Customer Reviews

Complete Venus Equilateral

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This book (a collection of related articles from one of the sci-fi magazines of the mid 40's) describes the world of the future before the transistor was invented (so the new technology is based on vacuum tubes!) This book is a refreshing and delightful look at life and invention on board a space station. From the manager of the local eating establishment (who gets annoyed when the engineers keep taking his tablecloths to the drafting department to document their designs) to the engineer who discovers how to move matter from point A to point B by transmitting it through the ether (and has a slight problem demonstrating this with a patent judge's antique pocket watch), engineers will especially enjoy this refreshing look at what the future could have been.

Fans of Arthur C. Clarke will be surprised at this book. Clarke is of course widely known as, among other things, the inventor of the idea behind the communications satellite. It turns out George O. Smith was there almost two decades sooner. (Clarke wrote an introduction to one of the editions of this book in which he gives credit to Smith.)

Similarly, fans of Larry Niven may be surprised. Remember the "enhanced tunnel diode effect" he proposed in his JumpShift cycle first showed up in a George O. Smith story. One of the ones reprinted here, in fact. (Niven gave credit to Smith in one of his essays.) Star Trek's transporter and replicator are here, too.

These stories are set on "Venus Equilateral" -- a giant, permanently-manned communications relay station, permanently parked in one of Venus's Trojan points (hence making an equilateral triangle with Venus and the Sun, get it?). Its purpose is to relay communications between Earth, Mars, and Venus when the Sun gets in the way. The lead characters are the staff who live aboard said space station, keep the message traffic flowing, defend themselves from enemies both legal and technical, and somehow find time to tinker up a few amazing gadgets. The period is a few-decades-after-tomorrow future in which an efficient replacement for rocket propulsion (the "driver tube") has been invented, opening up the inner solar system, and that's about the only thing they start out with that we couldn't build today.

Now... since "tomorrow" was from the point of view of the 1940s, the cosmology is dated: areas of Mars and Venus are seen to have shirtsleeve environments. And the technology looks... quaint. There's a priceless scene, for example, in which a gang of men open a hatch in the side of one of those driver tubes, walk inside, and change the spent cathode for a new one with the aid of wrenches and a winch...

Which sounds like I'm saying "don't bother, it's horribly dated," when I'm fact I'm saying the opposite. This book isn't really about vacuum tubes or space pirates. (Yes, there are space pirates here, and as presented, they, their economics, and their defeat are all believable.) What this book is really about is the camaraderie of a gang of competent people working together to solve problems; the sheer joy of tinkering and inventing; and some very human drama. The first two of those things are missing from a lot of today's sf, and I for one miss them. We could all use more of them in real life, too.

Smith didn't forget some of the sociology, either. Yes, he thought up Star Trek-style transporters and replicators, *and* provided a reasonable explanation for how they work (within the context reasonable as anything else you'll find in sf, anyway). But then he also explored the economic upheavals that will be inevitable if we ever do manage to "replicate" manufactured goods.

Now you're probably thinking, "Fine, but do I have to be an radio engineer to understand it?" Well, I have to admit: Smith was an electronics engineer himself (during the war he worked on the "radar proximity fuze," essentially radar sets small enough and rugged enough to be built into the tip of an artillery shell) and a lot of the workings of the gadgets here are based on sound electronics theory. Remember Heinlein's _Rocket Ship Galileo_? When that ship lifted off, you understood how it worked -- IF you knew something about nuclear reactors and the principles of rocket propulsion. Same here: if you know something about electronics, you'll get a lot more out Smith's gang of merry mad scientists.

But as with _Galileo_ that understanding really isn't necessary and you can skip over the tech if you want. If you want to think of the technology as simply being magic, feel free. It's just that understanding it makes the stories a lot more plausible.

Anyway, I absolutely guarantee you that if you're an engineer or scientist of any stripe -- particularly with some electronics background -- you'll love this book. (I handed it to one EE who said he doesn't like science fiction, but he liked this.) And even if you're a hardcore sociology or English lit. or marketing major, at the very least it will show you how it is that some of us techies seem to be having so darned much fun.

Venus Equilateral is a collection of short stories about great scientists who work on a relay station in the L4 or L5 orbit for Venus. The author, George O. Smith, realized that if people moved to Mercury, Venus and Mars, there would be times when the sun would be between two planets, making it impossible to communicate. The Venus Equilateral Relay Station was built to allow messages to be transmitted around the sun.

The stories are very dated. Many of the stories were published in Astounding Science Fiction between 1942 and 1945. Often the heroes go into technical details in trying to solve various problems.

Don Channing, one of the heroes, is the ultimate engineer. He is forced to deal with crooks, lawyers and businessmen. He and his gang whip out new technical marvels in almost every story. For example in one of the later stories they build a matter duplicating machine. George O. Smith does a great job in exploring the impact of that on society. Think about what it would mean if you had a machine that could duplicate money, gold, cars, books, and so on.

I did enjoy the stories, but the dated technical details bogged me down at times.