Characters and Plot
Most of the stories feature Dr. Donald A. Channing, Director of Communications at Venus Equilateral; Walter Franks, Beam Control Engineer; and Arden Westland, Channing's secretary turned fiancée turned wife. Other regular characters include heads of development Charles and Freddie Thomas, Master Mechanic Michael Warren, Martian archeologists Barney Carroll and James Baler, Baler's sister Christine, Terran Electric Company lawyer Mark Kingman, Terran Electric physicist Wesley Farrell, and neurosurgeon-turned-evil-genius Allison "Hellion" Murdoch. A frequent background character is Joe, operator of the "best Bar in Twenty-Seven Million Miles, Minimum!", upon whose tablecloths the engineers do much of their brainstorming.
The typical plot of a Venus Equilateral story consists of the station's engineers inventing new devices that allow them to solve the story problem.
Read more about this topic: Venus Equilateral
Famous quotes containing the words characters and, characters and/or plot:
“Unresolved dissonances between the characters and dispositions of the parents continue to reverberate in the nature of the child and make up the history of its inner sufferings.”
—Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900)
“When the characters are really alive before their author, the latter does nothing but follow them in their action, in their words, in the situations which they suggest to him.”
—Luigi Pirandello (1867–1936)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)