Edward E. Smith, Ph.D., was the man who invented “space opera”, although he preferred the label “epics of space”. Many writers before him had written tales of space travel—most of them journeys to the moon or Mars—and a few of their heroes had gone further afield than the solar system, but most imaginary voyagers who had embarked upon interstellar odysseys had done so in the spirit of the voyages extatiques penned by the French astronomer Camille Flammarion, rapt with wonder at the immensity and magnificence of the universe. One very obscure British scientific romance—Robert William Cole’s The Struggle for Empire (1900)—had looked forward to a day when the all-conquering British Empire might extend its colonial wars as far as Sirius, but no one had ventured to suggest that the entire sidereal system might one day serve as a gigantic playground for pioneers until Smith wrote The Skylark of Space.
Smith completed the text of The Skylark of Space in 1920, when he was thirty years old, having started it five years earlier in collaboration with Lee Garby, the wife of a neighbor. He submitted it to numerous book publishers and pulp magazines, but it was consistently rejected until the specialist science fiction pulps came into being in the late twenties. Smith became one of a precious handful of writers who had already produced work that was too bizarre to find a home elsewhere, but could immediately be slotted into place within the nascent genre, helping to define its field. Stanton A. Coblentz and “John Taine” (Eric Temple Bell) were other such writers but neither was to provide such an important precedent as “Doc” Smith. Although Taine’s The Time Stream—which was written a decade earlier than its publication in 1931—was equally daring, after its own particular fashion, it did not have the same potential to make an explosive impact on a reader’s imagination as The Skylark of Space.
It was probably Amazing’s then editor, T. O’Conor Sloane, who insisted that Smith should add his doctorate to his byline. The editors of the early sf magazines were very anxious to give the impression that they were not merely marketing one more brand of pulp fiction, and they made the most of whatever scientific credentials their writers had. The fact that Smith was a food scientist specializing in doughnut mixes was to cause much sarcastic comment in years to come, but he was not guilty of any real dissimulation in parading his qualification; he never made any strenuous attempt to pretend that The Skylark of Space was a realistic novel of the future.
By the time The Skylark of Space actually appeared in print, in the August-October 1928 issues of Amazing Stories, Smith’s invention had been partly duplicated by Edmond Hamilton, the first of whose tales of the Interstellar Patrol began simultaneous serialization in the August 1928 issue of Weird Tales. Hamilton’s series, however, consisted of tales of a distant future inhabited by men with bizarre names and superhuman proclivities. While the hectic action/adventure stories were certainly not rhapsodic voyages extatiques, they were decisively distanced from the world of the reader. Smith’s story began in that world; its opening paragraph dispatched a copper bath coated with a previously-unknown metal into the interstellar wilderness, hurtling through space with breathtakingly casual panache, and then sent supposedly ordinary people off in pursuit of it. Readers could identify with Smith’s Richard Seaton with a ready ease that could not be duplicated in contemplating the exploits of the Interstellar Patrol—and the importance of that readiness of identification, especially for young readers, should not be underestimated.
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The Skylark series proper consists of three volumes, the original serial being followed by Skylark Three (Amazing August-October 1930), and Skylark of Valeron (Astounding August 1934-February 1935). A fourth novel, Skylark DuQuesne, was serialized in If in 1965, but Smith was in his seventies by then and science fiction—including space opera—had become far more sophisticated; the addendum to the series had nothing to recommend it but nostalgia-appeal.
It is difficult for today’s readers, who are fully accustomed to the use of galactic empires as narrative stages, to appreciate the impact that the opening paragraph of The Skylark of Space had on its contemporary readers. By the same token, young people who find no difficulty at all in orientating themselves with the plots of Star Trek and Babylon-5 are bound to find the clean-cut Seaton, his pal Martin Crane, and their respective girl-friends a trifle unconvincing as heroes shaped for such a stage. The villains of the Skylark series—rich businessmen with political ambitions, soon to be aided, and eventually replaced, by wave after wave of ugly aliens—have not been so rapidly superseded by the evolution of space operatic cliché, but the author’s blithe assumption that genocide is the appropriate solution to most diplomatic problems (“Humanity über alles—homo sapiens against all the vermin of the universe!” Seaton cries, as he sets out to save the humans of Valeron from the depredations of chlorine-breathing amoebas) is bound to seem crass as well as crude in a post-Hitler era. In its original incarnation, however, the series was possessed of a remarkable and unprecedented exuberance that transported many of its readers into imaginative terra incognita.
