"In the Walls of Eryx" by H. P. Lovecraft, with Kenneth Sterling

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Aaah, the old days before astronomy figured out what was really going on with the other planets in the solar system, and authors could dream up whatever they wanted for their stories without fear of contradiction by science.

The pictures used is a true color picture of Venus, taken by NASA's MESSENGER spacecraft in 2007. Kind of boring to look at. But then the first half of this story is pretty boring, the pacing is much too slow - it is far too obvious to the reader what is going on, but he really belabors it as if the reader simply wasn't bright enough to figure it out. Even the second half continued to drag in places. Not the best story from a story-telling perspective, my guess is the author was really just interested in the message(s) he wanted to get across and didn't worry himself to much about the rest.

The follow along: https://www.hplovecraft.com/writings/texts/fiction/iwe.aspx