In truth, the closest that the young zero-gargling John Campbell came to achieving parity with his hero was that thrilling moment in late 1934 when the two had serials running concurrently in the pages of the Tremaine Astounding—Smith’s third Skylark story, Skylark of Valeron, and Campbell’s last attempt at the epic of super-science, The Mightiest Machine. But after this, Campbell, too, dropped away. Or, more precisely, turned his attention elsewhere.
In the last half of the Thirties, E.E. Smith stood alone, completely without peer. And, competing with himself, Smith still contrived to top Smith. He put the Skylark series aside and launched himself into a new super-story that he had been incubating for ten years, ever since the moment he had finally sold The Skylark of Space to Amazing.
The Lensman series—four novels serialized in Astounding from 1937 to 1947—was conceived on a scale that made even the Skylark stories seem limited and parochial. In this series, the entire galaxy is one ongoing multifaceted civilization, in which Earth—here often called “Tellus”267—was an early leader, but is not set apart or specially privileged.
These stories, as nothing else, would reveal the true difference between Smith and his quasi-rivals, Hamilton and Campbell. In his Interstellar Patrol stories, Edmond Hamilton presented human beings lightly turning aside the threats offered by larger and larger increments of space and time. In his epics of super-science, John W. Campbell imagined ever-larger quantifications of the potential power of human thought. But underlying all of Smith’s fiction was an altogether more subtle vision—the conviction of the existence of level upon level of potential being and becoming.
As early as The Skylark of Space, this conviction may be seen in the form of the disembodied intelligence who creates the illusion of a planet for the members of the Skylark party to land upon and toys with them for a brief hour before allowing them to depart. This being not only operates on another and higher level of existence, but also indicates to the Skylarkers that this other level may potentially be attained by human beings.
Richard Seaton himself is a leap-taker. The increases in power and scale from story to story in the Skylark series, until the dauntless companions are boldly jumping from galaxy to galaxy in mile-long spaceships, may be taken as exact reflections of Richard Seaton’s increases in imaginative grasp, scientific command, and personal acceptance of responsibility.
But there were limitations to the possible scope of the Skylark stories inherent in their very structure. They were the personal adventures of one contemporary genius from Idaho and his best buddy and their wives, and no more.
So, in a switch that was in itself a conceptual leap—an example of the very idea he was attempting to express in the form of fiction—Smith dropped the Skylark stories and launched the Lensman series.
In these novels, there is a hierarchy of being and responsibility in the galaxy. Galactic Civilization respects all forms of intelligent life. And the very best beings of any kind may aspire to become Galactic Patrolmen and help to maintain the peace of Galactic Civilization.
The most advanced members of the Galactic Patrol wear the Lens. This individually tailored “lenticular jewel”268 is both a sign of their superior character and an instrument of overwhelming power. More than that, in a real sense it is the very basis on which Galactic Civilization is founded.
Early in the first story in the series, Galactic Patrol (Astounding, Sept. 1937-Feb. 1938), we are told:
“The Lens, which, being proof against counterfeiting or even imitation, makes identification of Lensmen automatic and positive, was what made our Patrol possible. Having the Lens, it was easy to weed out the few unfit. Standards of entrance were raised ever higher, and when it had been proved beyond question that every Lensman was in fact incorruptible, the Galactic Council was given more and more authority. More and ever more solar systems, having developed Lensmen of their own, voted to join Civilization and sought representation on the Galactic Council, even though such a course meant giving up much of their systemic sovereignty.”269
Only some of the Lensmen are human, of course. Most are not. But the very best of the Lensmen is Smith’s protagonist, another John Carter figure, Kimball Kinnison, whose special talents and abilities increase from story to story as he and his Lens-wearing fellows are pitted against a succession of ever more powerful, repellent and dangerous antagonists, some human and some not.
But the obvious and apparent levels of galactic conflict in these stories ultimately prove not to be the most important level. Gradually, it would be revealed that behind the brave and able wearers of the Lens stand the beings who make the Lens—the good Arisians, a higher race who hide themselves from view lest the very fact of their immense superiority disturb and intimidate impressionable younger beings. And behind the layers of menace that the Galactic Patrolmen strip away, there is eventually to be found another superior race—the evil Eddorians, interlopers from another space/time continuum.
A desperate struggle between good and evil is going on in the universe at every level, led by Arisia and Eddore, and humanity has a significant role to play in the conflict. Once more it is possible for men to have something to say about the making of their own destiny rather than merely serving as a toy of Fate.
Smith’s Skylark and Lensman stories presented a strikingly positive vision of human vigor, power and potential. At this moment, by contrast, even the best and noblest works of British SF were lost in uneasy dreams of human inability and senescence.
For example, in Brave New World (1932), a satire of Wellsian scientific utopia by Aldous Huxley—a grandson of Thomas Huxley, the great biologist and teacher of Wells—it is five hundred years After Ford. This future has no frontiers—space travel, for instance, is never mentioned—and no sense of human dignity and purpose. Humanity is genetically engineered to fit the needs of society. War and art have been eliminated, and men live solely for comfort and pleasure. At the conclusion of the novel, the one character who represents traditional human values—“the Savage”270—must commit suicide in utter despair at this sterile existence and his own degradation.
