Early depictions '' Jupiter was long believed, incorrectly, to be a
solid planet onto which it would be possible to make a landing. It has made appearances in fiction since at least the 1752 novel
Micromégas by
Voltaire, wherein an
alien from
Sirius and another from
Saturn pass Jupiter's satellites and land on the planet itself. In the 1800s, writers typically assumed that Jupiter was not only solid but also an
Earth-like world and depicted it accordingly. Jupiter resembles prehistoric Earth with a rich fauna full of lifeforms such as
dinosaurs and
mastodons in the 1894 novel
A Journey in Other Worlds by
John Jacob Astor IV. A few
utopian works of fiction of the early 1900s are set on Jupiter, including the anonymously published 1908 novel
To Jupiter Via Hell and the 1922 novel
The Perfect World by
Ella Scrymsour.
Jovians Most writers portrayed the inhabitants of Jupiter as being human, including
Marie Corelli in the 1886 novel
A Romance of Two Worlds and
Cornelius Shea in the 1905 novel
Mystic Island; Or, the Tale of a Hidden Treasure. Some portrayed Jovians as giant humans, including
Albert Waldo Howard in the novel
The Milltillionaire and
William Shuler Harris in the 1905 novel
Life in a Thousand Worlds. In the
satirical 1886 novel
A Fortnight in Heaven by
Harold Brydges, an Earthling who visits Jupiter finds a futuristic version of America and discovers that the planet is populated by giant counterparts of Earth persons. Others took different approaches to portraying the natives, such as
Fred H. Brown in the 1893 short story "
A Message from the Stars", where the planet is inhabited by the spirits of the dead, and
Homer Eon Flint in the 1918 short story "
The King of Conserve Island", where Jovians are winged.
Pulp era Jupiter made appearances in several
pulp science fiction stories, including the final
John Carter story by
Edgar Rice Burroughs, the 1943 short story "
Skeleton Men of Jupiter". In the 1933 short story "
The Essence of Life" by
Festus Pragnell, a
social scientist is visited by human-looking beings from Jupiter who reveal that they have a kind of
elixir of life that they are willing to share, but also that they are ruled by octopus-like beings who keep them as pets. Jupiter's
Great Red Spot is imagined as a landmass of shifting solidity which is mined for radioactive deposits in the 1936 short story "
Red Storm on Jupiter" by
Frank Belknap Long, and it leaves Jupiter entirely in the 1937 short story "
Life Disinherited" by
Eando Binder.
Surface As the conditions of Jupiter became better understood in the 1930s and onward, several stories emerged where the planet was portrayed as having a solid surface underneath a high-pressure atmosphere. In the 1944 short story "
Desertion" by
Clifford D. Simak (later included in the 1952
fix-up novel
City), humans who have been thus transformed find Jupiter a preferable place to live and refuse to leave. Descents into the atmosphere are commonplace, seen in such works as the 1960 short story "
The Way to Amalthea" by
Soviet science fiction authors
Arkady and Boris Strugatsky, the 1972 novel
As on a Darkling Plain by
Ben Bova, and the 1977 novel
If the Stars are Gods by
Gregory Benford and
Gordon Eklund. == Moons ==