Book download page: https://www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20230236
Before he wrote his most famous book, The Day of the Triffids, John Wyndham was writing wonderfully strange pulp science fiction under the name John Beynon Harris, and in 1932 he decided to send humanity to Venus.
Hundreds of years after an earlier expedition disappeared, the spaceship Fyra reaches Venus and discovers something nobody expected.
Somehow the descendants of that lost expedition survived, but after centuries on Venus they've developed into very different societies. And they aren't exactly getting along. Throw in the planet's intelligent native inhabitants, strange aircraft, an alien wilderness and a new group of Earth explorers suddenly dropped into the middle of everything, and you've got a proper old-school planetary adventure.
This is a 1932 pulp story, so some of its ideas about race, "civilization," human development and colonialism have aged pretty badly. But still an interesting bit of science fiction.
