E.E. "Doc" Smith: First Lensman (1950)

Edition: Panther, 1972
Review number: 100



The second novel in Smith's Lensman series, First Lensman is a unified narrative (unlike Triplanetary which precedes it). It follows on directly from the events of the first book, detailing the later stages in the fight against drugs and corruption led by Virgil Samms. (Samms plays a comparatively small part in Triplanetary, which was more concerned with the swashbuckling adventures of his sub-ordinates.)

The first half of the novel is an explanation of the origins of the Lens after which the series as a whole is known. Various problems are beginning to dog the Triplanetary Service. Corruption is taking hold, particularly in the fight against drugs; criminals are impersonating officers of the Service, using faked ids. A mysterious conviction grows that answers to these problems can be found through a visit to the planet Arisia, shunned as a "ghost planet" both by legitimate spacemen and by pirates and drugs runners.

Arriving at Arisia, Samms meets an entity who calls itself "Mentor". He is given a mysterious artefact, a Lens; it is a telepathic crystal, tuned to his mind alone and capable of enhancing the powers that his mind possesses. Mentor assures him that no one will be given a Lens who is unworthy of one, and that only the incorruptible will wear them.

Samms is a bit bemused by this generosity, but the reader knows the background to it: the eons-old war between the Arisians and Eddorians, the Arisians continually trying to build up civilisation, the Eddorians to knock it down.

The second half of the book tells of a North American presidential election (Canada, the US and Mexico together forming a single state) fought by the officers of the Triplanetary Service (as 'Cosmocrats') on the right and the pirates and drugs runners on the left. Smith's politics are one of the most difficult aspects of his writing style for a modern European reader to swallow - as they cater rather more for stereotypical American political viewpoints a US citizen may find them easier to accept. He persistently holds the belief that any intelligent person must support the right, with the left only gaining votes through stupidity, corruption and vote-rigging. It is a view perhaps explicable in an American of his time, who had lived through some of the most corrupt scandals of American town-hall politics. Smith's right wing politics were of a reasonably benign kind, characterised by a strong belief in intelligent capitalism most clearly expressed in Subspace Encounter. He was relatively free from racism, particularly when compared to contemporaries, though this is perhaps debatable given the almost complete absence of non-white human beings in his novels.

The first half of First Lensman is easier to read, then, than the second, though the ins and outs of the political campaign are an interesting change from the standard military space opera trappings of the rest of the series. If Heinlein's novels transfer an idealised American small-town background to everywhere in the universe (see review of Rolling Stones), then this novel takes a similar approach with an American large town.

David A. Kyle: Z-Lensman (1983)

Edition: Bantam, 1983
Review number: 831

The culmination of Kyle's trilogy continuing E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman series concentrates on the second stage lensman Nadreck, from the Pluto-like planet Palain VII. (He is a Z-lensman because in a classification scheme for sentient beings in which humans are A, his species is of type Z, very alien indeed.) He is instrumental in seeing off several threats to civilization, including rebellious machines and psychic forces.

As with his earlier attempts at the continuation, Kyle is unable to make Z-Lensman match up to the original series. Nadreck is not sufficiently strange (this accusation could be levelled at the original novels, but it is not as severe a problem when he is not the central character), and his human helpers are interchangeable. Introducing the idea of survival after death doesn't work very well, especially as it forms an unnecessary addition to an already complicated plot. The writing is disjointed and leaves a great deal to be desired in terms of the sense of wonder and enthusiasm which is such an important part of Smith's own writing. Only worthwhile if, like me, you are something of a collector.

David A. Kyle: The Dragon Lensman (1980)

Edition: Bantam, 1983
Review number: 815

Many science fiction fans, myself included, have something of a soft spot for the novels of E.E. "Doc" Smith. This is despite their obvious failings, and is because they have a grandeur of vision and convey a sense that the writer is excited by his own story. Since Smith's death, there have been several attempts to continue some of his series. The best known of these is probably Stephen Goldin's Circus of the Galaxy series, which has the two advantages of being based on lesser known Smith and of being published under Smith's name.

Of all Smith's writing, the seven volume Lensmen series is easily the most famous, and it is inevitable really that the Smith estate should have sought to add to it. The Dragon Lensman is the first of three volumes described as a continuation, though in fact they fill in a gap in the original series. They also concentrate on lesser characters than Smith's hero Kinnison; these are the other three "Second Stage" lensmen, and in this case the reptilian Worsel of Velantia.

The plot of the novel, set between Second Stage Lensmen and Children of the Lens, is rather confusing. Basically, several crises occur simultaneously, which gives them the appearance of being connected. These include the development of intelligence by machines on the Planetoid of Knowledge, the galactic museum; the novel begins with an attack by them on Worsel (the motivation for the attack being the feeling that machines have been subjugated by biological entities). This coincides with a psychic attack on a nearby spaceship, in which a call for help from Worsel appears to be part of the attack so that it seems possible that he has become evil.

