George Oliver Smith pursued an early interest in radio into two careers--as an electrical engineer and as a writer of technically detailed science fiction. Smith kept the future world of his fiction within the bounds of available scientific knowledge. He explains, often in great detail, how scientific speculation is transformed by engineering skill into material reality. Smith's work in the development of radar during World War II was a living example of how urgent problems engender technological miracles. He dramatized his experience in two series of short stories for Astounding Science-Fiction. One was the Plutonian Lens series of mildly technical space opera written under the pseudonym Wesley Long. The other series, twelve stories published individually from 1942 to 1945 and collected as Venus Equilateral (1947), established Smith's reputation as a writer of extrapolative science fiction based on the best current technical knowledge. The stories describe the technical difficulties of a space...