E.E. ''Doc'' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus
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From The SF Gateway, the most comprehensive digital library of classic SFF titles ever assembled, comes an ideal sample introduction to the fantastic work of E. E. ''Doc'' Smith, one of the most influential authors of the pulp era. Working with legendary ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION editor, John W. Campbell, Smith revolutionised space opera, giving it many of the tropes still evident today. This volume reprints the four novels of his classic Skylark series:
THE SKYLARK OF SPACE
SKYLARK THREE
SKYLARK OF VALERON
SKYLARK DUQUESNE
Release date: November 28, 2013
Publisher: Orion Publishing Group
Print pages: 800
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E.E. ''Doc'' Smith SF Gateway Omnibus
E.E. ''Doc'' Smith
Edward Elmer ‘Doc’ Smith (1890–1965) was a US food chemist (he specialised in doughnut mixes), and author, often called the ‘Father of Space Opera’; because Hugo Gernsback had appended ‘PhD’ to Smith’s name for his contributions to Amazing from 1928, he also became known as ‘Doc’ Smith. Greatly influential in US pulp-magazine sf between 1928 and about 1945, he found his reputation fading somewhat after the end of World War Two, when it seemed that the dream-like simplicities of his world-view could no longer attract the modern reader of Genre SF. But more than one of the speciality houses that became active after 1945 were founded in the awareness that his vast pre-War space-opera sagas, published only in magazines, had never achieved book publications; and his central corpus was soon made available to new readers. Towards the end of his life, after he retired around 1960, he began producing space operas again, and the work of his prime began to appear in mass-market paperbacks; his popularity soared, and though his reputation has faded to a degree in recent decades, he is by no means forgotten.
Smith’s work is strongly identified with the beginnings of US pulp sf as a separate marketing genre, and did much to define its essential territory: galactic space dominated by Galactic Empires, these usually being run by humans, though Aliens appear frequently, not only as villains; Space Opera plots, featuring heroes and their inventions, are the norm; wars rage across the parsecs. But although Smith’s protagonists fit comfortably into this universe, it is the case that his most developed (and numerous) protagonists, the Lensmen at the heart of the Lensmen epic, are also soldiers: willing employees in a higher cause. his later heroes – like Kim Kinnison himself – advance through promotion, and rule their universes as dictators in all but name, for the cause of Good.
When in 1915 Smith began to write the first novel of his Skylark series with Mrs Lee Hawkins Garby (1892–1953), a neighbour seconded to help with feminine matters such as dialogue, no prior models existed in popular fiction to source the combined exuberance and scale that The Skylark of Space (see below) demonstrated when the magazine version finally began to appear in Amazing Stories in 1928 (the book form only appeared in 1946); its two immediate sequels – Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron (see below for both) – add to the exuberance. (Skylark DuQuesne was published posthumously in 1966.)
But it was not until he began to unveil the architectural structure of his second and career-climaxing series that Smith was able to demonstrate the thoroughness of his thinking about Space Opera, though perhaps losing some of the spontaneity of Skylark. It is with the Lensman series – or The History of Civilization, the over-title for the 1953–1955 limited-edition boxed reprint of the original books – that his name is most strongly associated. In order of internal chronology, the sequence comprises Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second-Stage Lensmen and Children of the Lens. The Vortex Blaster, assembling stories published during World War Two, and only put in book form after Smith’s death, is also set in the Lensman Universe, probably some time before Children of the Lens; but does not deal with the central progress of the main series, the working out of which was Smith’s most brilliant auctorial coup. As resorted and augmented in book form, the first two novels, one of them written much later, likewise stand outside the main action; it is the central four volumes that constitute the heart of Smith’s accomplishment. Conceived as one 400,000-word novel, and divided into separate titles for publication between 1937 and 1948 in Astounding, this central Lensman tale is constructed around the gradual revelation, paced by moments that for many readers caught the essence of the Sense Of Wonder, of the hierarchical nature of the Universe: a sense that the universe was both infinitely surprising but, in the end, controlled by Arisians.
That gradual revelation is eschewed in the full series as published in book form. Here, we learn immediately that two vastly advanced and radically opposed Forerunner races, the good Arisians and the evil Eddorians, each dominating a separate galaxy, have been in essential opposition for billions of years. The Arisians understand that the only hope of defeating the absolute Evil represented by the Eddorians is to nurture the growth over aeons of a countervailing Civilization developed from their own ‘spores’ via special breeding lines on selected planets, of which Earth (Tellus) is one. Guided by their Arisian Secret Masters, these breeding lines develop heroes capable of enduring the enormous stress of inevitable conflict with the escalating galactic conspiracy of evil known collectively as Boskone, a force inimical to Civilization and secretly commanded through a nest of hierarchies by the invisible Eddorians.
As the conflict deepens, the Arisians (always in disguise) make available to their unknowing scions a Psionic pseudo-gem known as the Lens which – when attached physically to advanced specimens of the breeding programme, who have already formed a Galactic Patrol responsible for defending Civilization – awards them certain telepathic and other Psi Powers, operating both as a weapon and a communication device. The central figure of the series is the human Kim Kinnison, who with his wife represents the penultimate stage in the Arisian breeding programme, and whose children will finally defeat the Eddorians. As the central sequence progresses, we climb with Kinnison, link by link, through a vast chain of command, evil empire after evil empire, until he defeats Boskone and becomes, in essence, the ruler of the civilized universe. But Kinnison is destined only slowly to understand that the empire of Boskone, which he has destroyed through the use of weapons of unparalleled immensity, is not the final enemy, whose name he never learns, no more than he ever discovers the full truth about his own Arisian mentors, whose civilized precepts he enacts. Though his powers are vast, he remains ignorant of the true scale and nature of the Universe, which is greater, and requires greater powers to comprehend and confront, than even a hero with superpowers is capable of grasping. Perhaps the deepest attraction of the Lensman series lies in the fact that Kinnison, as ultimate commander of the organization of Lensmen (itself hierarchical), is licensed; but that only we (and his children) know who issued the licence.
