Ice age Venus?
by James M. Jensen II
First, let me join those who've said thanks for putting this site together. I always loved the old SF stories and wished something like them were still plausible. Thanks for not only advocating for reviving the genre but putting together such a nice resource for doing it.
I do have a question: could a setting where Venus was not only habitable but with an ice age climate (that is, not completely frozen over, but similar to the last ice age Earth went through) qualify as NOSS?
To my knowledge, no story has ever portrayed Venus in this way, and certainly all common sense rails against it... but without a runaway greenhouse effect and given a material composition and rotation closer to that of Earth (in line with many OSS-era assumptions), the high albedo from the Venusian cloud cover, which is over twice that of Earth, suggests to me that under the clouds, a habitable Venus could actually have a significantly lower temperature than Earth.
The question is: if explained like this to the reader, could this still be within the "wrap" of Venus? Or would it violate common sense and OSS tradition too greatly?
{Comment from Zendexor: Let's have some other readers' thoughts on this! Central issues are raised here. By the way, James, your use of the word "wrap" is so handy, I think I'll shamelessly borrow it from now on. The "wrap" of Venus: that indeed is the nub of the matter. My immediate reaction is: successful wrapping-enlargement will depend upon the treatment of the theme, and specifically the degree to which the element of surprise is portrayed. If a deviation from the normal limits of the "wrap" is presented with a respectful degree of homage to the archetype which it is apparently flouting, then I suspect the author will get away with it. And "getting away with" things is after all the name of the game in the OSS! But as I said before, it would be good to have others' thoughts on this.
One related observation: the Mars of the French writer Gustave Le Rouge, in the first decade of the twentieth century, portrays regions of the Red Planet quite tropically hot. This apparently flouts the archetype just as much as an ice-age Venus, so it's interesting that (to my mind at any rate) Le Rouge gets away with it.}