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ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME 2




Introduction
by ARTHUR C. CLARKE




T here cannot be many science fiction novels that end with a 40-page appendix full of mathematical
equations and electric-circuit diagrams. Don’t worry–this isn’t one of them; but just such a book inspired it,
half a century ago. And with any luck, during the next half-century it will cease to be fiction.

It must have been in 1937 or ’38, when I was Treasurer of the five-year-old British Interplanetary Society
(annual budget to start the conquest of space, about $200), that the BIS was sent a book with a rather odd title,
by an author with an even odder name. “Akkad Pseudoman’s” Zero to Eighty (Princeton: Scientific
Publishing Company, 1937) must now be quite a rarity: I am indebted to my old friend Frederick I. Ordway
III (responsible for the technical designs in 2001: A Space Odyssey) for the fine copy I possess.

The snappy subtitle says it all:


Being my lifetime doings,

reflections, and inventions

also

my journey round the Moon


Quite an “also”; I can hear the author’s modest cough.

He was not, of course, really Mr. Pseudoman, as the preface made clear. This was signed “E. F. Northrup,”
and explained that the book had been written to show that the Moon may be reached by means of known
technologies, without “invoking any imaginary physical features or laws of nature.”

Dr. E. F. Northrup was a distinguished electrical engineer, and the inventor of the induction furnace which
bears his name. His novel, which is obviously a wish-fulfillment fantasy, describes a journey to the Moon
(and around it) in a vehicle fired from the earth by a giant gun, as in Jules Verne’s classic From the Earth to
the Moon. Northrup, however, tried to avoid the obvious flaws in Verne’s naive proposal, which would have
quickly converted Ardan et al. into small blobs of protoplasm inside a sphere of molten metal.


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 ARTHUR C. CLARKE'S VENUS PRIME: VOLUME 2

Northrup used an electric gun, two hundred kilometers long, most of it horizontal but with the final section