_QRM--INTERPLANETARY_

Venus Equilateral
    
George O. Smith
    
Illustrations by Sol Levin
    
_Special Delivery_

The Project Gutenberg eBook of Venus Equilateral
    
Sometimes it's a little hard to get people to realize that not only has
the world changed in the past, but that it is changing now, and will
change in the future. In fact, it takes something on the order of an
atomic bomb to blast them out of their congenital complacency.

And it took the literally shocking violence of the atomic bomb to make
the general public understand the fact that science-fiction is _not_
"pseudo-science" (that's what you find in Sunday Supplements--fiction,
pretending to be science) but an entirely different breed of
thing--fiction stories based on science, and attempting to extrapolate
the curves of past development into future years.

In essence, Venus Equilateral represents the basic pattern of
science-fiction--which is, equally, the basic pattern of technology.
First starting from the isolated instance, the effects spread outward
through the culture. Scientific methodology involves the proposition
that a well-constructed theory will not only explain every known
phenomenon, but will also predict new and still undiscovered phenomena.
Science-fiction tries to do much the same--and write up, in story form,
what the results look like when applied not only to machines, but to
human society as well.The science-fiction writer can be extremely accurate in the guesses he makes of future progress--and yet there are factors that may make a complete failure of his prediction.

George O. Smith is a radio engineer; radio is his field of technology. As such, his predictions tend to be based on the extrapolation of a single line of activity. But it may be that all his predictions may come to nothing due to a development in an entirely separate field of technical progress. It might be, for 

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