After completing his central series, Smith wrote some rather less popular out-of-series books, none having anything like the force of his major effort. A decade after his death, books he had begun or completed in manuscript, or had merely inspired or authorized, began to appear in response to his great posthumous popularity. The best known of these is the Family d’Alembert series, published as by Smith ‘with Stephen Goldin’, derived some material from posthumous manuscripts; the first volume, The Imperial Stars (1976), was based on published material, but subsequent volumes were essentially the work of Goldin.
Smith was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall Of Fame in 2004.Today, while he must be read by anyone interested in understanding the deep appeal of American Genre SF in the days before World War Two, any revisit to his work should be made in the loving awareness that he is a creature of the dawn.
The novels of the Skylark of Space sequence – The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron and Skylark DuQuesne – are here reprinted in one volume. The magazine publication of the first volume – which appeared in the same issue of Amazing that also featured Philip Nowlan’s ‘Armageddon – 2419 AD’, the story which introduced Buck Rogers to the world – marked the coming of age of early American sf. Even then, Smith was more fun. Elements of his dawn-age exuberance may have been discernible in some of the Edisonades which proliferated in America from about 1890; and a certain cosmogonic high-handedness can be traced to the works of H. G. Wells and his UK contemporaries. But it was Smith who combined the two.
The Skylark of Space brings the Edisonade to its first full maturity, creating a proper galactic forum for the exploits of the inventor/scientist/action-hero who keeps the world (or the Universe) safe for American values, despite the efforts of a foreign-hued villain (Marc ‘Blackie’ DuQuesne) to subvert those values. At the heart of the action lies a highly personalized conflict between hero-inventor Richard Seaton, who always triumphs through luck, gumption, vast intellect, and athletic prowess, and villain-inventor DuQuesne, who develops from the stage histrionics of the first novel into a dominating antihero, and who is perhaps Smith’s most vivid creation. As their conflict escalates, the scale of everything – the potency of the weapons, the power, size and speed of the spaceships, the number of planets overawed or annihilated – also escalates by leaps and bounds. Earth is soon left behind. The galaxy beckons! The galaxy is ours! We read the Skylark of Space in a kind of exhilarated daze. When we finish, we awaken from a marvellous dream.
For a more detailed version of the above, see E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/smith_e_e
Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon which, a moment before, he had been electrolyzing his solution of ‘X,’ the unknown metal. As soon as he had removed the beaker with its precious contents the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing a dozen reagent-bottles on its way, and straight on out through the open window. Hastily setting the beaker down, he seized his binoculars and focused them upon the flying bath, which now, to the unaided vision, was merely a speck in the distance. Through the glass he saw that it did not fall to the ground, but continued on in a straight line, its rapidly diminishing size alone showing the enormous velocity at which it was moving. It grew smaller and smaller. In a few seconds it disappeared.
Slowly lowering the binoculars to his side, Seaton turned like a man in a trance. He stared dazedly, first at the litter of broken bottles covering the table, and then at the empty space under the hood where the bath had stood for so many years.
Aroused by the entrance of his laboratory helper, he silently motioned him to clean up the wreckage.
‘What happened, doctor?’
‘Search me, Dan … wish I knew, myself,’ Seaton replied, absently, lost in wonder at what he had just seen.
Ferdinand Scott, a chemist from an adjoining laboratory, entered breezily.
‘Hello, Dicky, thought I heard a rack— Good Lord! What you been celebrating? Had an explosion?’
‘Uh-uh.’ Seaton shook his head. ‘Something funny – darned funny. I can tell you what happened, but that’s all.’
He did so, and while he talked he prowled about the big room, examining minutely every instrument, dial, meter, gauge, and indicator in the place.
Scott’s face showed in turn interest, surprise, and pitying alarm. ‘Dick, boy, I don’t know why you wrecked the joint, and I don’t know whether that yarn came out of a bottle or a needle, but believe me, it stinks. It’s an honest-to-God, bottled-in-bond stinkeroo if I ever heard one. You’d better lay off the stuff, whatever it is.’
Seeing that Seaton was paying no attention to him, Scott left the room, shaking his head.
Seaton walked slowly to his desk, picked up his blackened and battered briar pipe, and sat down. What could possibly have happened, to result in such shattering of all the natural laws he knew? An inert mass of metal couldn’t fly off into space without the application of a force – in this case an enormous, a really tremendous force – a force probably of the order of magnitude of atomic energy. But it hadn’t been atomic energy. That was out. Definitely. No hard radiation … His instruments would have indicated and recorded a hundredth of a millimicrocurie, and every one of them had sat placidly on dead-center zero through the whole show. What was that force?
And where? In the cell? The solution? The bath? Those three places were … all the places there were.
Concentrating all the power of his mind – deaf, dumb, and blind to every external thing – he sat motionless, with his forgotten pipe clenched between his teeth.
He sat there while most of his fellow chemists finished the day’s work and went home; sat there while the room slowly darkened with the coming of night.
Finally he stood up and turned on the lights. Tapping the stem of his pipe against his palm, he spoke aloud. ‘Absolutely the only unusual incidents in this whole job were a slight slopping over of the solution onto the copper and the short-circuiting of the wires when I grabbed the beaker … wonder if it will repeat …’
He took a piece of copper wire and dipped it into the solution of the mysterious metal. Upon withdrawing it he saw that the wire had changed its appearance, the X having apparently replaced a layer of the original metal. Standing well clear of the table, he touched the wire with the conductors. There was a slight spark, a snap, and it disappeared. Simultaneously there was a sharp sound, like that made by the impact of a rifle bullet, and Seaton saw with amazement a small round hole where the wire had gone completely through the heavy brick wall. There was power – and how! – but whatever it was, it was a fact. A demonstrable fact.
Suddenly he realized that he was hungry; and, glancing at his watch, saw that it was ten o’clock. And he had had a date for dinner at seven with his fiancée at her home, their first dinner since their engagement! Cursing himself for an idiot, he hastily left the laboratory. Going down the corridor, he saw that Marc DuQuesne, a fellow research man, was also working late. He left the building, mounted his motor-cycle, and was soon tearing up Connecticut Avenue toward his sweetheart’s home.
