The Best of E E 'Doc' Smith

by E E 'Doc' Smith

  The Best of E.E. "Doc" Smith

  Classic Adventures in Space By One of SF's Great Originals

  LIST OF CONTENTS

  Preface

  Foreword

  To The Far Reaches Of Space

  Robot Nemesis

  Chapter I The Ten Thinkers

  Chapter II Hater of the Metal Men

  Chapter III Battle in Space

  Chapter IV The Sun's Gravity

  Pirates Of Space

  The Vortex Blaster

  Tedric

  Lord Tedric

  Subspace Survivors

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  The Imperial Stars

  I

  II

  III

  IV

  V

  VI

  VII

  VIII

  IX

  X

  Afterword - The Epic of Space

  Bibliography

  Preface

  When "The Skylark of Space" was published in AMAZING STORIES in 1928 it gave the science fiction fraternity the road to the stars. It also had a profound effect on other writers, notably John W. Campbell, who took their cue from Smith.

  TO THE FAR REACHES OF SPACE, a complete - in itself excerpt from the famous novel, records this initial leap beyond the solar system. Told with verve and gusto, the narrative admirably shows Smith's panache in handling vast distances and strange alien worlds.

  As "The Skylark of Space" shattered the confines of the space story in 1928, so ROBOT NEMESIS widened the frontiers of the robot story when it first appeared (under another title) in 1934. Robots in the early days of science fiction were usually clanking monstrosities who threatened their scientist creators. In this story Smith's illimitable imagination postulates a future wherein robots actually threaten to supplant mankind as the Lords of Creation.

  Smith's writing was never better than in the opening chapters of "Triplanetary." The complex structure of the pirate base, a self-contained world in space, comes across with absolute credibility in the complete segment PIRATES OF SPACE.

  THE VORTEX BLASTER is definitive Smith, with its skillful intermingling of super-science and human interest. The tragedy of Neal Cloud immediately grips the reader who easily identifies with Cloud in his fight against the atomic horror responsible for his wife's death.

  In TEDRIC (1953) and LORD TEDRIC (1954), the reader is offered two lost gems which were originally published in two of the rarest magazines in the field. Here one finds a fascinating blend of sword and sorcery and the paradoxes of time travel, in the inimitable Smith style.

  SUBSPACE SURVIVORS (1960) is a compelling novelette written in the modern tradition which marked Smith's triumphant return to the pages of ASTOUNDING SCIENCE FICTION after a thirteen year absence.

  THE IMPERIAL STARS (1964) marks the high watermark of the final phase of Smith's work. Whilst presented in the slick, modern manner, it evokes the old magic of the Lensman series, with its galactic agents and star-spanning intrigues. Intended as the first in a new series, later parts are said to exist in outline and may yet appear in some form or other.

  That is something to look forward to. Meanwhile you will find encompassed here the best of "Doc" Smith, eight stories spanning an incredible five decades of science fiction history, by its best-loved pioneer.

  Philip Harbottle, Wellsend, March 1975.

  Foreword

  EDWARD E SMITH, PhD-CIVILIZATION'S HISTORIAN

  Dekanore VI - A non-Tellurian planet inhabited by immensely ugly, spider-like beings, to whom Kimball Kinnison was a shuddersome sight.

  Adams of Procia - Commander-in-chief of Procyon's armed forces; appointed general of Procyon by Roderick Kinnison in the formation of the Galactic Patrol.

  Croleo's - A bar in the city of Ardith, on Radelix.

  Slasher-worm - A Venerian creature which Herkimer threatened to use in torturing Jill Samms.

  Thought-cap - The Jelm version of the thought-transfer helmet, or mechanical educator.

  "Tail high, brother!" - The Vegian war-cry.

  Devoted followers of those doughty heroes Richard Seaton, Kimball Kinnison and Neal Cloud will be able to make good sense of these items from The Universes of E E Smith. They are typical of hundreds of entries in a unique concordance to the eleven best-known novels of the late Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D., which took two of his disciples four years to compile. Its 270 pages from a complete reader's guide to the complex webwork of imaginary worlds and fantastic creations which earned the beloved "Doc" the title of "Historian of Civilization;" a fitting memorial to one of the most inventive and influential writers to leave his mark on the popular literature of science fiction.

  Few others have made such an impact as he did at his first appearance in 1928, or continued so long to delight a host of fans most of whom remained faithful even after his work had been dismissed as artless and juvenile. That his first novel, The Skylark of Space, opened the door for the most extravagant excursions of super-science into the remotest regions, and led the way for "space opera," has been held against him in recent years where once it was deemed a vital spur to the development of the genre. Yet, despite their undoubted limitations on the literary level, the sweeping "epics" of "Skylark" Smith are still relished for their sheer exuberance.

