The Long Way

In the 1940s, when science fiction still believed technology could save us, George O. Smith built something remarkable: a three-mile-long space station carved from an asteroid, hovering at the balance point between Sun and Venus. This is the Venus Equilateral Relay Station, where the galaxy's brightest engineers solve impossible problems with ingenuity and optimism. The Long Way follows Don Channing and his team as they receive a mysterious Martian device: a power transmission tube that could revolutionize energy forever. They dream of harnessing the Sun itself, beaming clean power across the solar system. But first, they must outmaneuver Terran Electric, the corporation that owns the patent and sees the engineers as threats to their monopoly. What follows is a tense negotiation where brains clash with bureaucracy, and the future of human technology hangs in the balance. This is engineering as adventure, where the greatest enemy isn't alien monsters but patent law and short-sighted executives. For readers who love watching competent people be competent, who believe in the promise of discovery, who want to remember when science fiction looked at the stars and saw possibility.