On the way, an idea struck him like a blow of a fist. He forgot even his motorcycle, and only the instinct of the trained rider saved him from disaster during the next few blocks. As he drew near his destination, however, he made a determined effort to pull himself together. ‘What a stunt!’ he muttered ruefully to himself as he considered what he had done.
‘What a stupid jerk! If she doesn’t give me the bum’s rush for this I’ll never do it again if I live to be a million years old!’
As evening came on and the fireflies began flashing over the grounds of her luxurious Chevy Chase home, Dorothy Vaneman went upstairs to dress. Mrs Vaneman’s eyes followed her daughter’s tall, trim figure more than a little apprehensively. She was wondering about this engagement. True, Richard was a fine chap and might make a name for himself, but at present he was a nobody and, socially, he would always be a nobody … and men of wealth, of distinction, of impeccable social status, had paid court … but Dorothy – no, ‘stubborn’ was not too strong a term – when Dorothy made up her mind …
Unaware of her mother’s look, Dorothy went happily up the stairs. She glanced at the clock, saw that it was only a little after six, and sat down at her dressing table, upon which there stood a picture of Richard. A strong, not unhandsome face, with keen, wide-set gray eyes; the wide brow of the thinker, surmounted by thick, unruly, dark hair; the firm, square jaw of the born fighter – such was the man whose vivid personality, fierce impetuosity, and indomitable perseverance had set him apart from all other men ever since their first meeting, and who had rapidly cleared the field of all other aspirants for her favor. Her breath came faster and her cheeks showed a lovelier color as she sat there, the lights playing in her heavy auburn hair and a tender smile upon her lips.
Dorothy dressed with unusual care, the last touches deftly made, went downstairs and out upon the porch to wait for her guest.
Half an hour passed. Mrs Vaneman came to the door and said anxiously, ‘I wonder if anything could have happened to him?’
‘Of course there hasn’t,’ Dorothy tried to keep all concern out of her voice. ‘Traffic jams – or perhaps he has been picked up again for speeding. Can Alice keep dinner a little longer?’
‘To be sure,’ her mother answered, and disappeared.
But when another half hour had passed Dorothy went in, holding her head somewhat higher than usual and wearing a say-something-if-you-dare expression.
The meal was eaten in polite disregard of the unused plate. The family left the table. For Dorothy the evening was endless; but at the usual time it was ten o’clock, and then ten-thirty, and then Seaton appeared.
Dorothy opened the door, but Seaton did not come in. He stood close to her, but did not touch her. His eyes searched her face anxiously. Upon his face was a look of indecision, almost of fright – a look so foreign to his usual expression that the girl smiled in spite of herself.
‘I’m awfully sorry, sweetheart, but I couldn’t help it. You’ve got a right to be sore and I ought to be kicked from here to there, but are you too sore to let me talk to you for a couple of minutes?’
‘I was never so mad at anybody in my life, until I started getting scared witless. I simply couldn’t and can’t believe you’d do anything like that on purpose. Come in.’
He came. She closed the door. He half-extended his arms, then paused, irresolute, like a puppy hoping for a pat but expecting a kick. She grinned then, and came into his arms.
‘But what happened, Dick?’ she asked later. ‘Something terrible, to make you act like this. I’ve never seen you act so – so funny.’
‘Not terrible, Dotty, just extraordinary. So outrageously extraordinary that before I begin I wish you’d look me in the eye and tell me if you have any doubts about my sanity.’ She led him into the living room, held his face up to the light, and made a pretense of studying his eyes.
‘Richard Ballinger Seaton, I certify that you are entirely sane – quite the sanest man I ever knew. Now tell me the worst. Did you blow up the Bureau with a C-bomb?’
‘Nothing like that,’ he laughed. ‘Just a thing I can’t understand. You know I’ve been reworking the platinum wastes that have been accumulating for the last ten or fifteen years.’
‘Yes, you told me you’d recovered a small fortune in platinum and some of those other metals. You thought you’d found a brand-new one. Did you?’
‘I sure did. After I’d separated out everything I could identify, there was quite a lot of something left – something that didn’t respond to any tests I knew or could find in the literature.
‘That brings us up to today. As a last resort, because there wasn’t anything else left, I started testing for trans-uranics, and there it was. A stable – almost stable, I mean – isotope; up where no almost-stable isotopes are supposed to exist. Up where I would’ve bet my last shirt no such isotope could possibly exist.
‘Well, I was trying to electrolyze it out when the fireworks started. The solution started to fizz over, so I grabbed the beaker – fast. The wires dropped onto the steam-bath and the whole outfit, except the beaker, took off out of the window at six or eight times the speed of sound and in a straight line, without dropping a foot in as far as I could keep it in sight with a pair of good binoculars. And my hunch is that it’s still going. That’s what happened. It’s enough to knock any physicist into an outside loop, and with my one-cylinder brain I got to thinking about it and simply didn’t come to until after ten o’clock. All I can say is, I’m sorry and I love you. As much as I ever did or could. More, if possible. And I always will. Can you let it go – this time?’
‘Dick … oh, Dick!’
There was more – much more – but eventually Seaton mounted his motorcycle and Dorothy walked beside him down to the street. A final kiss and the man drove away.
After the last faint glimmer of red tail-light had disappeared in the darkness Dorothy made her way to her room, breathing a long and slightly tremulous, but supremely happy sigh.
Seaton’s childhood had been spent in the mountains of northern Idaho, a region not much out of the pioneer stage and offering few inducements to intellectual effort. He could only dimly remember his mother, a sweet, gentle woman with a great love for books; but his father, ‘Big Fred’ Seaton, a man of but one love, almost filled the vacant place. Fred owned a quarter-section of virgin white-pine timber, and in that splendid grove he established a home for himself and his motherless boy.
