3 ideas
In Vladko's novel, first published in 1935 with a Russian translation in 1939, a Soviet crew flies a rocket ship to Venus, told in third-person narration. Beneath the planet's cloud cover they find a hot, swampy world of primitive, prehistoric-seeming life, which they must survive and study. It is an early Ukrainian science-fiction novel built around a crewed interplanetary expedition.
The novel treats Venus as a younger version of Earth: hotter, wetter, and at an earlier evolutionary stage. Under this lens, a trip across space also works as a trip back in time, so the explorers can see a geological past that on Earth survives only as fossils. The speculation turns astronomy into a natural laboratory for evolutionary history.
In keeping with 1930s Soviet ideology, the novel presents space travel as the product of organized collective effort and state-backed science, not of a lone genius or private adventurer. The expedition's announced prize is material: ultr gold to fight corrosion and infraradium to supply energy, sought for society's benefit rather than for personal glory.