Be Fruitful and Multiply (Patreon)

(See attached PDF)

I've been reading a lot of public-domain science fiction magazine stories via Project Gutenberg and thought I'd try my hand at writing one in that style. Two tourists land on Venus - what will they find?

I love the whiz-bang enthusiasm and retro flavor of those old stories, but they had some notable flaws, notably a striking lack of female characters and some pretty stereotypical and sidelined depictions of them when they do appear.  Two women leads, like I've got here, would be virtually unheard-of.  But I did make a new discovery I really enjoy - Evelyn E. Smith, who (while not immune to that kind of stuff) includes a lot of humor and a fair few good stories with women as protagonists. She also has some fun satirical stuff that plays with weight and society's attitude towards it - I looked up her old paperback, The Perfect Planet, which follows a pair of chubby Earth-people who land on a supposedly-uninhabited world only to find that it's home to the descendants of an abandoned and cut-off health resort, who've built a culture around physical perfection. Very silly, but fun.