Exiles on Asperus by John Wyndham

Author:John Wyndham
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: For the Benefit of Mr. Kite
Published: 1978-12-31T16:00:00+00:00

The Venus Adventure

1932

Tells of an early flight to Venus and the surprising world the crew of the Fyra discover. Not only are there intelligent indigenous lifeforms, and a breathable atmosphere, there are also fellow humans.

You may have read in the history books of Joseph Watson or, as he later called himself, Noah Watson; but it is probably that you have not found more than a slanting reference to his exploit. History is like that. As we go on with a longer and longer written record behind us, either events must be foreshortened and incidents dropped out, or else the earlier centuries must be lopped from our knowledge.

It is too much for any but a specialist or a group of specialists to study all the strange phenomena of human history. We have, therefore, in this year, 2926 AD, chosen the former expedient of compressing our knowledge and whittling it down to the main facts and causes, with the inevitable result that many figures, once of world importance, are now remembered only in the museum libraries.

No one, save perhaps his own followers, could have ascribed world importance to Joseph Watson, but there can be no doubt that he was a remarkable figure in his day.

He was born in Scotland in May, 2104. It was a natural birth, for in the more rural northern districts the people still clung with a Puritan obstinacy to the superstitious belief that an incubated child was bound to be abnormal in some way. The Anti-Incubation Society’s pamphlets with their spurious and harmful ‘proofs’ that no incubated child could possibly be considered to have a soul, were distributed in enormous numbers and with telling effect among the partly educated and the simple-minded. Such a prejudice dies hard and, even today, one sometimes hears of atavism to the extent of natural birth occurring in the obscurer corners of the earths.

Watson’s mother paid the penalty for her crudity and credulity by dying at the birth of her son – a very frequent sequel to such a primitive mode of reproduction, as will be well understood – and the fact that she handed her life on to him seems to have had a profound effect on his character. He is reported all through his schooldays to have been an ‘erratic youth, given to introspection and not without flashes of misleading genius.’ The phrase ‘misleading genius’ is puzzling, but there is little doubt that it refers to his strange, retrogressive mental outlook frequently shown by a firm adherence to principles long exploded.

It was during his university career that he entered upon a form of enthusiasm which will be understandable to few persons today, and therefore requires some explanation.

In 2123, the belief which all the world holds today, that of the Fundamental Order or Prime Origins, was known only to a small group. The rest of humanity grasped only a fragment of this whole and each section of people interwove its particular fragment with a different set of customs and superstitions to produce what it called a ‘religion’.

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