One of the successful aspects of Smith's writing was to balance cosmic ideas against a simple plot; the main Lensmen story is just a series of battles between good and evil, gradually increasing in scale. In this and in several other ways, Kyle shows himself not to be Smith, despite the endorsement from A.E. van Vogt that the writing says that Smith is back.

E.E. "Doc" Smith: Grey Lensman (1951)

Edition: Panther, 1973
Review number: 168


By the second Kimball Kinnison Lensman book, the fourth in the series overall, the path to the final conflict between the Arisians and the Eddorians is set. Each remaining book now contains the downfall of one or more of the races in the lower echelons of the Eddorian scheme of things, with Smith bursting his imagination to come up with every more spectacular weapons to destroy the planetary headquarters of these races. In Grey Lensman, these consist of a planet sized sphere of negative mass, drawn in ever faster by the frantic efforts of defenders to push it away and eating into the planet to leave rubble (none of the vast explosive release of energy which is actually the consequence of the interaction of matter and anti-matter); and a pair of planets released to crush Jarnevon, planet of the Eich, between them.

The ethics of such a destruction are taken entirely for granted, as was generally the case in science fiction of the time; the justification is the self-evident evil nature of the Eddorians and their henchmen (henchbeings?). Human beings are the only species in significant numbers on both sides (this is something that clearly worried Robert Kyle in his series of authorised Lensman sequels); all other species are either black or white as a whole, with no exceptions. The tendency to paint with a broad brush in this way is common even today; there must be many decent Serbs, for example, but we never hear about them and crimes are attributed to "the Serbs" by the media, as though they were all equally culpable.

One cannot really fault Smith for being of his time and not of now; and he does allow Kinnison a moment of self-doubt, for leading good men to their deaths. It is for the exuberance of his story-telling that people still read Smith's space operas, not for his moral philosophy.

E.E. "Doc" Smith: Galactic Patrol (1937)

Edition: Panther, 1977
Review number: 119

With the third of his Lensmen series, Smith introduces the man who will be the hero of the next four books - Galactic Patrol, Grey Lensman, Second Stage Lensmen and (to a lesser extent) Children of the Lens. Kimball Kinnison is the one for whom the Arisians have been waiting and working, the culmination of the human breeding programme they set up many centuries earlier. Galactic Patrol deals with the earliest stages of his career, from his graduation as a Lensman from the Patrol's cadet academy.

His graduation comes at a hard time for civilization. Organised pirates, known as Boskonians, have gained a great advantage in a new kind of space drive, making their ships far faster than anything the Patrol can build. That is, with the exception of one ship, the Britannia. New and experimental, she has abandoned the traditional ray armament of a space ship for an offence even older - explosive artillery, fired at an opponent held in place by unbreakable tractor beams. Her mission is to capture a Boskonian ship of the new type intact enough to get the secret of her speed (hence the artillery, which the scientists of the patrol think can damage another ship enough to disable it without destroying the information they want to have). Her experimental nature means that she would be useless to a man with the amount of experience normally required to captain a space ship, so she is given to Kinnison to command.

Galactic Patrol is science fiction of the old heroic, pulp fiction type, and is unashamedly so. It is immensly exciting if you can ignore the over-florid writing style; it is traditional comic book hero material as a novel, but great fun for all that.

E.E. "Doc" Smith: Triplanetary (1948)

Edition: Panther, 1973
Review number: 88

This, the first of the Lensmen series, is a real classic of science fiction. In common with Smith's Sklyark series, it set far wider horizons for SF than readers were used to; not just interplanetary, but interstellar and intergalactic in scope.

In many ways, the series defines science fiction as the genre it is considered to be by outsiders: it is not great literature, but it is exciting; it uses space travel and the idea of war in space; it is more interested in technology than people.

Triplanetary itself is really a prologue to the main part of the series, and consists of two major parts. The first explains the background to the whole series, a huge war of mental power between the evil Eddorians and the benevolent Arisians, carried out through the history of an oblivious humankind on Earth. Smith takes five defining events: the fall of Atlantis (through a nuclear war), an attempted coup in Rome against the Eddorian-controlled Nero, the First and Second World Wars, and, finally, a nuclear Third World War. In each of these periods he tells part of the story of the two families who will be of immense importance later on, and who will produce the two people who are the culmination of the human genetic pool, Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa MacDougal.

The second part, which was originally published as a magazine story, takes up the tale after civilisation has been rebuilt with the covert help of the Arisians. Mankind is beginning to reach out into the solar system, setting up colonies and fighting a war with the Adepts of North Polar Jupiter, only to face a new menace. The Nevians are the ampibious dominant race of their planet, many lightyears distant from the sun. The planet is desperately short of metals, and a spaceship sets out to try to obtain more - say from an asteroid. Instead, they find the ships of the Triplanetary Service (Earth, Mars and Venus in alliance) at war with the fleet of a surviving Adept; from ships and men every atom of free or combined iron is taken.

This means the death of every person in the fleet, and is followed by the same action taken against the Earth city of Pittsburgh. It is up to one man to save the human race, one of the three captives taken alive by the Nevians as zoological specimens.

I've always enjoyed the Lensmen series; they're something to read on an evening when half asleep.