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.
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“The first glance at History convinces us that the actions of men proceed from their needs, their passions, their characters and talents; and impresses us with the belief that such needs, passions and interests are the sole spring of actions.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“To marry a man out of pity is folly; and, if you think you are going to influence the kind of fellow who has “never had a chance, poor devil,” you are profoundly mistaken. One can only influence the strong characters in life, not the weak; and it is the height of vanity to suppose that you can make an honest man of anyone.”
—Margot Asquith (1864–1945)
“We have defined a story as a narrative of events arranged in their time-sequence. A plot is also a narrative of events, the emphasis falling on causality. “The king died and then the queen died” is a story. “The king died, and then the queen died of grief” is a plot. The time sequence is preserved, but the sense of causality overshadows it.”
—E.M. (Edward Morgan)