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"The world is really so surreal these days that it's necessary for us to blunt it somehow in order to stay sane. The artist functions to short-circuit the buffering mechanism, so that people can occasionally perceive the weirdness of things as they are."
- William Gibson
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| Interplanetary Communications Center | ||
| The backbone for a solar system-wide communications system. |
For those who don't know, George O. Smith was not only a science fiction writer, he was also an electronics engineer. Arthur C. Clarke (who himself invented the idea for the geostationary communications satellite in 1945) described Smith as "the first technically qualified writer to spell out the uses of space stations for space communications".
| The Venus Equilateral Relay Station was a modern miracle of engineering if you liked to believe the books. Actually, Venus Equilateral was an asteroid that had been shoved into its orbit about the Sun, forming a practical demonstration of the equilateral triangle solution of the Three Moving Bodies. It was a long cylinder, about three miles in length by about a mile in diameter...
This was the center of Interplanetary Communications. This was the main office. It was the heart of the Solar System's communication line, and as such, it was well manned. Orders for everything emanated from Venus Equilateral. |
| Technovelgy from QRM - Interplanetary,
by George O. Smith. Published by Street and Smith in 1942 Additional resources -
|
Compare to Communicate with Extraterrestrials from From the Earth to the Moon (1867) by Jules Verne, planetary telegraphing from In the Deep of Time (1879) by George Parsons Lathrop, the ether-traffic from The Duel on the Asteroid (1932) by P. Schuyler Miller (w/D. McDermott) and the Quantum Communications Hub from Defeated (2004) by Sean McKee.
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'Once in the very first weeks of the war, before everyone had been evacuated from the surface...'
'For a while your colonists will have to come up to the [orbital] Hospital...'
'...it raised its front end off the ground and waved its antennae at them, then raised one armoured claw as if to snip them out of the sky.'
'Henry... assumed the curious absent look of a robot talking on the TBR circuits.'
'The king, an old hand in the running of tyrannies, instantly grasped the directions...'
'...a hemispherical force field enclosing his head.'
