A BETTER WAY TO KILL THE LITTLE GRAY CELLS OF HERCULE POIROT ...Sometimes, I'm a fool. I thought, perhaps, that the "so called" golden age of sci-fi before Heinlein would be as painful to read as the old Jules Verne. I even tried to read the first ten pages of the first book of the Lensman of E. E. Smith PHD and cringed down to my soul. I was thinking that nothing would be worth the pain of reading this trash. And yet, all of my favorite past couple of generations of sci-fi authors swore by the old doc, and there are still generations of readers that are surprised and delighted by the stories. Heck, the fourth book is considered by some to be the 98th best sci-fi book of all time. I buckled down, gritted my teeth, and picked up the fourth without so much as reading eleven pages of the first three. I WAS DUMBFOUNDED. I was awestruck. I was plainly amazed and giddy in the reading of these little serialized bubblegum stories of sci-fi heroes. I'm too young to have watched Flash Gordon, but I understand the draw. I'm certainly old enough to have sat amazed through all the Star Wars at the inception. I've watched all of the original Star Treks, (not to mention every iteration after). I was forced to re-evaluate my entire internal consistency engine of sci-fi idea sources and lineage, and all of a sudden, the mitochondrial eve of sci-fi tropes (at least the best surviving eve) is FOUND. Now I understand. The light shines upon my mind. The great cosmic egg lights up like a big bulb. So I asked in a small voice... "So the Lensman series is what encouraged the Green Lantern Comics into being? It also encouraged the biggest space operas? It took over as the sci-fi successor to all westerns and greek hero myths?" And E. E. Smith replied, "Yes, you dumbshit." AAaaahhhh... ok... I feel like a moron now, but at least I didn't proliferate that weird-ass idea about galaxies colliding... whew... I'm back on my moral high ground again. :) I might just have to read them in order again and ignore, dutifully, the Really Bad Physics in favor of the Great Fun. Update: I can't get this out of my head: The proper term for the collision of two planets is "Squishingly". I can't unread what I have read, so I pay it forward

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 ALIENS, for example, but we never hear about them and crimes are attributed to "the ALIENS" by the media, as though they were all equally culpable.

Monday, 16 November 1998

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.

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.

Posted by Simon McLeish