Once imagined as humid and hot forested wetlands, shrouded in clouds, Venus was the setting for countless sci-fi pulp imaginings. Edgar Rice Burroughs, a prolific pulp sci-fi writer, wrote of a hot and wet Earth-like planet, with human-like inhabitants. Other writers and artists had similar notions of Venus. Stanislav Lem got a bit closer to reality when he described the surface of Venus as hellish in his 1951 novel The Astronauts, where it is revealed the former inhabitants committed nuclear suicide.