In front of the cabin lay a level strip of meadow, beyond which rose a magnificent, snow-covered peak that caught the earliest rays of the sun.
This mountain, dominating the entire countryside, was to the boy a challenge, a question, and a secret. He accepted the challenge, scaling its steep sides, hunting its forests, and fishing its streams. He toughened his sturdy young body by days and nights upon its slopes. He puzzled over the question of its origin as he lay upon the needles under some monster pine. He put staggering questions to his father; and when in books he found some partial answers his joy was complete. He discovered some of the mountain’s secrets then – some of the laws that govern the world of matter, some of the beginnings man’s mind has made toward understanding the hidden mechanism of Nature’s great simplicity.
Each taste of knowledge whetted his appetite for more. Books! Books! More and more he devoured them; finding in them meat for the hunger that filled him, answers to the questions that haunted him.
After Big Fred lost his life in the forest fire that destroyed his property, Seaton turned his back upon the woods forever. He worked his way through high school and won a scholarship at college. Study was a pleasure to his keen mind; and he had ample time for athletics, for which his backwoods life had fitted him outstandingly. He went out for everything, and excelled in football and tennis.
In spite of the fact that he had to work his way he was popular with his college mates, and his popularity was not lessened by an almost professional knowledge of sleight-of-hand.
His long, strong fingers could move faster than the eye could follow, and many a lively college party watched in vain to see how he did what he did.
After graduating with highest honors as a physical chemist, he was appointed research fellow in a great university, where he won his Ph.D. by brilliant research upon rare metals – his dissertation having the lively title of ‘Some Observations upon Certain Properties of Certain Metals, Including Certain Trans-Uranic Elements.’ Soon afterward he had his own room in the Rare Metals Laboratory, in Washington, D.C.
He was a striking figure – well over six feet in height, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, a man of tremendous physical strength. He did not let himself grow soft in his laboratory job, but kept in hard, fine condition. He spent most of his spare time playing tennis, swimming and motor-cycling.
As a tennis-player he quickly became well known in Washington sporting and social circles. During the District Tournament he met M. Reynolds Crane – known to only a very few intimates as ‘Martin’ – the multi-millionaire explorer-archaeologist-sportsman who was then District singles champion. Seaton had cleared the lower half of the list and played Crane in the final round. Crane succeeded in retaining his title, but only after five of the most grueling, most bitterly contested sets ever seen in Washington.
Impressed by Seaton’s powerful, slashing game, Crane suggested that they train together as a doubles team. Seaton accepted instantly, and the combination was highly effective.
Practicing together almost daily, each came to know the other as a man of his own kind, and a real friendship grew up between them. When the Crane–Seaton team had won the District Championship and had gone to the semi-finals of the National before losing, the two were upon a footing which most brothers could have envied. Their friendship was such that neither Crane’s immense wealth and high social standing nor Seaton’s comparative poverty and lack of standing offered any obstacle whatever. Their comradeship was the same, whether they were in Seaton’s modest room or in Crane’s palatial yacht.
Crane had never known the lack of anything that money could buy. He had inherited his fortune and had little or nothing to do with its management, preferring to delegate that job to financial specialists. However, he was in no sense an idle rich man with no purpose in life. As well as being an explorer and an archaeologist and a sportsman, he was also an engineer – a good one – and a rocket-instrument man second to none in the world.
The old Crane estate in Chevy Chase was now, of course, Martin’s, and he had left it pretty much as it was. He had, however, altered one room, the library, and it was now peculiarly typical of the man. It was a large room, very long, with many windows. At one end was a huge fireplace, before which Crane often sat with his long legs outstretched, studying one or several books from the cases close at hand. The essential furnishings were of a rigid simplicity, but the treasures he had gathered transformed the room into a veritable museum.
He played no instrument, but in a corner stood a magnificent piano, bare of any ornament; and a Stradivarius reposed in a special cabinet. Few people were asked to play either of those instruments; but to those few Crane listened in silence, and his brief words of thanks showed his real appreciation of music.
He made few friends, not because he hoarded his friendship, but because, even more than most rich men, he had been forced to erect around his real self an almost impenetrable screen.
As for women, Crane frankly avoided them, partly because his greatest interests in life were things in which women had neither interest nor place, but mostly because he had for years been the prime target of the man-hunting debutantes and the matchmaking mothers of three continents.
Dorothy Vaneman, with whom he had become acquainted through his friendship with Seaton, had been admitted to his friendship. Her frank comradeship was a continuing revelation, and it was she who had last played for him.
She and Seaton had been caught near his home by a sudden shower and had dashed in for shelter. While the rain beat outside, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by playing his ‘fiddle.’ Dorothy, a doctor of music and an accomplished violinist, realized with the first sweep of the bow that she was playing an instrument such as she had known only in her dreams, and promptly forgot everything else. She forgot the rain, the listeners, the time and the place; she simply poured into that wonderful violin everything she had of beauty, of tenderness, of artistry.
Sure, true, and full, the tones filled the big room, and in Crane’s vision there rose a home filled with happy work, with laughter and comradeship. Sensing the girl’s dreams as the music filled his ears, he realized as never before in his busy and purposeful life what a home with the right woman could be like. No thought of love for Dorothy entered his mind – he knew that the love existing between her and Dick was of the sort that only death could alter – but he knew that she had unwittingly given him a great gift. Often thereafter in his lonely hours he saw that dream home, and knew that nothing less than its realization would ever satisfy him.
Returning to his boarding house, Seaton undressed and went to bed, but not to sleep. He knew that he had seen what could very well become a workable space-drive that afternoon … After an hour of trying to force himself to Sleep he gave up, went to his desk, and started to study. The more he studied, the more strongly convinced he became that his first thought was right – the thing could become a space-drive.
By breakfast time he had the beginnings of a tentative theory roughed out, and also had gained some idea of the nature and magnitude of the obstacles to overcome.
Arriving at the Laboratory, he found that Scott had spread the news of his adventure, and his room was soon the center of interest. He described what he had seen and done to the impromptu assembly of scientists, and was starting in on the explanation he had deduced when he was interrupted by Ferdinand Scott.
