Venus Equilateral

What Hacker News says

1. kcartlidgeMay 2023
   Multiple re-reads:

   - Saga of the Exiles by Julian May, which merges science fiction with folklore/fantasy in Pliocene Earth

   - Hyperion by Dan Simmons, excellent SF with a feel of the Canterbury Tales about it

   - Neuromancer by William Gibson, plus the follow-ups (all the Sprawl) are very good too

   - The Sheep Look Up by John Brunner, about the eco collapse of the US in the 1980s (10 years after it was written) and which William Gibson called a "brilliant novel"

   And a couple of guilty pleasures:

   - Venus Equilateral by George O Smith, 1940s stories based around a three mile long space station at the L4 point in space, a bit like Babylon 5 meets DS9 in the era of vacuum tubes

   - Necrotech by KC Alexander, a brutal and obscene body-mod cyberpunk dystopia (the sequel of which, Nanoshock, has a superbly offensive opening sentence)

   - Halcyon Drift by Brian Stableford, about a corporate dystopia and a pilot who hooks up his body to merge with his ship (a bit blase now but less so then, especially as I had read far less at the time)

   - Bio of a Space Tyrant by Piers Anthony, a 6 book series following the rise of a refugee to becoming the Tyrant of Jupiter

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2. jloughrySep 2018
   George O. Smith's Venus Equilateral stories from 1942–1945 are wonderful—if you like the idea of vacuum tube technology taken to extreme lengths.

   Lots of fun in those stories for engineers and hackers: spaceships that can accelerate at six gees but the passengers can't, capacitors charged up in the gigajoule range, walk-in electron guns (why bother with vacuum pumps when you're in space and can just build devices in the "open air"?), stock market manipulation by means of speed-of-light delay, and SLAs.

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3. FiatLuxDaveJun 2018
   I'd choose one of these two, since they both completely qualify as underrated:

   A) "Psychohistorical Crisis" by Donald Kingsbury, which is an unauthorized sequel set in the world of Asimov's Foundation Series.

   B) "Venus Equilateral" by George O. Smith, which is an old, rather cheesy sci-fi novel from the 1940s, which is basically a bunch of engineers on a communications space station fighting lawyers, bureaucracy, and space pirates through inventing stuff.

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4. FiatLuxDaveFeb 2017
   I was lucky enough as a kid to inherit my grandfather's collection of old sci-fi books. I first became aware of Q codes through the short story "QRM Interplanetary" from 1942 (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Equilateral).

   I find it interesting that Q codes have changed so little over the last century. I have some ham radio friends who will use Q codes when talking face-to-face with each other, and the codes they use are basically the same ones from the original list.

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