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"[Science fiction is] anything that turns you and your social context, the social you, inside out."
- Gregory Benford
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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 -
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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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'Drake was the young spatial engineer he employed to terraform the little rock...'
'It diverts integers of the data, the fundamental message-units, so that they no longer agree.'
'Clothes are no longer made from dead fibers of fixed color and texture that can approximate only crudely to the vagrant human figure...'
'Books were just a commodity that had to be produced, like jam or bootlaces.'
'...it rears and spreads its fan. It can pick one man out of a crowd.'
