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A Visit to Venus cover

A Visit to Venus by George E. Hobbs

(Hobnob Press, 2021)

Reviewed by Andy Sawyer

It would probably be fair to say George E. Hobbs is unknown to sf fans. He is certainly not featured in the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, nor Brian Stableford’s Scientific Romance in Britain 1890-1950. Hobnob Press have masterminded a revival of this Swindon based author, a railway engineer most of whose works were produced for the local newspaper. A prolific writer of fiction and non-fiction (often on religious topics), Hobbs turned to sf on a number of occasions. This, the third book of his work published by Hobnob, is a long short story in which three young men journey to Venus and find a spiritually advanced race there. It was serialised in the Swindon Advertiser in 1927 and seems to have remained unknown since.

Like much early space-travel sf, technological wonders are to the fore. There is, for instance, a kind of televiewer which, as described, is extrapolated from the “etheric vocal and instrumental disturbances from a broadcast station”, and which eliminates the need for windows or periscopes. There are food-tablets. There is an ingenious if hand-waving motive power which depends upon “powerful magnetic antennae” allowing the controller to “reverse the poles of attraction and repulsion”. The ship is made from the secret alloy named “alumite”—which has “a specific gravity of 1.94 against that of 2.56 for aluminium”. Hobbs’s space-travellers (two Englishmen and a Frenchman) are no doubt much too well-bred to utter the exclamation “Gosh-Wow!” but nevertheless there’s a breathless excitement about the beginning when the narrator of the story’s “frame” reflects upon the manuscript in front of him and the ways in which it seems “preposterous”, “unthinkable”, “a phantasy written by an unbalanced mind.”

The “unbelievable” nature of the account is increased as narrator Jim describes the utopian Venusian society revealed by their guide, the Bible-and-Tennyson-quoting Mentor. There is tension when the diet of food-tablets becomes too much for the three Earthmen at the sight of some succulent fowls. There is high drama with an invisible foe. There is even a bitter-sweet romance. In all these, the ways in which Venus differs from Earth in custom and morality and the great Cosmic scheme of things are brought to the notice of our heroes. This, rather than the excitement of space travel, is what the story is about.

The introduction makes much of the early date (1927) of this story—an earlier visit to the moon, featuring some of the same characters, was published in 1923—and its resonances with modern humanist sf such as Star Trek. In truth, it comes across as interesting rather than gripping, featuring much of the collision of sf with spiritualism which is a feature of many 19th century examples. Although Hobbs apparently claimed that he “never read any of the fiction writers upon this subject [space travel]”, we are told of an earlier reference to the “Jules Verne school” and that he was an avid cinemagoer at a time when space travel was a popular subject—more tenuously, that he was receiving magazines from his brother in the USA, and could one of these be Amazing Stories?

The resonances that do come to mind—with the French writer Camille Flammarion, who also wrote of space voyages and the transmigration of souls from planet to planet—would seem to be more a case of shared ideas “in the air” during the late 19th and early 20th centuries than actual influence. Still, it is interesting to see A Visit to Venus as less a forecast of Star Trek, reversed polarities notwithstanding, and more a prototype for C.S. Lewis’s more gripping and theologically orthodox Perelandra, (1943), in which an “unfallen” world is also shown to us.

No undiscovered masterpiece, but a valuable instance of the way science fiction was being used by authors (and brought to audiences) largely unassociated with anything like an sf “industry”.

Review from BSFA Review 17 - Download your copy here.


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