‘Quick, Dr Watson, the needle!’ he exclaimed. Seizing a huge pipette from a rack, he went through the motions of injecting its contents into Seaton’s arm.
‘It does sound like a combination of science-fiction and Sherlock Holmes,’ one of the visitors remarked.
‘“Nobody Holme,” you mean,’ Scott said, and a general chorus of friendly but skeptical jibes followed.
‘Wait a minute, you hidebound dopes, and I’ll show you!’ Seaton snapped. He dipped a short piece of copper wire into his solution.
It did not turn brown; and when he touched it with his conductors, no
Smith’s work is strongly identified with the beginnings of US pulp sf as a separate marketing genre, and did much to define its essential territory: galactic space dominated by Galactic Empires, these usually being run by humans, though Aliens appear frequently, not only as villains; Space Opera plots, featuring heroes and their inventions, are the norm; wars rage across the parsecs. But although Smith’s protagonists fit comfortably into this universe, it is the case that his most developed (and numerous) protagonists, the Lensmen at the heart of the Lensmen epic, are also soldiers: willing employees in a higher cause. his later heroes – like Kim Kinnison himself – advance through promotion, and rule their universes as dictators in all but name, for the cause of Good.
When in 1915 Smith began to write the first novel of his Skylark series with Mrs Lee Hawkins Garby (1892–1953), a neighbour seconded to help with feminine matters such as dialogue, no prior models existed in popular fiction to source the combined exuberance and scale that The Skylark of Space (see below) demonstrated when the magazine version finally began to appear in Amazing Stories in 1928 (the book form only appeared in 1946); its two immediate sequels – Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron (see below for both) – add to the exuberance. (Skylark DuQuesne was published posthumously in 1966.)
But it was not until he began to unveil the architectural structure of his second and career-climaxing series that Smith was able to demonstrate the thoroughness of his thinking about Space Opera, though perhaps losing some of the spontaneity of Skylark. It is with the Lensman series – or The History of Civilization, the over-title for the 1953–1955 limited-edition boxed reprint of the original books – that his name is most strongly associated. In order of internal chronology, the sequence comprises Triplanetary, First Lensman, Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second-Stage Lensmen and Children of the Lens. The Vortex Blaster, assembling stories published during World War Two, and only put in book form after Smith’s death, is also set in the Lensman Universe, probably some time before Children of the Lens; but does not deal with the central progress of the main series, the working out of which was Smith’s most brilliant auctorial coup. As resorted and augmented in book form, the first two novels, one of them written much later, likewise stand outside the main action; it is the central four volumes that constitute the heart of Smith’s accomplishment. Conceived as one 400,000-word novel, and divided into separate titles for publication between 1937 and 1948 in Astounding, this central Lensman tale is constructed around the gradual revelation, paced by moments that for many readers caught the essence of the Sense Of Wonder, of the hierarchical nature of the Universe: a sense that the universe was both infinitely surprising but, in the end, controlled by Arisians.
That gradual revelation is eschewed in the full series as published in book form. Here, we learn immediately that two vastly advanced and radically opposed Forerunner races, the good Arisians and the evil Eddorians, each dominating a separate galaxy, have been in essential opposition for billions of years. The Arisians understand that the only hope of defeating the absolute Evil represented by the Eddorians is to nurture the growth over aeons of a countervailing Civilization developed from their own ‘spores’ via special breeding lines on selected planets, of which Earth (Tellus) is one. Guided by their Arisian Secret Masters, these breeding lines develop heroes capable of enduring the enormous stress of inevitable conflict with the escalating galactic conspiracy of evil known collectively as Boskone, a force inimical to Civilization and secretly commanded through a nest of hierarchies by the invisible Eddorians.
As the conflict deepens, the Arisians (always in disguise) make available to their unknowing scions a Psionic pseudo-gem known as the Lens which – when attached physically to advanced specimens of the breeding programme, who have already formed a Galactic Patrol responsible for defending Civilization – awards them certain telepathic and other Psi Powers, operating both as a weapon and a communication device. The central figure of the series is the human Kim Kinnison, who with his wife represents the penultimate stage in the Arisian breeding programme, and whose children will finally defeat the Eddorians. As the central sequence progresses, we climb with Kinnison, link by link, through a vast chain of command, evil empire after evil empire, until he defeats Boskone and becomes, in essence, the ruler of the civilized universe. But Kinnison is destined only slowly to understand that the empire of Boskone, which he has destroyed through the use of weapons of unparalleled immensity, is not the final enemy, whose name he never learns, no more than he ever discovers the full truth about his own Arisian mentors, whose civilized precepts he enacts. Though his powers are vast, he remains ignorant of the true scale and nature of the Universe, which is greater, and requires greater powers to comprehend and confront, than even a hero with superpowers is capable of grasping. Perhaps the deepest attraction of the Lensman series lies in the fact that Kinnison, as ultimate commander of the organization of Lensmen (itself hierarchical), is licensed; but that only we (and his children) know who issued the licence.
After completing his central series, Smith wrote some rather less popular out-of-series books, none having anything like the force of his major effort. A decade after his death, books he had begun or completed in manuscript, or had merely inspired or authorized, began to appear in response to his great posthumous popularity. The best known of these is the Family d’Alembert series, published as by Smith ‘with Stephen Goldin’, derived some material from posthumous manuscripts; the first volume, The Imperial Stars (1976), was based on published material, but subsequent volumes were essentially the work of Goldin.
Smith was posthumously inducted into the Science Fiction Hall Of Fame in 2004.Today, while he must be read by anyone interested in understanding the deep appeal of American Genre SF in the days before World War Two, any revisit to his work should be made in the loving awareness that he is a creature of the dawn.
