DRUG WARLORDS LIKE BRITISH IN OPIUM WARS ....GALACTIC PATROL UND SO WEITER This was a slog. Like most of the Lensman stuff, it's hard to rate as a whole, since each book was originally serial, and some bits are a lot less sloggy than others. Refresher on the landfill metaphor: being 1940s sci-fi pulp serial, reading it is an archaeological dig into a landfill. There are layers of quaintness, which any science fiction turns into with time enough. There are layers of rollicking awesome, where action moves along at a good clip. And then there are layers of painful awkwardness. The layers aren't distinct of course, they blend together and veins of them intertwine with each other. But you never quite know what layer's going to dominate in a chapter to chapter reading. I started reading it last year, and the first half's really a one-star affair. The painful awkwardness dominates all the way through it. Our hero's investigation and tracing of the structure of enlightened Civilization's enemy has led him to a planet ruled by women, you see, an extreme matriarchy because the males aren't really people, but non-sentient breeding stock. Not even a Lensman can deal with such a topsy-turvy mixed up world, where women don't behave as women ought, because, well, just look at the last three letters of "lensman!" It stands to reason. But the planet must be dealt with, for Civilization's sake! Therefore, even though the womanly mind is simply not structured or capable of wielding a Lens, a (gasp!) female Lensman must come to be! So...yeah. The whole sequence could have been the plot treatment for a very bad Roger Corman film, and it just broke me. Thus almost a year passing before I took a deep breath and resumed. Luckily, I found out I'd already tunneled past the very worst parts, and the rest of it flowed rather more smoothly. There was an uptick of the good bits of giant fleets verily grimly triumphantly defenestrating vacuum itself through the coruscating, incomparable, unimaginable glass of their stacked adjectives and adverbs. Things move right along, the good guys kick ass, and then in the final chapter there's a final burp of outgassing in the victory chapter of Civilization's only possible Lenswoman squealing "Now I can go clothes shopping!" for a dozen pages.NAIF SCI-FI ....THE LENSMAN AND THE LESMA SAGA OU SAGA DAS LESMAS ...SLUGS ...LOST IN TRANSLATION Backstage Lensman" short story by Randall Garrett, a parody or pastiche of the Lensman series It was first written in 1949, lost and then rewritten in 1978. Garrett claimed that "Doc read the first version of 'Backstage Lensman' and laughed all through the convention. It was his suggestion that I call the spaceship Dentless rather than Dauntless." Garrett plays on the rather breathless and adjective-heavy prose of Smith—long strings of adjectives and adverbs, many of them compounded by hyphens, or offering the highest extremes, e.g. inconceivable, completely, irresistible, unimaginably, ultra indescribable. "The awesome awfulness of the unimaginable vastness of the intergalactic void", "the depths of degradation, the valleys of vileness, the caverns of corruption" or "beams, rods, cones, stilettos, icepicks, corkscrews, knives, forks, and spoons of energy raved against the screens of the Dentless." There is an almost complete lack of levity, but the long, stern descriptions are given a final twist in an appended sentence. The "blocky" plotting and the characteristic long background discussions are parodied, as is the unevenly applied physics (Smith often has problems with mass, inertia and gravity). Character names are often puns—Frite of the Meich, Gimble Ginnison, the Starboard Admiral Partisipple, Hess von Baschenvolks, Flatworthy, Woozle, Shadrack, Houston Carbarn, Banlon of Downlo, Banjo Freeko. Personal characteristics are exaggerated—- Ginnison uses phrases like "Jeepers!" and "Gee whiz!"; Shadrack describes himself as "a yellow-bellied, chicken-livered, jelly-gutted coward."

Second Stage Lensman

September 15, 2007 by Elijah

Hey everyone, I’m back-ish. My time for personal reading has gone down considerably during the last few weeks (thankfully, however, I’ve been reading some pretty cool stuff for school: expect a write-up of the Sundiata epic soon) but I’ve managed to get it in where I can. For example, I just recently finished up the penultimate book in E. E. “Doc” Smith’s formative, revolutionary, and precedent-setting space opera known as Lensman.
Second Stage Lensman, the fifth book in the series, might just be my favorite so far. First of all, it has all of the wonderful things that one expects from a Lensman book: action, scale, and a surprising mixture of well-thought-out ideas and corny shit. Best of all, it’s all written like this…