The Skylark series is a straightforward and unashamed power-fantasy, which took that underrated art-form to a new extreme. Seaton continually trades in his starships for bigger and better ones with much-increased firepower (usually described in terms of the mastery of new “orders” of radiation). Although his personality remains stubbornly boyish, his mind becomes a sponge for the accumulated wisdom of whole races, increasing his personal capabilities to the point at which he can take on disembodied beings of “pure intelligence”—a conventional representation of the ultimate end of evolution—and beat them at their own game. At the end of the third volume, he bottles up these inconvenient adult-substitutes with “Blackie” DuQuesne in a prison of pure force, exiling them to the very edge of the universe (where they remained, incapable of disrupting the heroes’ good clean fun, until they were required to provide leverage for the plot of the belated fourth volume).
It is the subjugation of all the series’ science-fictional ideas to the cause of juvenile power-fantasy that establishes The Skylark of Space and its sequels as the true progenitors of space opera. Edmond Hamilton’s space operas are just as wild in their inventions, but they retain a shadowy respect for scientific method and a subtle undercurrent of adult cynicism—both of which were to be dutifully elaborated in subsequent contributions to the subgenre by John W. Campbell Jr. and Jack Williamson. None of these later writers were bashful in their employment of marvelous super-science, but none of them ever showed the same level of conscienceless disrespect as Smith did in the Skylark series. Despite the Ph.D. that his editors continued to append his byline, Smith did not pay the slightest lip-service to the limits of actual possibility while he was chronicling the continuing adventures of Richard Seaton; as befit their collective title, in the Skylark series he deployed his pseudoscientific jargon as a straightforward mask for magic and miracles.
Smith was not incapable of writing space operas of a slightly more restrained kind, nor was he unwilling to do so. The Spacehounds of I.P.C. (1931), which was serialized in Amazing after Skylark Three, uses its pseudoscientific notions in a manner much more reminiscent of John Campbell, who had made his debut a year earlier. Triplanetary (1934)—which Smith wrote for the higher-paying Astounding, then edited by Harry Bates, but had to divert to Amazing when the Clayton magazine chain collapsed—also plays with its ideas in a more scrupulous and respectful fashion. Significantly, neither novel extends its action beyond the inner solar system, and their reception by readers was sufficiently lukewarm to ensure that Smith then went back to doing what he did best. When Astounding began publication again, under the aegis of F. Orlin Tremaine, he completed the Skylark trilogy in the most grandiose fashion he could contrive, and then he went on to plan a new series, whose entire raison d’être was that it would be more grandiose still: the Lensman series.
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When it was reprinted in 1950-54 as a set of books, the Lensman series was expanded to six volumes, and some later reprints added The Vortex-Blaster (1941-42; fix-up 1960) as a seventh, on the woefully inadequate grounds that it was set in the same universe. The book series begins with an extensively-revised Triplanetary, and continues with a new volume, First Lensman (1950), which connects the revamped Triplanetary to the four volumes of which the series had initially consisted. These four volumes are based on the magazine serials Galactic Patrol (Astounding Stories, September 1937-February 1938); Gray Lensman (Astounding Science Fiction, October 1939-January 1940); Second-Stage Lensman (Astounding Science Fiction, November 1941-February 1942), and Children of the Lens (Astounding Science Fiction, November 1947-February 1948).
The first of these six volumes begins with the revelation that a cataclysmic coalescence of two galaxies in the distant past precipitated a conflict between the humanoid Arisians and the monstrous Eddorians, who began a long war for control of the many new planets spawned by the event. The Arisians planned to build a galaxy-wide civilization, while the Eddorians sought to subjugate all worlds to their totalitarian rule. An Arisian group-mind named Mentor initiated and supervised a special breeding-program intended to produce beings capable of battling the Eddorians, using the human inhabitants of Earth as raw material.
After brief interludes set in Atlantis, Rome and the arenas of three World Wars, the book version of Triplanetary describes the Eddore-inspired assault led by the Adepts of Jupiter against the human-dominated inner planets of the solar system, causing them to unite—and, after their victory, to set in train plans for human expansion into the galaxy. In First Lensman, humans make contact with Arisia, where Mentor arranges that Virgil Samms, the founder of the Galactic Patrol, comes into possession of the Lens: a device that serves as a universal translator. Each individual lens is a semi-living entity attuned to a single wearer; it defies all attempts at analysis or duplication. Armed with lenses, the elite members of the Galactic Patrol fight against the various criminal activities inspired and organized by Eddore’s agents.
The four volumes that comprise the main part of the series tell the story of Kimball Kinnison and Clarrissa MacDougall (MacDougall was the maiden name of Smith’s own wife). This couple is the penultimate product of Arisia’s breeding program, whose union eventually brings forth the children destined to destroy Eddore. Galactic Patrol describes how the newly-graduated Kinnison fights the pirates of Boskone, winning a spectacular victory against enormous odds. In Gray Lensman, gifted with new mental powers by advanced Arisian training, Kinnison carries the fight to the Boskonians, eventually penetrating the defences of their home planet Jarnevon.