The novels of the Skylark of Space sequence – The Skylark of Space, Skylark Three, Skylark of Valeron and Skylark DuQuesne – are here reprinted in one volume. The magazine publication of the first volume – which appeared in the same issue of Amazing that also featured Philip Nowlan’s ‘Armageddon – 2419 AD’, the story which introduced Buck Rogers to the world – marked the coming of age of early American sf. Even then, Smith was more fun. Elements of his dawn-age exuberance may have been discernible in some of the Edisonades which proliferated in America from about 1890; and a certain cosmogonic high-handedness can be traced to the works of H. G. Wells and his UK contemporaries. But it was Smith who combined the two.
The Skylark of Space brings the Edisonade to its first full maturity, creating a proper galactic forum for the exploits of the inventor/scientist/action-hero who keeps the world (or the Universe) safe for American values, despite the efforts of a foreign-hued villain (Marc ‘Blackie’ DuQuesne) to subvert those values. At the heart of the action lies a highly personalized conflict between hero-inventor Richard Seaton, who always triumphs through luck, gumption, vast intellect, and athletic prowess, and villain-inventor DuQuesne, who develops from the stage histrionics of the first novel into a dominating antihero, and who is perhaps Smith’s most vivid creation. As their conflict escalates, the scale of everything – the potency of the weapons, the power, size and speed of the spaceships, the number of planets overawed or annihilated – also escalates by leaps and bounds. Earth is soon left behind. The galaxy beckons! The galaxy is ours! We read the Skylark of Space in a kind of exhilarated daze. When we finish, we awaken from a marvellous dream.
For a more detailed version of the above, see E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith’s author entry in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: http://sf-encyclopedia.com/entry/smith_e_e
Some terms above are capitalised when they would not normally be so rendered; this indicates that the terms represent discrete entries in The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction.
Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon which, a moment before, he had been electrolyzing his solution of ‘X,’ the unknown metal. As soon as he had removed the beaker with its precious contents the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing a dozen reagent-bottles on its way, and straight on out through the open window. Hastily setting the beaker down, he seized his binoculars and focused them upon the flying bath, which now, to the unaided vision, was merely a speck in the distance. Through the glass he saw that it did not fall to the ground, but continued on in a straight line, its rapidly diminishing size alone showing the enormous velocity at which it was moving. It grew smaller and smaller. In a few seconds it disappeared.
Slowly lowering the binoculars to his side, Seaton turned like a man in a trance. He stared dazedly, first at the litter of broken bottles covering the table, and then at the empty space under the hood where the bath had stood for so many years.
Aroused by the entrance of his laboratory helper, he silently motioned him to clean up the wreckage.
‘What happened, doctor?’
‘Search me, Dan … wish I knew, myself,’ Seaton replied, absently, lost in wonder at what he had just seen.
Ferdinand Scott, a chemist from an adjoining laboratory, entered breezily.
‘Hello, Dicky, thought I heard a rack— Good Lord! What you been celebrating? Had an explosion?’
‘Uh-uh.’ Seaton shook his head. ‘Something funny – darned funny. I can tell you what happened, but that’s all.’
He did so, and while he talked he prowled about the big room, examining minutely every instrument, dial, meter, gauge, and indicator in the place.
Scott’s face showed in turn interest, surprise, and pitying alarm. ‘Dick, boy, I don’t know why you wrecked the joint, and I don’t know whether that yarn came out of a bottle or a needle, but believe me, it stinks. It’s an honest-to-God, bottled-in-bond stinkeroo if I ever heard one. You’d better lay off the stuff, whatever it is.’
Seeing that Seaton was paying no attention to him, Scott left the room, shaking his head.
Seaton walked slowly to his desk, picked up his blackened and battered briar pipe, and sat down. What could possibly have happened, to result in such shattering of all the natural laws he knew? An inert mass of metal couldn’t fly off into space without the application of a force – in this case an enormous, a really tremendous force – a force probably of the order of magnitude of atomic energy. But it hadn’t been atomic energy. That was out. Definitely. No hard radiation … His instruments would have indicated and recorded a hundredth of a millimicrocurie, and every one of them had sat placidly on dead-center zero through the whole show. What was that force?
And where? In the cell? The solution? The bath? Those three places were … all the places there were.
Concentrating all the power of his mind – deaf, dumb, and blind to every external thing – he sat motionless, with his forgotten pipe clenched between his teeth.
He sat there while most of his fellow chemists finished the day’s work and went home; sat there while the room slowly darkened with the coming of night.
Finally he stood up and turned on the lights. Tapping the stem of his pipe against his palm, he spoke aloud. ‘Absolutely the only unusual incidents in this whole job were a slight slopping over of the solution onto the copper and the short-circuiting of the wires when I grabbed the beaker … wonder if it will repeat …’
He took a piece of copper wire and dipped it into the solution of the mysterious metal. Upon withdrawing it he saw that the wire had changed its appearance, the X having apparently replaced a layer of the original metal. Standing well clear of the table, he touched the wire with the conductors. There was a slight spark, a snap, and it disappeared. Simultaneously there was a sharp sound, like that made by the impact of a rifle bullet, and Seaton saw with amazement a small round hole where the wire had gone completely through the heavy brick wall. There was power – and how! – but whatever it was, it was a fact. A demonstrable fact.
Suddenly he realized that he was hungry; and, glancing at his watch, saw that it was ten o’clock. And he had had a date for dinner at seven with his fiancée at her home, their first dinner since their engagement! Cursing himself for an idiot, he hastily left the laboratory. Going down the corridor, he saw that Marc DuQuesne, a fellow research man, was also working late. He left the building, mounted his motor-cycle, and was soon tearing up Connecticut Avenue toward his sweetheart’s home.
On the way, an idea struck him like a blow of a fist. He forgot even his motorcycle, and only the instinct of the trained rider saved him from disaster during the next few blocks. As he drew near his destination, however, he made a determined effort to pull himself together. ‘What a stunt!’ he muttered ruefully to himself as he considered what he had done.
‘What a stupid jerk! If she doesn’t give me the bum’s rush for this I’ll never do it again if I live to be a million years old!’
