British television science fiction fiction was "Star Cops" (1987), which ran for only nine episodes to poor viewing figures on the corporation's second channel, BBC2. It was written by Chris Boucher, who had contributed scripts to "Doctor Who" and "Blake's 7", and was script editor for the later series entire run. The 1980s also saw the arrival on the BBC of two science fiction comedy series both of which had their origins on radio. The first was "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy" (1981) by Douglas Adams which amalgamated aspects of the original radio series with that of the subsequent novel. The second was
Planets in science fiction Mars as a more marginal desert planet. Mars remained a favored destination for fictional travellers down to the early 1960s (see Mars in fiction). Since probes revealed the absence of any indications of intelligent life on Mars, the science fictional Mars has changed to a possible future home for the human race, e.g. through terraforming. Venus was never quite so popular as Mars, probably because it obdurately refused to display any surface features (it is covered with sulfuric acid clouds only dimly translucent to visible light), making any statement about its nature disturbingly speculative. In 1918, chemist Svante Arrhenius, deciding