Smith was a SF writer during the war, when he wrote the famous Venus Equilateral stories. This yarn is still hard SF but more mainstream space opera and less engineer's fantasy. Still, no one writes quite like Smith: "The book had been thrown at Charles Farradyne. Then they had added the composing room, the printing press, and the final grand black smear of printer's ink. So when Howard Clevis located Farradyne working in the fungus fields of Venus four years later, he found a beaten man who no longer burned with resentment because he was all burned out."