Uranus in fiction

Uranus has been used as a setting in works of fiction since shortly after its discovery in 1781, albeit infrequently. The earliest depictions portrayed it as having a solid surface, whereas later stories portrayed it more accurately as a gaseous planet. The moons of Uranus have also appeared in a handful of works. Both the planet and its moons have experienced a slight trend of increased representation in fiction over time.

Uranus

Uranus was discovered in 1781 and has comparatively rarely been featured in fiction since then; in the catalogue of early science fiction works compiled by E. F. Bleiler and Richard Bleiler in the reference works Science-Fiction: The Early Years from 1990 and Science-Fiction: The Gernsback Years from 1998, Uranus only appears in 6 (out of 2,475) and 9 (out of 1,835) works respectively, compared to 194 for Mars in fiction and 131 for Venus in fiction in The Gernsback Years alone. Various explanations for this lack of representation have been proposed, including the planet's relatively late date of discovery, its remote location, its presumed hostile environmental conditions, and its featureless appearance in telescopes.

Early depictions

The planet's first appearance in a work of fiction was in the pseudonymous "Monsieur Vivenair"'s 1784 novel A Journey Lately Performed Through the Air, in an Aerostatic Globe, Commonly Called an Air Balloon, from this Terraqueous Globe to the Newly Discovered Planet, Georgium Sidus, a satire of the then-reigning British monarch George III and his court. In the subgenre of works visiting multiple locations in the Solar System that appeared throughout the 19th century, Uranus was rarely included, one exception being the anonymously published 1837 novel Journeys into the Moon, Several Planets and the Sun.

Early works about Uranus incorrectly envisioned it as a solid planet. Human colonization of the planet and alien lifeforms living on the surface thus became recurring themes.