"Parasite Planet" is a science fiction short story by American writer Stanley G. Weinbaum originally published in the February 1935 issue of Astounding Stories. It was Weinbaum's fourth published story, and the first to be set on Venus. He quickly followed it up with a sequel called "The Lotus Eaters". Weinbaum's Venus In the story, tidal locking keeps one side of Venus perpetually facing the Sun. This side of the planet is a barren desert. Towards the planet's twilight region the temperature drops below the boiling point of water and the Hotlands begin: an area of the planet inhabited by native life forms, all of them parasitic to a greater or lesser degree. "A thousand different species, but all the same in one respect; each of them was all appetite. In common with most Venusian beings, they had a multiplicity of both legs and mouths; in fact, some of them were little more than blobs of skin split into dozens of hungry mouths, crawling on a hundred spidery legs." The air of the Hotlands is hazy with spores which instantly infest any life-form unfortunate enough to have its skin pierced, and at the top of the Venusian food chain is the doughpot, a mass of fast-moving undifferentiated protoplasm that absorbs every living thing in its path, and whose touch is fatal to humans. Close to the terminator a constant wind from the night side of Venus brings the temperature below 80 degrees Fahrenheit, too cold for the spores and most of the other Hotlands' life. This is the Cool Country, where most of the planet's human settlers live. At the terminator itself, the lower wind from the night side meets a hot upper wind from the day side, resulting in a permanent violent thunderstorm. The precipitation from that storm falls as snow on the night side of the terminator, forming a vast ice barrier which slumps under its own weight into the dayside, then melts into rivers that flow away from the terminator until they evaporate in the growing heat. It is revealed in a later story, "The Planet of Doubt", that the United States had attempted to lay claim to all of Venus. The Council of Bern ruled in 2059 that planetary explorers could only lay claim to as much of a planet as they had explored. As a result, the United States was only able to establish a