Because of the women held captive by the pirates, the Valerians carried no machine rifles, no semi-portables, no heavy stuff at all; only their DeLameters and of course their space-axes. A Valerian trooper without his space-axe? Unthinkable! A dire weapon indeed, the space-axe. A combination of and sublimation of battle-axe, mace, bludgeon, and lumberman’s picaroon; thirty pounds of hard, tough, space-tempered alloy; a weapon of potentialities limited only by the physical strength and bodily agility of its wielder. And vanBuskirk’s Valerians had both–plenty of both. One-handed, with simple flicks of his incredible wrist, the smallest Valerian of the Dauntless’ boarding party could manipulate his atrocious weapon as effortlessly as, and almost unbelievable [sic] faster than, a fencing master handles his rapier or an orchestra conductor waves his baton.
– p. 95 (of Good Earth Books facsimile edition)

And this…

Not by choice, then, but of necessity and in sheer desperation the pirates fought. In the vicious beams of their portables the stone walls of the room glared a baleful red; in spots even were pierced through. Old-fashioned pistols barked, spitting steel-jacketed lead. But the G-P [Galactic Patrol] suits were screened against lethal beams by generators capable of withstanding anything of lesser power than a semi-portable projector; G-P armor was proof against any projectile possessing less energy than that hurled by the high-caliber machine rifle. Thus the Boskonian beams splashed off the Valerians’ screens in torrents of man-made lightning and in pyrotechnic displays of multi-colored splendor, their bullets richoted harmlessly as spent, mis-shapen blobs of metal.
– p. 96

The incredible thing about it, is that it’s all written like that. Every goddamn page.
At some point soon I plan to go on at length about the series as a whole, but for now I’ll stick with Second Stage Lensman. With this book we once again pick up the adventures of Kimball Kinnison, Gray Lensman of the Galactic Patrol, as he fights against the evil forces of Boskonia, whom he had thought destroyed at the end of the last book (and had also thought destroyed at the end of the book before that, and thinks destroyed at the end of this one, but there’s still one more to come… yes, they are a smidge formulaic).
What makes this one, in my opinion, better than the somewhat similar, but still very good, books Galactic Patrol and Gray Lensman (books three and four, respectively–the first two books were all set up) are–strangely enough, in any discussion of Doc Smith–the little things. For example, Kim Kinnison, and indeed every other Lensman in the series, (the Lensmen are the super powered arm of the Patrol) are always shown as being utterly brutal killers, willing to do whatever it takes to make the galaxy safe for Civilization. While our hero certainly never enjoys the slaughters in which he takes part, it isn’t until this book that he truly begins to feel distaste at them. He never hesitates from what needs to be done, mind you, but it makes him sick to his stomach at times, and that one little character change is quite welcome. What’s more, Kinnison even begins to doubt the methods he employed in previous books, not only causing the character to grow, but showing Doc Smith himself growing as an author.
Even better than that, though, is that Second Stage Lensman spends more time than any previous book on non-human characters. One of the incredible things about Smith is that he was one of the first writers to really get into the psychologies of his created alien races, and make them really, truly, and fundamentally inhuman, but still normal characters like anybody else. In this book he takes that one step further by letting Worsel, Tregonsee, and the newly-introduced Nadreck–all of whom are the only Lensman to achieve the titular Second Stage other than our hero–each do a good deal more than any of them, with the exception of Worsel, ever got to do before. Plus, the coldly calculating Nadreck is really, really great to read about.
(There is, actually, a trilogy of books (called, collectively, Second Stage Lensman) set during the Lensman series, each of which centers upon one of those three non-human Lensmen. They are, however, by a different author who is simply building upon Smith’s work… and I’m not really sure how I feel about that. Anyone read these?)
Also, in Second Stage Lensman, Smith gives us the one, and only, female Lensman. Of course, alot about this very old series comes across as quaintly sexist in this day and age, but it is worth pointing out that Smith clearly and fully believed that he was creating a world in which there was equality of the sexes. It’s the thought that counts, right? In this novel he introduces us to the matriarchy of Lyrane, which is shown as so backwards as to be almost evil, but at the same time he makes it clear that in his mind a total patriarchy would be just as bad.
The rather silly bits of sexism can be enjoyed along with the goofy dialogue and everything else that makes the books pulpy. In fact, I would argue that part of what makes the Lensman series so great is that the feeling of immense scope (a scope that grows wider than any other space opera that I can name) and incredible imagination blends wonderfully with pulp-style action and characters, and lots of “going undercover” types of intrigue.
The bottom line is that if you don’t mind being awed one minute and laughing at clumsy dialogue the next, the Lensman series will be immense fun for you. Despite a slightly lackluster climax, (although only in comparison to the preceding ones) Second Stage Lensman is a perfect example of the insane, nonstop enjoyment and boundless imagination that this watershed series has to offer… after you’ve slogged through those first two books.....AND YOU CAN YES YOU CAN READ MORE THAN THREE  BOOKS LIKE THAT ...LIKE TIT ....NO...NOT LIKE TIT