V-frogs, small sticklike animals that the human colonists keep as pets. Asimov's Venus has a human population of six million living in some fifty domed cities on the ocean floor. The largest Venusian city is Aphrodite, with a population of a quarter million. Venus' chief exports are fertilizer made from the native vegetation, and animal feed derived from cultivated yeast.