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INTRODUCTION: DREAMING OF VENUS

Sometime during the early 1970s, the idea of writing a novel set on the planet Venus came to me. I can even recall where I first had the idea; I was sitting on the porch of the old Victorian house where I was renting an apartment, had just finished a game of chess with a friend who lived down the street, had been reading Carl Sagan’s speculations about the possibility of terraforming Venus, and had an impulse to write a lengthy and profound family saga along the lines of Thomas Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks. I’d already had the experience of writing a novel that was something of a family saga (my first novel, Cloned Lives, which was published in 1976), but this time wanted to write about several generations of a family.

I might have set such a story on an invented planet, but that didn’t appeal to me; why make something up when the solar system already offered a variety of fascinating settings? And the scope of a terraforming project—decades, most likely centuries, of efforts to make an inhospitably world habitable by humankind—required a story that would have to encompass generations.

From the start, I unconsciously realized that trying to write such a novel would take some time and demand a long-term commitment. I didn’t foresee that the one long novel I first imagined, Venus of Dreams, would grow into three massive tomes, require almost twenty-five years of writing and rewriting (about half of my adult life by the time the third volume, Child of Venus, was published in 2001), and eventually need successive agreements with four different publishers in the U.S. alone to get all of the volumes into print. I contracted with Pocket Books for the first book, Venus of Dreams, had that contract cancelled shortly before Pocket’s Timescape science fiction imprint was discontinued in the early 1980s, sold a trilogy including Venus of Dreams, Venus of Shadows, and Child of Venus to Bantam, saw Venus of Dreams published in 1986 and Venus of Shadows in 1988, had the Bantam contract abruptly cancelled while I was in the middle of writing the third volume in the early 1990s, and finally sold the orphaned Child of Venus in the late 1990s to HarperPrism, a division of HarperCollins, which brought it out under the Eos imprint acquired by HarperCollins after it took over William Morrow and Avon. The entire trilogy is now available, in both print-on-demand trade paperbacks and electronic editions, from E-Reads (http://ereads.com/).

This winding and uncertain course of publication put me through much stress, depression, and soul-destroying angst; had I known what lay ahead, I would have abandoned Venus of Dreams the day after the idea first occurred to me. But writers often sense that the writer is only a device for a story or novel to get itself written, and that what happens to the writer doesn’t much matter to the story. The Venus novels got themselves written, and that the process took as long as it did was partly because of the immensity of that task, partly because of broken promises by publishers, and partly because life does go on, and there were other things (including other books and stories) demanding my attention during those years.

I might have set my generational saga on Mars instead of Venus, but enough masters of science fiction had used Mars as a setting to make me feel I should head toward relatively unexplored fictional planetary territory. (Kim Stanley Robinson had not yet embarked on his masterful trilogy about the terraforming of Mars, nor had Greg Bear written Moving Mars, but H. G. Wells, Ray Bradbury, C. S. Lewis, Robert A. Heinlein, and legions of other masters had already dealt quite well with the Red Planet, and Joe Haldeman has recently inhabited it for his novel Marsbound.) Venus also offered opportunities for female imagery and for using the hellish environment of Venus, with its runaway greenhouse effect, to make some points about the increasing climatic threats to our own planet. But I didn’t expect, a decade after the last Venus novel was published, to feel as though I am now living through the early stages of the future history that I invented for those novels.

I got lucky with some of that future history. I call it luck because carefully considered futuristic extrapolations and forecasts have a lot less to do with my writing than instincts, unconscious processes, and often feeling that using one detail rather than another will make for a better story. Because I had read Soviet dissident Andrei Amalrik’s book Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, I assumed that the Soviet Union would have fallen apart sometime before the beginning of Venus of Dreams, a novel that begins some five hundred years from now. I was vague about when this fragmentation took place (a good rule for science fiction writers is: know when to be vague) and by the time I traveled to Russia, after Venus of Shadows was published, the Soviet Union’s disintegration was already under way and I could congratulate myself for being prescient.

Another notion that appealed to me was creating a future Earth dominated politically and culturally by Muslims. This had less to do with extrapolating a possible future and more to do with my desire to create a future that felt connected to our present and our past while also being convincingly strange and different. A story or novel for me almost always begins with a character (sometimes more than one character) trying to tell me a story. The character who began speaking to me when I first thought of writing Venus of Dreams was a young woman in North America trapped among the well-meaning but ignorant members of her family, with apparently no way out and no way to become part of the effort to terraform Venus. Only after I had written about her, and had completed a rough early draft of the novel, did I begin to get a fuller picture of her world. This future Earth was made up of nomarchies, provinces with a certain amount of cultural individuality and political autonomy but dominated by a council based in the Middle East and largely made up of Muslims. It seemed reasonable to assume that people there and in remnants of Russia and the East might pick up the pieces of an Earth ravaged by climate change and earlier conflicts that I called the Resource Wars. I didn’t lay out the background of my novel, the future history, charts of governmental and Venus Project hierarchies, maps, a chronology, and all the rest until I’d finished that first draft, which is normal for me even if it seems to be doing things in the wrong order. I have to let my characters clue me in, and only then can I dig into the details of their histories and cultures.

Given this backwards way of working, I’ve found myself surprised that I seem to have done a better job of prognosticating than I thought possible. The future history of climate change, diminishing resources, failing educational systems (most of the people in the Venus books, those who are not among the elite who have gained their power through the control of both resources and information, are illiterate or close to it), mosques dotting the American landscape (accompanied unfortunately by a rabid xenophobia that I hadn’t anticipated), deepening political divisions, and diminishing expectations is rushing upon us more quickly than I envisioned, and I am not at all convinced that it will lead to a terraforming project like the one I imagined or indeed to a promising or sustainable future.

But I can hope.

I was sure that I was finished with the Venus terraforming project and also any fiction even slightly related to the trilogy once Child of Venus was written (I estimate that the published novels contain some 750,000 words), but as I’ve said, stories will get themselves written however they can. The stories in this book were not part of the Venus trilogy, but were written after I had finished Child of Venus, when characters and stories existing in the interstices of the novels began to speak to me. These are stories that can stand alone outside that context, but I hope that they will allow some readers to revisit those books and perhaps others to discover them.

―Pamela Sargent

Albany, New York

December 30, 2011