Jovian (fiction) - Jovians in Literature

Jovians in Literature

• In H. P. Lovecraft's Cthulhu Mythos (1928–...), Jupiter was the one-time home of the flying polyps.
• The Conquest of Two Worlds (1932) by Edmond Hamilton. Humans explore the solar system and discover intelligent life on Mars and Jupiter, and proceed to ruthlessly conquer and subjugate it. Jupiter is a humid jungle world with high gravity. The natives are friendly, hairless beings with thick hands and legs ending in flippers, small heads and large dark eyes.
• In Isaac Asimov's short story Victory Unintentional (1942), human colonists on Ganymede send robots to Jupiter to contact the Jovians, who are planning a war with the humans.
• In Poul Anderson's Three Worlds to Conquer, sympathetic Centaur-like Jovians are in danger of extinction by cruel invaders from another region of the planet. At the same time their friends, the human colonists of Ganymede, are threatened by a powerful space warship commanded by a dictatorial militarist. Eventually, the two groups find ingenious ways to help each other defeat their respective enemies.
• In John Carter of Mars: Skeleton Men of Jupiter (1943), the eleventh and last Barsoom book by Edgar Rice Burroughs, the hero John Carter is kidnapped and taken to Jupiter by its inhabitants, the Morgors, also called "Skeleton Men" because they look like walking human skeletons. Jupiter is described as a harsh world warmed only by volcanoes, with forests of sentient trees.
• Arthur C. Clarke's A Meeting with Medusa (1972) proposes giant mile sized medusa-like creatures living in Jupiter's atmosphere.
• Arthur C. Clarke's 2010: Odyssey Two (1982) depicts city-sized, cloud-like creatures, squid-like animals, and creatures resembling terrestrial aircraft.
• Ben Bova's novel Jupiter (2001) also features massive whale-like creatures kilometers long living in the liquid stage of Jupiter's atmosphere and are pictured as being intelligent.
• In the Larklight Trilogy by Philip Reeve, Jupiter's moons are inhabited by a variety of races. The planet itself has sentient storms the largest of which, Old Thunderhead, is worshipped as a God. The planet also possesses floating creatures that resemble animals in Earth's oceans.