In Second-Stage Lensman, Kinnison, having discovered that a much deeper conspiracy lies behind the power of Boskone, traces that activity back to the planets Lyrane II and Lonabar. Clarrissa MacDougall becomes the first female wearer of the Lens in order to work with the matriarchal Lyranians, and discovers the role played in their affairs by the Eich and the Thralians, whose interstellar empire is ruled by Alcon. Kinnison manages to assassinate Alcon, but his initial attempts to take control of the Thralian empire are thwarted when Prime Minister Fossten—the power behind Alcon’s throne—reveals that he has powers as great as an Arisian’s. Even so, Kinnison destroys this further adversary—without realizing that Fossten is, in fact, Gharlane of Eddore, Mentor’s chief adversary since the dawn of their conflict.
In Children of the Lens the children of Kimball Kinnison and Clarrissa MacDougall—their son Christopher and four daughters, all partnered with second-stage lensmen—carry on the fight against the masters of Boskone. After suffering various setbacks, they go to Arisia to undergo the third stage of their training, which they are uniquely fitted to receive. They supervise the defense of Arisia against the Ploorans, the last of Eddore’s pawns, and then combine the collective mental power of the Patrol and Arisia for an assault on Eddore itself, where their father is now being held prisoner. When this battle is won, the Kinnison children become the new Guardians of Civilization, while the Arisians pass on to a further phase of existence beyond the limits of time and space.
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When the four magazine serials that comprised the original Lensman series were first published, it was not until the conclusion of the fourth and last part of the main series that its readers found out—along with the characters—that the Kinnisons’ adventures had all been part of a greater scheme. For this reason, readers who first encounter the series in book form obtain a view of its contents and development very different from—and arguably much inferior to—that of its original readers.
The manner in which the pulp serials worked through an ever-escalating series of contexts represented a gradual but inexorable expansion of consciousness from the narrow confines of the inner solar system to the furthest horizons then imaginable. It was this steady but spectacular expansion of perspective that gave the serials their central role within the developing mythos of pulp science fiction, and established them as the key exemplars of classic space opera. The book versions, which establish the largest scale of action within the prologue, distance the reader in much the same fashion as Hamilton’s tales of the Interstellar patrol. As in the Skylark series, however, the “science” within the Lensman series is merely a mask for miracles, the lenses being magical devices whose function is simply to provide empowerment in measured stages.
In spite of its grandiose claim to constitute “The History of Civilization” (the original book publisher once issued a boxed set bearing that collective title) the main sequence of the Lensman series is a straightforward allegory of maturation. It is clearly a product of the era in which fear of organized crime first gave prolific birth to the mythology of the all-powerful mafia, and it is also an embodiment of the American Dream of universal conquest by means of super-weapons—which is described in detail by H. Bruce Franklin in War Stars (1988)—but this is incidental to its real narrative thrust. The four-volume novel is, essentially, a “boy’s book” which does no more and no less than all boys’ books do, mapping out a route from present powerlessness to future power and offering elaborate counsel as to the wisdom of using that inevitable inheritance constructively.
Shorn of its fanciful embellishments, the plot of the main sequence describes how young Kimball Kinnison graduates from school, is gifted with the responsibilities and prerogatives of a new adult, gets a girl and falls in love, learns to refine his powers and privileges, brings up his kids while his own kindly “parents” helpfully look on, and eventually passes the torch of responsibility on to them, while his erstwhile Mentor follows the path of destiny into the mysterious world beyond life. As in the myriad allegories of maturation that nowadays constitute the bulk of genre fantasy, the business of learning to juggle authority and responsibility is plagued by many demons, whose evil is represented as a generalized and deep-seated force, from whose fountainhead such phenomena as smuggling, piracy and war all spring.
Like all fantasies of this ilk, the Lensman series is stridently and conservatively moralistic, aiming to inculcate in its young readers not merely a reasoned hatred of evil but a reflexive emotional repulsion. It is not ashamed to use such elementary strategies as labeling its villains with expressions of disgust: Eich!, Ploor! etc. It is, in fact, addressed very frankly to the immature, and ought not to be judged by the standards of adult literature.
When he had finished the Lensman series, with an extravagant flurry of collapsing galactic empires, there was no further stage for Smith to explore. Indeed, the last of the four serials—which appeared six years after the third, delayed in the writing by Smith’s war-time stint in a munitions factory—was neither promoted nor received with the same enthusiasm as its predecessors. Between 1942 and 1948 Astounding had undergone a sea-change, partly due to John W. Campbell Jr.’s crusade to make genre sf more responsible to known science, and partly due to the endorsement lent to that crusade by the advent of the Atomic Age, whose dilemmas and prospects sf had anticipated more cleverly than anyone had expected.