In Odd John (1935), by Olaf Stapledon, a mental and moral superman sets up a colony of his own kind in the South Seas. But the jealousy and fear of ordinary humans will not tolerate its separate existence. The supermen are confronted by a combined fleet of ships from the governments of Britain, France, the United States, Holland, Japan and Russia. Finally, rather than fight—or make common cause with lesser beings—Odd John and his fellows elect to commit mass suicide:
The supernormals might have chosen to end their career by simply failing dead, but seemingly they desired to destroy their handiwork along with themselves. They would not allow their home, and all the objects of beauty with which they had adorned it, to fall into subhuman clutches. Therefore they deliberately blew up their power-station, thereby destroying not only themselves but their whole settlement.271
Finally, Star Maker (1937), also by Stapledon, presents a picture of the farther reaches of time and space in a book that is an extension of the visions of Last and First Men. The narrative begins with a contemporary human, lost in despair, desperately wishing for confirmation that humanity is not alone in the cosmos. This wish is given an answer through a kind of disembodied astral travel that allows the narrator’s consciousness to eavesdrop on many different stellar worlds through coming time. The narrator observes race upon race of life forms—some lower than man, some higher—and is even permitted a glimpse of the Star Maker, a cruel, remote and chilly god not unlike those presented by Bertrand Russell and Lord Dunsany at the turn of the century.
But human beings have no direct part to play in this vast universe. In Last and First Men, the hand-wringing Eighteenth Men, themselves unable to brave the interstellar void, launch great sperm ships to scatter human seed among the stars. But this project has no consequence reported in Star Maker. It is only one more futile gesture. The conclusion of Star Maker brings the narrator full circle, back home to
contemporary Earth, where he is left to look forward to imminent catastrophe, beyond that to the demise of the human race on Neptune, and beyond that to the complete physical quiescence of all existence.
By contrast, Doc Smith’s Lensman stories incorporate many of the very same materials as these distinguished but despairing British books—the advanced scientific society, human eugenics, the emergent superman, higher races, and great sweeps of space and time—but to completely different effect:
The future painted by Aldous Huxley in Brave New World is a limited place without challenge or purpose. Human breeding can only lead to an obscene fragmentation and diminution of human nature. But Smith’s future is a universe that is wide open, a world in which genetic selection is not an evolutionary dead end, but a way upward.
Olaf Stapledon’s superman in Odd John is a murderer of ordinary humans as a child. And in the very first paragraph of the story we are told, “The word ‘man’ on John’s lips was often equivalent to ‘fool.’ ”272 But Smith’s Lensmen are not so snotty and self-indulgent. As the best of their worlds, part of a continuum of capacity and responsibility, they have real work to perform serving as the guardians and protectors of their less advanced brothers and sisters.
Stapledon’s vision of the wider universe in Star Maker is of a remote realm that has no viable place within it for mankind. At best, it may engage our aesthetic appreciation. We may applaud its brilliance (and our own) before we are permitted to die. But E.E. Smith’s universe is a very different kind of place. It is made for intelligent creatures, including mankind, and offers itself to their mastery.
In the second story in the series, Gray Lensman (Astounding, Oct. 1939-Jan. 1940), there is a highly significant passage where, for a brief moment, while his ship is traveling through intergalactic space, Kimball Kinnison misplaces his usual sense of purpose and falls into self-doubt before the vastness of the universe. But then he remembers himself, and reasserts the power of man:
Despite the fact that Kinnison had gone out there expecting to behold that very scene, he felt awed to insignificance by the overwhelming, the cosmic immensity of the spectacle. What business had he, a sub-electronic midge from an ultra-microscopic planet, venturing out into macro-cosmic space, a demesne comprehensible only to the omniscient and omnipotent Creator?273
He got up, shaking off the futile mood. This wouldn’t get him to the first check-station, and he had a job to do. And after all, wasn’t man as big as space? Could he have come out here, otherwise? He was. Yes, man was bigger even than space. Man, by his very envisionment of macro-cosmic space, had already mastered it.
Like the extraordinary voyages of Jules Verne in an earlier moment of transition, Smith’s epics of super-science served as a bridge between eras. They were the culmination of one period and the foundation for another. Just as Verne’s fiction, with its domestication of wild science and its probes into the unknown, summed up Romantic Era proto-SF and made possible the new scientific fiction of the Technological Age, so Smith’s stories, with their mastery of the macrocosm and visions of higher levels of possible being, simultaneously served to sum up Age of Technology science fiction and laid the groundwork for the modern science fiction of the coming Atomic Age.
Smith’s great sweeping science fiction stories made all things possible. During the Thirties, Doc Smith’s confident and optimistic vision of the universe and man’s place within it offered an imaginative basis for the most progressive experiments of American magazine science fiction.
Within the great imaginative domain encompassed by Smith, there was room aplenty for acclimatization to the future and outer space, and for new views of time and matter. Old story material might be cast in new guise. Old problems might be resolved, and old scores settled. Stories that otherwise might have seemed too muddled, tenuous or ambivalent to accept, stories that in many cases could never have been imagined at all without the scope and courage lent by his example, were protected and legitimized by Smith’s work.
