Exiles on Asperus - John Wyndham
Aahh, some good old fashioned Boy's Own tales; ray guns and alien races; life on Mars and Venus and elsewhere; the future foretold. This is a collection of three stories from Day of the Triffids author John Wyndham. Two, Exiles on Asperus and The Venus Adventure, from the early thirties and the other, No Place Like Earth, from 1951.
The stories all look askance at the human race, using the horrors perpetrated in the name of colonialism as a model for how we will behave in space. The alien races are all far more moral than they are depicted. In Exiles on Asperus, Sen-Su, leader of the Martian revolution says: "They have made quite a bogy of me on Earth; I assure you they exaggerate. It has been Governmental policy to malign me - Governments have to create thorough-going villains. In private life we should call them liars, but in public life they are propagandists."
