"Your child's book is trash! The only good thing is that it uses many difficult words for an eleven-year-old." These were the words directed at my elders by our literate neighbor. Up to that point, I had liked the woman for her intelligent conversation. For that reason, I had given her one of my favorite books, Skylark 3 by E. E.“ Doc” Smith.
Doc Smith was Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D., the Dean of Space Opera in the 1920s and 1930s. Much of the appearance of science fiction in today's movies and television is closer to the style of Doc Smith than it is to currently written fiction. Born in 1890, Doc grew up in rural America. Before attending college, he worked in many manual jobs requiring mechanical competence. Eventually, he earned his doctor's degree in food chemistry and began working on the problems of doughnut mixes.
In his first successful novel, The Skylark of Space, he decided to ignore science for the sake of telling a good story. His heroes, Dick Seaton and Martin Crane surpass the speed of light in their pursuit of the villainous Marc DuQuesne. In reference to special relativity, Crane says, "Too bad, and there goes another good theory." Three sequels followed Skylark, Skylark 3, Skylark of Valeron, and Skylark DuQuesne. The last appeared many years after the first three, just before Smith's death in 1965.
Smith's most influential books were the Lensman series. The action raged over two galaxies in a story that starts before the creation of the Earth. Most of this occurs in the novel Triplanetary, written last to set the stage for the remaining five books. Initially serialized in Astounding Science Fiction, Fantasy Press published the entire series. The books are beautifully bound, with a large letter and drawing enclosed in a box at the start of each chapter. Each drawing depicts a scene drawn from the chapter.
When the story was written, the most accepted theory for the development of planets was one suggested by the British Astrophysicist Sir James Jeans. His theory was that planets were created by two suns passing near one another, thus gravitationally pulling material from each sun. This material would then form planetary bodies. Smith used this idea by assuming the Milky Way Galaxy had collided with another galaxy, creating many planets. Before this event, our galaxy had only one planetary system. The original galaxy was inhabited by beings, the Arisians. These beings had evolved superintelligence with the means of determining future events by mental calculations to visualize “The Cosmic All.” The other galaxy became the host of a planet from another dimension. This world was the home of another super race, the Eddorians, also possessing extreme mental powers. The Eddorians intended to enslave the intelligent beings that would develop on the newly created worlds of both galaxies. The Arisians set themselves the goal of developing the future races to withstand the plans of the Eddorians who would eventually be eliminated. Eventually, the races of our galaxy banded together to form a union of policemen, the Lensman. The lens was provided by the Arisians as an unforgeable badge of office that gave its bearer limited mental superpowers. Though the Arisians provided this aid, the receivers were kept unaware of the existence of the Eddorians and the ultimate purpose of the lens. In the course of the series, Doc Smith created a number of interesting alien characters. Among these were the three lensmen, Worsel, Tregnesee and Nedreck. These lensmen worked with the main character Kimball Kinnison.
I was not alone in loving this stuff. George Lucas claimed the Lensman stories were a major influence on him. This is apparent in his creation of the Jedi. Also, J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5, has written that he was a fan of the novels. The producer Ron Howard tried to produce a Lensman film, but was stopped by budget problems. Even Jerry Siegel, the creator of Superman, acknowledged his liking for Doc Smith’s stories. Robert Heinlein became a close friend of Smith and paid him homage by using him as a character in several of his books. Heinlein himself said that Smith provided a model for Lazarus Long, one of Heinlein's most important characters.
Smith was especially adept at inventing imaginary machinery and weapons. In the Lensman novels, the spaceships are propelled by the inertialess drive. Looking at Newton's famous equation, force equals mass times acceleration; it is clear that by making the mass very small, very large accelerations could be achieved with very little force. The inertialess drive simply reduces the mass of the spaceship to near zero. The idea appears in many science fiction stories of the golden age; for example, it is used in Heinlein's novel Methuselah's Children. Smith created a weapon, the negasphere, which absorbed anything that came near it, a kind of black hole. This was done in the 1930s. Many of his ideas have since become the staples of space opera.
The question remains, what is the readability of Doc Smith's stories for the modern reader? After all, I read them in my early teens and still enjoy the occasional reread. It is hard to predict how coming at the books for the first time as an adult might be. Recall my literary friend that admonished my elders for letting me read Smith’s stories. Certainly, if you like Starwars and its clones, you might very well like the Lensman and Skylark stories. Ebook versions are readily available on Amazon at quite a low cost. They are also in the huge library of scribd.com as part of a subscription to that service. At the very least, they will most likely enlarge your vocabulary and make you aware of the sources of much present-day film and television science fiction. If you do wish to sample Smith's work, I suggest you start with Galactic Patrol. This is the third of the Lensman books, but the first two were frankly relatively boring and unneeded prequels. The last four, Galactic Patrol, GrayLensman, Second Stage Lensman, and Children of the Lens, make up the real story. The introduction to Galactic Patrol provides all you need to read the original core series. In my rereads, I never look at the first two novels, Triplanetary and First Lensman.
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