Turner himself. Themes In Lucky Starr and the Oceans of Venus, Asimov returned to a recurring theme of his work — the use of mental powers to influence or control the actions of others. As far back as "Half-Breeds on Venus" in 1940, Asimov was writing about telepathic Venusians mentally controlling a native sauropod. The character of the Mule from the 1945 Foundation story of the same name, and Joseph Schwartz from the 1950 novel Pebble in the Sky could also use their mental powers to control others. Later, Asimov would introduce the mind-reading robot R. Giskard Reventlov in the 1983 novel The Robots of Dawn, and the telepathic world-entity Erythro in the 1989 novel Nemesis. Asimov's science-fictional mentor, John W. Campbell, was fascinated by the idea of telepathy, and as the editor of Astounding Science Fiction, he was able to ensure that his fascination was reflected in the stories his writers wrote and his magazine printed. Asimov also created a number of alien creatures to populate his Venusian ocean, and this was not a common theme of his. Asimov's works usually centered on the interactions of sentient beings, usually humans or robots, or occasionally intelligent aliens, with his fictional worlds serving only as backdrops. For Oceans of Venus, his only novel-length work set on that world, he hearkened back to the works of Stanley G. Weinbaum, whose imaginative alien ecologies made him a major figure in the science fiction field during his brief writing career in the mid-1930s. In his anthology Before the Golden Age, Asimov wrote that Oceans of Venus was "a conscious imitation of the spirit" of Weinbaum's 1935 story "Parasite Planet", which was also set on Venus. The growing Cold War background of the Lucky Starr series is also present in Oceans of Venus, though here it serves as a red herring, causing Mel Morriss to wrongly suspect a Sirian plot behind the growing troubles on Venus. Asimov also repeats a plot twist from David Starr, Space Ranger, momentarily throwing suspicion on one character before revealing that the actual villain is someone else. One unusual aspect of Oceans of Venus is the brief appearance of Lyman Turner's wife in chapter 7. Mrs. Turner is the only female character to appear in the entire Lucky Starr series. Both Turner and the Mule from the Foundation series are discovered and stopped due to very similar mistakes. The Mule