Space fiction is no longer fiction in the same way that it used to be. There was an element of distance and strangeness about it a few years back. Now, fact has caught up and threatens to overtake. Science fiction today has become science prediction.

An atom is a miniature solar system in some respects. The clustering molecules resemble galaxies, colloids are, perhaps, tiny models of the whole creation. Man stands midway between the unbelievably small and the unbelievably huge. This is one of the allies of science fiction. We look down into the mysteries of the infinitesimal; we look up into the majesty of the macrocosm.

In all this vastness of stars and planets there must be other life. One day we shall make contact with that life. What will the aliens be like? How will human culture compete with non-human culture? Which will survive?

"Orbit One" is the story of such an interaction.

The only lesson we learn from history is that we never learn from history. Primitive weakness destroys just as surely in the age of Rock and Roll as it did in the days of the harp or the spinet. Man has nothing to fear so much as human frailty. Material progress alone means nothing. Whether you kill your enemy with a club, a musket, or an atomic bomb .... he is equally dead! Civilisation will be no better a thousand years from now unless man changes his nature. An ape in a space ship is just as much a jungle beast as an ape in a tree.

Fear is the fetter that holds the cave man, the twentieth century man and the space man of tomorrow. Doubt is his chain.

This is an intensely gripping, human story of the men who will fly space liners into infinity .... The man who can conquer himself can conquer a galaxy.