- Smith, George O.
Venus Equilateral.
New York: Del Rey, [1942-1945, 1947, 1976] 1980.
ISBN 0-345-28953-6.
-
During World War II the author worked on one
of the most outrageous (and successful) electrical
engineering projects of all time—a vacuum tube radio
set manufactured in the tens of thousands, designed to
be fired from an artillery piece, withstanding
an initial acceleration of 20,000 gravities and spinning
at 500 revolutions per second—the
radio
proximity fuze. To relax, he
wrote the Venus Equilateral stories,
published in Astounding Science Fiction and
collected in this volume along with a retrospective
written in 1973 for an anthology in memory of long-time
Astounding/Analog editor John W. Campbell, Jr.
If you like your science fiction hard, this is about as
geeky as it gets:
“The nice thing about this betatron,” said Channing,
“is the fact that it can and does run both ends on
the same supply. The current and voltage phases are
correct so that we do not require two supplies which
operate in a carefully balanced condition. The
cyclotron is one of the other kinds; though the one
supply is strictly D.C., the strength of the field must
be controlled separately from the supply to the
oscillator that runs the D plates. You're sitting
on a fence, juggling knobs and stuff all the time you
are bombarding with a cyc.” (From “Recoil”, p. 95)
Notwithstanding such passages, and how quaint an interplanetary
radio relay station based on vacuum tubes with a staff of 2700
may seem to modern readers, these are human stories
which are, on occasions, breathtaking in their imagination and
modernity. The account of the impact of an “efficiency expert”
on a technology-based operation in “QRM—Interplanetary” is as
trenchant (and funny) as anything in
Dilbert.
The pernicious effect of abusive patent litigation on innovation,
the economics of a technological singularity created
by what amounts to a nanotechnological assembler, and the
risk of identity theft, are the themes of other stories
which it's difficult to imagine having been written half a
century ago, along with timeless insights into engineering.
One, in particular, from “Firing Line” (p. 259) so struck
me when I read it thirty-odd years ago that it has remained in
my mind ever since as one of the principal differences between
the engineer and the tinkerer, “They know one simple rule about
the universe. That rule is that if anything works once, it may be
made to work again.” The tinkerer is afraid to touch something
once it mysteriously starts to work; an engineer is eager to tear
it apart and figure out why. I found the account of the end of
Venus Equilateral in “Mad Holiday” disturbing when I first
read it, but now see it as a celebration of technological
obsolescence as an integral part of progress, to be welcomed,
and the occasion for a blow-out party, not long faces and
melancholy.
Arthur C. Clarke, who contributes the introduction to this
collection, read these stories while engaged in
his own war work, in copies of
Astounding sent from America by Willy Ley,
acknowledges that these tales of communication relays
in space may have played a part in his coming up
with
that
idea.
This book is out of print, but inexpensive used copies
are readily available.
September 2005 