Last year, Gutenberg posted the 1947 collection of George Oliver Smith's 1942-5 SVL4 stories (1949 reprint). I found out over the past week, after purchasing a used copy of the 1970s69 reïssue. That issue sports additional content like an Arthur C Clarke foreword.
75 years later - public domain, all legal, w0000t. I don't feel too suckered; the copy only cost me like $2 and it's good for reading while walking.
As ACC notes, GOS is seminal in hard SF. Which has its drawbacks. I've read the first three stories so far: "QRM: Interplanetary", "Calling the Empress", and (last night) "Recoil".
Smith was a telecom engineer during the War so that's the plot for the first two stories. First, some despot in northern Venus (Alpha Regio?) is sending a message to Earth; then, there's a plague on Venus (cue the "venereal disease" jokes) so ships in-flight to Venus need to be steered around it. These Macguffins are, of course, bogus. But Smith seems to know they're Macguffins, Smith might even know the word "Macguffin".
Accordingly I don't quite read when Smith predicts these events be occurring. I can suggest one constraint, in "QRM" - if we steelman the necessary communications to tightbeam. Earth and Venus are not in line-of-sight. That constrains those events to the early-2000s (or to some cycle afterward). Ordinarily our Sun shouldn't block mutual communications.
One misstep is that Smith - at least in "QRD" - seems unaware that a Lagrangian is a halo orbit. The station should be lazily crawling fore and aft in a long (three-dimensionally) curved ellipse. And it should be dealing with rubble. Later Smith does note meteors, which help the "Recoil" story so -maybe someone mailed his magazine?
On the social side of dynamics some might care that there's borderline xesualhassarment going on, between the big men and the female secretaries. I might even be one of those who care. Probably those stations in our day, which is not 2012, are getting Grok-powered Alexa, so the misfits and nerds on those stations can go flirt with her. A problem for 2117 mayhap.
By contrast Smith has a keen eye for male dynamics. Dynamics like how engineers use tablecloths for blueprints because they're not allowed paper - they'd just fly aeroplanes from them. Dynamics like that micromanaging midwit Burbank in "QRM".
As to the physics, that matters in explaining how Burbank's wellmeaning, GCSE-tier understanding thereof is destroying the station in "QRM". That might well have inspired Pournelle's "High Justice" stories, along with knockoffs like L Neil Smith (who famously does away with Venus itself). Our Smith brings an Asimovian "atomic pile" to power his station, not a mercury boiler as I'd dimly (mis)remembered others saying of this oeuvre. Which comes in handy when Smith's lads are electron-'cuting a pyrate in "Recoil".
As noted: our boy is a Maxwellbro.
As other zeerust goes, everyone smokes - on an oxygen-rationed and air-filtered starbase. I gotta assume, they vape instead. And they use FREEDOM units not metric. Sigh.
People get from place-to-place in these inner planets by non-Hohmann high-thrust high-impulse beasts. Neukart fusion, maybe. Ideally brachistochrone trajectory, although Smith doesn't spend as much effort around launch-windows as, say, Harry Bishop did.
The science gitz a little less gud in "Empress". This goes around - how do we find a 200-meter ("six hundred-odd foot") bucket of aluminum in space, and contact it. Any brachistochrone must emit massive energy in the infrared so - it can't be that hard, down here. And the Empress hasn't got any receivers tuned to Earth, Venus, or the Equilateral which, I'm sorry, is highly irresponsible. Over on the Equilateral's side why ain't it got some 'scopes on the Gaia or Webb tech-level? Where's Gaia or Webb themselves, or the equivalent on (say) Deimos? Maybe the Burbank mess might account for some of these shortfalls.
UPDATE 12/20 - when MacGuffins take over. Yeah, I'd call the more-important stories for these first three; plus, "Off the Beam" and "Firing Line" I daresay. On the second “Calling the Empress”, Porcius couldn't into the math. So we nerds'll want to read "Another 'Deadline'?".
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