The War of the Wenuses

E-text prepared by David Starner, Edna Badalian, and the Project Gutenberg
Online Distributed Proofreading Team
Reprint of the 1898 ed. published by J. W. Arrowsmith Bristol, Eng.
Translated from the Artesian of H. G. Pozzuoli
Author of The Treadmill , The Isthmus of Dr. Day , The Vanishing Lady , etc., etc.
Not novels and poetry swipes, but ideas, science, books The Artilleryman
The Coming of the Wenuses.
The Coming of the Wenuses.

No one would have believed in the first years of the twentieth century that men and modistes on this planet were being watched by intelligences greater than woman's and yet as ambitious as her own. With infinite complacency maids and matrons went to and fro over London, serene in the assurance of their empire over man. It is possible that the mysticetus does the same. Not one of them gave a thought to Wenus as a source of danger, or thought of it only to dismiss the idea of active rivalry upon it as impossible or improbable. Yet across the gulf of space astral women, with eyes that are to the eyes of English women as diamonds are to boot-buttons, astral women, with hearts vast and warm and sympathetic, were regarding Butterick's with envy, Peter Robinson's with jealousy, and Whiteley's with insatiable yearning, and slowly and surely maturing their plans for a grand inter-stellar campaign.
The Wenuses seem to have calculated their descent with quite un-feminine accuracy. Had our instruments permitted it, we might have witnessed their preparations. Similarly pigs, had they wings, might fly. Men like Quellen of Dresden watched the pale pink planet—it is odd, by the way, that for countless centuries Wenus has been the star of Eve—evening by evening growing alternately paler and pinker than a literary agent, but failed to interpret the extraordinary phenomena, resembling a series of powder puffs, which he observed issuing from the cardiac penumbra on the night of April 1st, 1902. At the same time a great light was remarked by Idos of Yokohama and Pegadiadis of Athens.