As evening came on and the fireflies began flashing over the grounds of her luxurious Chevy Chase home, Dorothy Vaneman went upstairs to dress. Mrs Vaneman’s eyes followed her daughter’s tall, trim figure more than a little apprehensively. She was wondering about this engagement. True, Richard was a fine chap and might make a name for himself, but at present he was a nobody and, socially, he would always be a nobody … and men of wealth, of distinction, of impeccable social status, had paid court … but Dorothy – no, ‘stubborn’ was not too strong a term – when Dorothy made up her mind …
Unaware of her mother’s look, Dorothy went happily up the stairs. She glanced at the clock, saw that it was only a little after six, and sat down at her dressing table, upon which there stood a picture of Richard. A strong, not unhandsome face, with keen, wide-set gray eyes; the wide brow of the thinker, surmounted by thick, unruly, dark hair; the firm, square jaw of the born fighter – such was the man whose vivid personality, fierce impetuosity, and indomitable perseverance had set him apart from all other men ever since their first meeting, and who had rapidly cleared the field of all other aspirants for her favor. Her breath came faster and her cheeks showed a lovelier color as she sat there, the lights playing in her heavy auburn hair and a tender smile upon her lips.
Dorothy dressed with unusual care, the last touches deftly made, went downstairs and out upon the porch to wait for her guest.
Half an hour passed. Mrs Vaneman came to the door and said anxiously, ‘I wonder if anything could have happened to him?’
‘Of course there hasn’t,’ Dorothy tried to keep all concern out of her voice. ‘Traffic jams – or perhaps he has been picked up again for speeding. Can Alice keep dinner a little longer?’
‘To be sure,’ her mother answered, and disappeared.
But when another half hour had passed Dorothy went in, holding her head somewhat higher than usual and wearing a say-something-if-you-dare expression.
The meal was eaten in polite disregard of the unused plate. The family left the table. For Dorothy the evening was endless; but at the usual time it was ten o’clock, and then ten-thirty, and then Seaton appeared.
Dorothy opened the door, but Seaton did not come in. He stood close to her, but did not touch her. His eyes searched her face anxiously. Upon his face was a look of indecision, almost of fright – a look so foreign to his usual expression that the girl smiled in spite of herself.
‘I’m awfully sorry, sweetheart, but I couldn’t help it. You’ve got a right to be sore and I ought to be kicked from here to there, but are you too sore to let me talk to you for a couple of minutes?’
‘I was never so mad at anybody in my life, until I started getting scared witless. I simply couldn’t and can’t believe you’d do anything like that on purpose. Come in.’
He came. She closed the door. He half-extended his arms, then paused, irresolute, like a puppy hoping for a pat but expecting a kick. She grinned then, and came into his arms.
‘But what happened, Dick?’ she asked later. ‘Something terrible, to make you act like this. I’ve never seen you act so – so funny.’
‘Not terrible, Dotty, just extraordinary. So outrageously extraordinary that before I begin I wish you’d look me in the eye and tell me if you have any doubts about my sanity.’ She led him into the living room, held his face up to the light, and made a pretense of studying his eyes.
‘Richard Ballinger Seaton, I certify that you are entirely sane – quite the sanest man I ever knew. Now tell me the worst. Did you blow up the Bureau with a C-bomb?’
‘Nothing like that,’ he laughed. ‘Just a thing I can’t understand. You know I’ve been reworking the platinum wastes that have been accumulating for the last ten or fifteen years.’
‘Yes, you told me you’d recovered a small fortune in platinum and some of those other metals. You thought you’d found a brand-new one. Did you?’
‘I sure did. After I’d separated out everything I could identify, there was quite a lot of something left – something that didn’t respond to any tests I knew or could find in the literature.
‘That brings us up to today. As a last resort, because there wasn’t anything else left, I started testing for trans-uranics, and there it was. A stable – almost stable, I mean – isotope; up where no almost-stable isotopes are supposed to exist. Up where I would’ve bet my last shirt no such isotope could possibly exist.
‘Well, I was trying to electrolyze it out when the fireworks started. The solution started to fizz over, so I grabbed the beaker – fast. The wires dropped onto the steam-bath and the whole outfit, except the beaker, took off out of the window at six or eight times the speed of sound and in a straight line, without dropping a foot in as far as I could keep it in sight with a pair of good binoculars. And my hunch is that it’s still going. That’s what happened. It’s enough to knock any physicist into an outside loop, and with my one-cylinder brain I got to thinking about it and simply didn’t come to until after ten o’clock. All I can say is, I’m sorry and I love you. As much as I ever did or could. More, if possible. And I always will. Can you let it go – this time?’
‘Dick … oh, Dick!’
There was more – much more – but eventually Seaton mounted his motorcycle and Dorothy walked beside him down to the street. A final kiss and the man drove away.
After the last faint glimmer of red tail-light had disappeared in the darkness Dorothy made her way to her room, breathing a long and slightly tremulous, but supremely happy sigh.
Seaton’s childhood had been spent in the mountains of northern Idaho, a region not much out of the pioneer stage and offering few inducements to intellectual effort. He could only dimly remember his mother, a sweet, gentle woman with a great love for books; but his father, ‘Big Fred’ Seaton, a man of but one love, almost filled the vacant place. Fred owned a quarter-section of virgin white-pine timber, and in that splendid grove he established a home for himself and his motherless boy.
In front of the cabin lay a level strip of meadow, beyond which rose a magnificent, snow-covered peak that caught the earliest rays of the sun.
This mountain, dominating the entire countryside, was to the boy a challenge, a question, and a secret. He accepted the challenge, scaling its steep sides, hunting its forests, and fishing its streams. He toughened his sturdy young body by days and nights upon its slopes. He puzzled over the question of its origin as he lay upon the needles under some monster pine. He put staggering questions to his father; and when in books he found some partial answers his joy was complete. He discovered some of the mountain’s secrets then – some of the laws that govern the world of matter, some of the beginnings man’s mind has made toward understanding the hidden mechanism of Nature’s great simplicity.
Each taste of knowledge whetted his appetite for more. Books! Books! More and more he devoured them; finding in them meat for the hunger that filled him, answers to the questions that haunted him.
