Editing Venus (section)

===Modern culture===
{{See also|Venus in fiction}}
[[File:Van Gogh - Starry Night - Google Art Project.jpg|thumb|Venus is portrayed just to the right of the large cypress tree in [[Vincent van Gogh]]'s 1889 painting ''[[The Starry Night]]''.<ref name=Whitney_1986/><ref name=Boime_1984/>]]

The impenetrable Venusian cloud cover gave science fiction writers free rein to speculate on conditions at its surface; all the more so when early observations showed that not only was it similar in size to Earth, it possessed a substantial atmosphere. Closer to the Sun than Earth, the planet was often depicted as warmer, but still [[Planetary habitability|habitable]] by humans.<ref name="miller"/> The genre reached its peak between the 1930s and 1950s, at a time when science had revealed some aspects of Venus, but not yet the harsh reality of its surface conditions. Findings from the first missions to Venus showed reality to be quite different and brought this particular genre to an end.<ref name=Dick_2001/> As scientific knowledge of Venus advanced, science fiction authors tried to keep pace, particularly by conjecturing human attempts to [[Terraforming of Venus|terraform Venus]].<ref name=Seed_2005/>