Smith spent the next few years revising and consolidating the book version of the Lensman series, and he also revised his other pulp novels for book publication. Ten years passed before he began a substantial new venture, and when he did so he made every effort to accommodate it to the new context, but he could not do it. Perhaps he was simply too old to learn new tricks; whatever the reason, The Galaxy Primes, serialized in Amazing in 1959, is devoid of any real narrative drive and gives the impression of being an inept pastiche of A. E. van Vogt. Smith wrote one more story for Astounding, “Subspace Survivors” (1960), but Campbell rejected its sequel, which was eventually issued in tandem with it in the book Subspace Explorers (1965). It is not at all surprising that, after revising a novel left behind by one of his admiring fans, E. Everett Evans, Smith then decided—in spite of the fact that he had almost lost the use of his eyes to cataracts—to revert to the first imaginative territory he had pioneered by writing Skylark DuQuesne. Its serial version appeared in print mere weeks before his death.
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It astonished many readers and critics—who regarded Smith as a virtual dinosaur and his last literary products as a set of embarrassing failures—that the books of Lensman series enjoyed a spectacular renewal of their popularity when they were re-released in paperback editions in the late 1960s. Indeed, they proved so very successful that the 1970s saw a concerted attempt to generate the same kind of boom in second-hand Smithiana that had previously been engineered in connection with the works of Robert E. Howard. A fragment that had appeared in If in 1964 as “The Imperial Stars” was completed by Stephen R. Goldin, and became the first of a ten-volume series. Two short stories from 1953-4 starring “Lord Tedric” became the basis for a four-volume series by Gordon Eklund. New titles were added to the Lensman series by William B. Ellern and long-time fan David A. Kyle. Lloyd Arthur Eshbach—who had published the book versions of most of Smith’s novels—supplied a sequel to Subspace Explorers.
None of this material is of any real interest, nor was any of it successful, even though the presence of Smith’s name on the covers guaranteed sales for a while. When the books in question began to pile up in second-hand outlets, unsaleable at any price, the whole enterprise came to seem rather absurd. If one considers the four Kimball Kinnison stories in isolation, however—or in association with the first three Skylark novels—it is not so very surprising that a new generation of teenage readers was able to find them exciting and inspiring, in spite of the fact that their form had been unwisely altered and their imaginative apparatus had become horribly dated. It is no coincidence that the same era saw the phenomenal success of paperback editions of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings and the spectacular rebirth of fantasy as a paperback genre. The imaginative apparatus of Tolkienesque fantasy was even more outdated than that of Smith’s space operas—but that was, in a sense, the whole point of the exercise.
The function of fairyland and all its literary analogues is that they provide an arena where an adult teller of a tale can meet a naïve reader on equal terms, unconfused by the fact that the teller’s experience of the world is far more varied and refined than his hearer’s. That was what Smith made of the universe of stars: an arena of adventure, where the limitations of scientific plausibility had no relevance at all. Any tale set in the real world is bound to be experienced very differently by an adult and a child, because they bring such different stocks of knowledge to the understanding of it, but a tale set in Middle-Earth or the Galactic Empire is neutral ground; all that is or can be known about it is the text.
It is for this reason that the Lensman series was—and, to some extent, still is—so wonderfully available to unsophisticated readers. Within this context, we can easily appreciate that the series is indeed a rather special work, for the imagination whose triumphs it celebrates is one that looks forwards rather than backwards, and outwards rather than inwards. Adult literature, which is inevitably devoted to self-conscious introspection and to historical understanding, can find little room for such endeavors as the Lensman series, but children will always be able to accommodate them.
Modern space opera has, of course, evolved to become much more sophisticated than its remotest ancestors. The politics of the galactic empire was extensively recomplicated and refined by writers like Isaac Asimov and Poul Anderson, and their influence has fed through to the TV shows that are now the principal format of the subgenre. It is arguable, however, that the similarities are more important than the differences. Modern space opera still consists largely of allegories of maturation, and its most popular forms still employ pseudoscientific jargon as a mask to conceal all the hoariest clichés of magical fantasy. Richard Seaton’s problematic battles with godlike beings of “pure intelligence” are still replayed, time and time again, and avatars of Blackie DuQuesne continue to play their mediating role in such struggles.
There is nowadays a kind of space opera that can qualify as adult literature, which has made the vast stage of the Galactic Empire available for thought-experiments of considerable subtlety and evident incisiveness—an opportunity that has been taken up by such thoroughly adult writers as Ursula K. Le Guin and Iain M. Banks—but the obvious merits of that kind of space opera should not entirely blind us to the merits of the other: the space opera that provided a thoroughly modern alternative to fairyland. The work that he did toward that end fully entitles Edward E. Smith, Ph.D. to be considered one of the most notable creators of science fiction.