Before and after the Lensmen

 kw: book reviews, science fiction, space opera, story reviews

In my late teens and early twenties I read science fiction obsessively. So much so, the local library began buying more to meet the demand, though it was a "demand of one." Very early I read the Lensman novels by E.E. "Doc" Smith. The themes I remember are the Lens as an unforgeable authentication device; mental telepathy and other mental powers, first in the Arisians and later in the Lensmen; and the inertialess drive, which enabled space travel across the galaxy with the ease of crossing a county or state by automobile. The seven Lensman novels were published between 1948 and 1954.

I recently obtained the eBook The Space Opera Megapack, which contains two of Doc Smith's books in the form first published as serials. One is his first published novel, The Skylark of Space, published serially in Amazing Stories in 1928, where it got the cover illustration and his name highlighted (spelled out!), but his co-author Lee Hawkins Garby (who wrote the "love interest" parts) was not mentioned.

Skylark was published in 1946 as a hardcover, greatly edited, after other novels in the series had become popular; the Megapack version is the 1928 text.

It's funny. I've known about Skylark and its siblings for decades, but I don't remember reading any of them. I remember only the Lensman books. The space drive in Skylark, set in a thoroughly Newtonian universe, involves "release of binding energy" of the copper atom, facilitated by a newly-discovered element called "Metal X". Doc Smith had a dark view of human progress. The Military-Industrial Complex that President D.D. Eisenhower warned us about in the 1950's was already well advanced, and Smith expected it to worsen (Even he would be shocked at how bad is has become!). In the novel industrialists run things (as venally as possible), and the chemist-protagonist Dick Seaton has to covertly develop a spacecraft with the (expensive!) help of an honest industrialist, Martin Crane. It proves a success.

It's an engaging tale, though the social and romantic aspects are too saccharine for my taste. The riders of the Skylark find humans and near-humans on other planets they visit. Doc Smith thought of the Skylark books as "semi-science fiction". Indeed, if there were no relativity, no "speed of light limit", the energy needed to accelerate a huge spaceship to speeds many times that of light would require total annihilation of a mass greater than that of the spacecraft. A few hundred pounds of copper would hardly suffice.

The story suited the times. It is credited with setting off the entire genre of Space Opera, so its inclusion in the Space Opera compendium is entirely fitting.

The same volume includes Galaxy Primes, serialized in 1959 in Amazing, a very different story. Doc Smith wrote it with no co-author. The protagonists are "psionic Primes", with the highest order of mental abilities known on Earth (or Tellus, Smith's designation in most of his books). Two male Primes and two female Primes are put aboard a spacecraft with an experimental interstellar drive that is engaged by pushing a button. They push the button and find themselves so far from Tellus that no constellations can be recognized. There is a shorter-range drive, of an unknown type, for zooming around among planets in stellar systems. They eventually find out they are in a different galaxy!

The Primes find human life everywhere, plus Guardians who are semi-humanoid (4 arms and hatchet-shaped head), that oversee the human planets, to ends not discussed and thus secondary to the plot. Tellus has no Guardians (yet). The powers of the Primes using "Gunther" techniques, are godlike. There are lower-level psionic persons on most planets, and a few Primes scattered here and there.

The first part mainly involves the four Primes learning to get along and how they discover the way to control their interstellar drive. Once that is accomplished, they gather Primes from many other systems to form a pan-galactic organization, with ties to other galaxies. The distance the ship can jump depends on the power of the Prime who directs it, and only the leading Tellus Prime, Clee, and a few others, can jump galaxies.

Apparently Doc Smith wanted an Earth-grown version of the Arisians, and the novel investigates the implications of almost godlike humans. It's a fun read, though I don't imagine such powers being properly used by anyone until a few tens of thousands of years of moral development have occurred. We consistently misuse the feeble power we have…

Some of the other stories in the Megapack are quite good, but I found many others to be "barrel scrapings." Whatever it took to fill an eBook of 1,400 pages, of which I read about 3/4.