On Earth, women govern, manage business, and make the important decisions. Men are considered emotional, impractical, and increasingly difficult to find.
For young Ferdinand Sparling, a voyage to Venus begins aboard a spaceship crowded with hundreds of women hoping to secure husbands on the male-dominated frontier. While exploring the ship, Ferdinand discovers Butt Lee Brown, a rugged Venusian stowaway returning home after an unsuccessful attempt to find a wife on Earth.
To Ferdinand, Butt represents everything adventurous and independent that his carefully ordered society distrusts. But when the stowaway meets Ferdinand’s older sister, Evelyn, competing ideas about love, authority, freedom, and the proper roles of men and women collide.
First published in *Galaxy Science Fiction* in 1951, *Venus Is a Man’s World* is a witty, provocative science-fiction satire that reverses familiar gender expectations and turns the planetary-romance adventure inside out. With sharp humor and playful exaggeration, William Tenn explores how societies create rigid roles—and what happens when people refuse to remain inside them.
Narrated by Todd Richards.