After Big Fred lost his life in the forest fire that destroyed his property, Seaton turned his back upon the woods forever. He worked his way through high school and won a scholarship at college. Study was a pleasure to his keen mind; and he had ample time for athletics, for which his backwoods life had fitted him outstandingly. He went out for everything, and excelled in football and tennis.
In spite of the fact that he had to work his way he was popular with his college mates, and his popularity was not lessened by an almost professional knowledge of sleight-of-hand.
His long, strong fingers could move faster than the eye could follow, and many a lively college party watched in vain to see how he did what he did.
After graduating with highest honors as a physical chemist, he was appointed research fellow in a great university, where he won his Ph.D. by brilliant research upon rare metals – his dissertation having the lively title of ‘Some Observations upon Certain Properties of Certain Metals, Including Certain Trans-Uranic Elements.’ Soon afterward he had his own room in the Rare Metals Laboratory, in Washington, D.C.
He was a striking figure – well over six feet in height, broad-shouldered, narrow-waisted, a man of tremendous physical strength. He did not let himself grow soft in his laboratory job, but kept in hard, fine condition. He spent most of his spare time playing tennis, swimming and motor-cycling.
As a tennis-player he quickly became well known in Washington sporting and social circles. During the District Tournament he met M. Reynolds Crane – known to only a very few intimates as ‘Martin’ – the multi-millionaire explorer-archaeologist-sportsman who was then District singles champion. Seaton had cleared the lower half of the list and played Crane in the final round. Crane succeeded in retaining his title, but only after five of the most grueling, most bitterly contested sets ever seen in Washington.
Impressed by Seaton’s powerful, slashing game, Crane suggested that they train together as a doubles team. Seaton accepted instantly, and the combination was highly effective.
Practicing together almost daily, each came to know the other as a man of his own kind, and a real friendship grew up between them. When the Crane–Seaton team had won the District Championship and had gone to the semi-finals of the National before losing, the two were upon a footing which most brothers could have envied. Their friendship was such that neither Crane’s immense wealth and high social standing nor Seaton’s comparative poverty and lack of standing offered any obstacle whatever. Their comradeship was the same, whether they were in Seaton’s modest room or in Crane’s palatial yacht.
Crane had never known the lack of anything that money could buy. He had inherited his fortune and had little or nothing to do with its management, preferring to delegate that job to financial specialists. However, he was in no sense an idle rich man with no purpose in life. As well as being an explorer and an archaeologist and a sportsman, he was also an engineer – a good one – and a rocket-instrument man second to none in the world.
The old Crane estate in Chevy Chase was now, of course, Martin’s, and he had left it pretty much as it was. He had, however, altered one room, the library, and it was now peculiarly typical of the man. It was a large room, very long, with many windows. At one end was a huge fireplace, before which Crane often sat with his long legs outstretched, studying one or several books from the cases close at hand. The essential furnishings were of a rigid simplicity, but the treasures he had gathered transformed the room into a veritable museum.
He played no instrument, but in a corner stood a magnificent piano, bare of any ornament; and a Stradivarius reposed in a special cabinet. Few people were asked to play either of those instruments; but to those few Crane listened in silence, and his brief words of thanks showed his real appreciation of music.
He made few friends, not because he hoarded his friendship, but because, even more than most rich men, he had been forced to erect around his real self an almost impenetrable screen.
As for women, Crane frankly avoided them, partly because his greatest interests in life were things in which women had neither interest nor place, but mostly because he had for years been the prime target of the man-hunting debutantes and the matchmaking mothers of three continents.
Dorothy Vaneman, with whom he had become acquainted through his friendship with Seaton, had been admitted to his friendship. Her frank comradeship was a continuing revelation, and it was she who had last played for him.
She and Seaton had been caught near his home by a sudden shower and had dashed in for shelter. While the rain beat outside, Crane had suggested that she pass the time by playing his ‘fiddle.’ Dorothy, a doctor of music and an accomplished violinist, realized with the first sweep of the bow that she was playing an instrument such as she had known only in her dreams, and promptly forgot everything else. She forgot the rain, the listeners, the time and the place; she simply poured into that wonderful violin everything she had of beauty, of tenderness, of artistry.
Sure, true, and full, the tones filled the big room, and in Crane’s vision there rose a home filled with happy work, with laughter and comradeship. Sensing the girl’s dreams as the music filled his ears, he realized as never before in his busy and purposeful life what a home with the right woman could be like. No thought of love for Dorothy entered his mind – he knew that the love existing between her and Dick was of the sort that only death could alter – but he knew that she had unwittingly given him a great gift. Often thereafter in his lonely hours he saw that dream home, and knew that nothing less than its realization would ever satisfy him.
Returning to his boarding house, Seaton undressed and went to bed, but not to sleep. He knew that he had seen what could very well become a workable space-drive that afternoon … After an hour of trying to force himself to Sleep he gave up, went to his desk, and started to study. The more he studied, the more strongly convinced he became that his first thought was right – the thing could become a space-drive.
By breakfast time he had the beginnings of a tentative theory roughed out, and also had gained some idea of the nature and magnitude of the obstacles to overcome.
Arriving at the Laboratory, he found that Scott had spread the news of his adventure, and his room was soon the center of interest. He described what he had seen and done to the impromptu assembly of scientists, and was starting in on the explanation he had deduced when he was interrupted by Ferdinand Scott.
‘Quick, Dr Watson, the needle!’ he exclaimed. Seizing a huge pipette from a rack, he went through the motions of injecting its contents into Seaton’s arm.
‘It does sound like a combination of science-fiction and Sherlock Holmes,’ one of the visitors remarked.
‘“Nobody Holme,” you mean,’ Scott said, and a general chorus of friendly but skeptical jibes followed.
‘Wait a minute, you hidebound dopes, and I’ll show you!’ Seaton snapped. He dipped a short piece of copper wire into his solution.
It did not turn brown; and when he touched it with his conductors, no
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