Stephen’s Reviews > The Complete Venus Equilateral > Status Update

"The External Triangle" ***½ | The heroes of Venus Equilateral—and their progeny—finally crack teleportation with some judicious use of solid-state devices and quantum mechanics... And a cute lampshading of the fact that all the previous stories were supposed to have been done with vacuum tube tech.

"Mad Holiday" *** | Essentially the end of the mainline Venus Equilateral stories, ending like any good engineering story should: inventing its way to obsolescence. But some insane tonal shifts bring it down somewhat, and make the ending less plausible.

Pandora's Millions ***½ | Venus Equilateral has invented a matter duplicator that can record the "signal" of any object, and so the race is on to make sense of this new economic paradigm. The actual story is weighed down somewhat by a series of miniature John Galt-ish speeches but the resolution is quite clever (and not Randian), which saves it.

"Special Delivery" **** | One of the sillier stories with some courtroom hijinks, but also one that, in its technobabble, adheres very close to the sf genre definition of "affirms the rational knowability of the universe, and has as its most particular reader experience the sense of conceptual breakthrough."

Firing Line **** | We might finally be getting into space opera territory with that lasers-vs-electric-torpedos spaceship duel. Also the space pirate "Hellion" Murdoch is an interesting villainous interpretation of what would otherwise be a straight super-science hero, thwarted by a team of merely above average technicians.

The Long Way **½ | Golden Age sf has a strange subgenre involving lawyers. This is one of those stories: a lawyer from Terran Electric wants to stonewall Venus Equilateral and prevent them from using the Martian power-beam device for communications. The banter is funny and the tech interesting (if basically magic) but the conflict is lackluster.

Off the Beam ***½ | The nice thing about all of these stories are that they are wish fulfillment (for electrical engineers, at least) but not over the top power fantasies. Of course Don Channing and the rest of the protagonists have massive plot armor, but they don't have superpowers other than a heroic unflappability in the face of, say, collision of their spaceship with an asteroid.

Lost Art ***½ | Possibly the most "science the shit out of this" story so far: two electrical engineers on Mars discover a buried Martian tower with a full engineering manual, which they decipher and use to construct... something. Just have to keep testing it! Pure EE/Popular Mechanics fan service, but also fun.

"Recoil" *** | A would-be space pirate threatens Venus Equilateral, just in time for the engineers to test their prototype meteor-deflecting electron mega-gun. The dialog is pure cheese, when it's not two engineers sketching out the plan for the space gun. That part gets a bit overlong but otherwise it's just as fun as the rest, in its cheesy ultra-Forties way.

"Calling the Empress" ★★★½ | It seems like these stories are going to be basically Forties-slang versions of "The Martian": science-ing the shit out of whatever fresh challenge comes their way, and not by any magic superpowers. This time it's the challenge of radio communications between Venus Equilateral and a spaceship... probably less challenging with modern robotics and computer tech, but definitely not easy.