One instance of this was the fruitful revival of the alien exploration story. In the early Thirties, a number of writers produced stories that were modeled on the tales of transition into unknown realms they had once read and loved in the All-Story and Argosy of the Teens. But these new stories had significant differences from the old ones.
In the new story of alien exploration, as in the old, a character from our world would be transferred into another world—a different dimension, or the far future, the microscopic realm, or perhaps some world in space. But the means of transference would not usually be occult, as had so often been the case in the Teens. And the destination would not be a world of spirit, but rather some strange corner within the new scientific multiverse.
As an example of this form, we might take the first story of Clifford Simak, a Midwestern newspaperman. Simak was another of the rural children born at the turn of the century who were struck by wonder at the sight of modern science and technology and grew up to write science fiction. Simak was born on August 3, 1904, and was raised in a log house on a farm in the woods of Wisconsin. He once commented, “I sometimes think that despite the fact my boyhood spanned part of the first and second decades of the Twentieth Century that I actually lived in what amounted to the tail end of pioneer days.”274
In Simak’s novelet “The World of the Red Sun” (Wonder Stories, Dec. 1931), two contemporary explorers in a time machine gone astray encounter a Big Brain named Golan-Kirt—“He-Who-Came-Out-of-the-Cosmos”275—ruling the Earth of five million years hence. The American venturers laugh this tyrant invader down, and then when he is helpless they pot him with their .45s. Ah, but when they attempt to return home, they only find themselves in an even-more-remote dying world where their deeds have become the stuff of ancient broken statuary.
Many things about this story are typical of Thirties’ alien exploration—from taking a wrong turning at the beginning to being stranded at the end. Where E.E. Smith’s confident Skylark voyagers paid visits to a variety of stellar worlds in a spaceship that was both completely substantial and deliberately directed, and might at any time follow their object-compass back home to Earth, the protagonists of stories of alien exploration tended to be flipped into some particular alien world, usually when an experimental scientific device began to operate in a manner wholly unexpected, and then had no way to get back home again. No surprise, then, that stories of this kind tended to be haunted and brooding and bittersweet.
In this, they bore a resemblance to British and European SF of the day. And yet, there was an active and progressive quality to these new stories of alien exploration that made them genuinely different in kind. Despite all their regret and grief at the passing of old worlds, stories of alien exploration were a means by which the unknown universes of science were discovered, investigated and tamed.
In earlier SF, Village Earth was at the very center of things, and all around was the impenetrable darkness of the cosmos. Stories of the exploration of alien realms like Wells’s The Time Machine or Ray Cummings’ “The Girl in the Golden Atom” would always be relayed to us through some stay-at-home subnarrator, who himself would have the tale from the lips of the actual venturer. But now, in a story like “The World of the Red Sun,” the narrative would both begin and end in the World Beyond the Hill, with present-day Earth serving only as an offstage possibility or memory.
And, however erratically and accidentally the protagonists of the new alien exploration story might travel into the unknown, they did go mentally prepared to do what was necessary to deal with what they found. Unlike their predecessors of the Teens, they did not have to retreat to Village Earth all maimed and mangled in order to heal and properly arm themselves. They traveled packing .45 automatics on their hips as potent symbols of human scientific authority. And they were not loath to pull the trigger.
The violent rejection of Big Brain in “The World of the Red Sun” was not an isolated incident, either, but a typical theme. In one alien exploration story afte
r another, Big Brains alien and Big Brains human were shot, bludgeoned, or even stomped to death.
The most popular SF novelet of the Thirties was an alien exploration story that transcended the usual limits of the genre. “Colossus” (Astounding, Jan. 1934), by Donald Wandrei, was the second story to be presented by new editor F. Orlin Tremaine as a special “thought-variant.”
In “Colossus,” a spaceship takes off from Earth, fleeing the devastation of a new world war, a war that has claimed the life of the hero’s beloved fiancée Anne. Out into the cosmos the ship White Bird travels, past Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto, into a universe of “150,000,000 galaxies, each composed of millions of stars.”276
The farther and faster this ship travels, the larger it becomes. And, at last, it leaves our world entirely for another: “He had burst through the atom that was his universe and had emerged on a planet of a greater universe, a superuniverse!”277
Here, the hero is examined by titanic beings, who inquire whether he can return to his own atom again. He replies:
“I do not know where it is. I would not know how to find it. If I could find it, I would not be able to enter. Something happened, when I burst through. I am bigger than my whole universe was. I cannot shrink down. Besides, millions of years have passed back there since I departed. I do not even know whether Earth, my planet, still exists.”278
But this transference into a higher dimension is not just another stranding, but rather a redemption and a new beginning. On an idyllic planet to which he is directed by the Titans, the hero finds a girl who looks like his lost Anne, and the recognition is mutual: “Her lips parted and her eyes, showing neither the fear nor the mistrust that he might have expected, shone of something secret, as if to greet some dimly remembered and half-forgotten friend of long ago.”279
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