  The pioneering Amazing Stories magazine was in its third year when it serialized what it described as "one of the outstanding scientifiction stories of the decade," predicting that it would be "referred to by fans for years to come." The prediction proved perfectly valid. Nearly twenty years later, when the first of several enterprising specialist book publishers began to resurrect "classic" tales from the magazines, the much-vaunted Skylark was an obvious choice and sold out so quickly that the firm had to be reorganized to cope with the demand. Since 1946 it has seen publication in several forms in many parts of the world, and it is still being reprinted, like the other "Doe" Smith serials that followed at intervals through the years. Yet, before Amazing Stories accepted it, The Skylark had gathered what the author cheerfully claimed was "probably the most complete collection of rejection slips in America." In a pleasant correspondence which we conducted in the late 1940s, he told me bow be had begun to write the story after starting out as a chemical engineer in 1914 and did not complete it until 1920. For two years Mrs. Lee Hawkins Garby, the wife of an old classmate, helped him with the romantic interest that readers found so treacly but which hardly interfered with the high-geared action. But she didn't have the staying power of the determined Smith, who by the time he was 25 had held down a dozen different jobs from millhand and stevedore to street-car conductor. Born 1890 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, E. E. Smith was raised on a riverside homestead in northern Idaho, where he worked as a lumberjack until his eldest brother and sister helped him get to the university. By 1915 he was earning enough as a food chemist with the U.S. Bureau of Standards to marry a girl from Idaho and settle down in Washington, D.C., where his wife went to work as a stenographer to enable him to get his Ph.D. This is why the book version of The Skylark of Space is dedicated "To Jeannie" -though Mrs. Garby got her name in the by-line-and her share of the 125 dollars he was paid for the magazine serial.

  In spite of the college-boy dialogue and the melodramatic exchanges between heroic Dick Seaton and his scheming rival "Blackie" DuQuesne, Amazing Stories readers, whose ranks I had recently joined, clamored for a sequel. So, in Skylark Three, which followed in 1930, Smith took his atom-powered voyagers out again to the rescue of the people of the Green System who faced annihilation by the marauding Fenachrone. This "tale of the galactic cruise which ushered in universal civilization" presented a stupendous panorama of alien life-forms, m
ile-long spaceships, traveling faster than light, devastating ray weapons, and frightful battles in the void ending in inevitable triumph for the visiting Earthmen.

  To keep him in tow, Amazing paid Smith more generously for this three-part serial, to which he wrote an epilogue suggesting that his readers had heard the last of the all-conquering Dick and his musical sweetheart. By way of a change. in 1931 he came up with another story, Spacehounds of IPC, which confined his new heroes of the Inter-Planetary Corporation to the solar system. This, he insisted, was true scientific fiction, not pseudo-science, and he planned to make it the first of a series-but it wasn't what his fans wanted. "We want Smith to write stories of scope and range. We want more Skylarks?" was the cry. And Amazing's 80-year-old editor Dr. T. O'Conor Sloane, who still had seven years to go before he retired, pointed a lean finger out towards the Milky Way.

  But whatever the critics said about the results of his labors, Smith was never a "hack" writer. He planned his stories with care, and took his time writing them. Invariably he would plot a graph to help him in developing his plot, the reactions of his characters to the situations they encountered and the background atmosphere he weaved into the story. "Not that I ever managed to stick to one of them all the way," he confessed. "Somehow my characters always break loose and take the yarn out of my hands which is a good thing, I guess."

  As science fiction advanced into the 1930s there were other editors, too, who wanted to get hold of his stories. Competition had set in-but so had the Depression, and if it had not suffered a temporary setback in 1933, Astounding Stories would have featured Triplanetary, the story which gave rise to the "Lensman" series. In any event, it went to enliven four issues of Amazing in 1934. It was this story that introduced the concept of the "inertialess drive" by which, it was assumed-since it could neither be proved nor disproved-spaceships might traverse the impossible gulfs of Smith's literary cosmos. When asked about the scientific probability of such a device, Smith responded: "It is not probable at all, at least in any extrapolation of present-day science. But as far as I can determine, it cannot be proved absolutely impossible and that is enough for me. In fact, the more improbable a thing, the better I like it-so long as it cannot be demonstrated mathematically impossible. I got the idea of inertialessness from a lecture given at the University of Michigan in 1912."

  So, this time, the eight-limbed amphibians of the far planet Nevia, who were greedy for iron rations, were properly frustrated by Conway Costigan and his colleagues, and obliged to sign a Treaty of Eternal Peace. And thirteen years later, to make a book of it, Smith wrote six new chapters to precede the Amazing story, barking back to the dawn of creation, recalling the end of Atlantis and the fall of Rome, and drawing on his own experiences during two world wars. All history is seen as a titanic struggle between two races of super-beings, the Arisians and the Eddorians, who influence human-kind for good or ill as civilization advances to the era of the Triplanetary League.

  When the book appeared in 1948, even Smith's gentler critics had difficulty in digesting this turgid mixture of cosmic imagery and rip-roaring adventure. Nevertheless it was accepted as a useful prelude to the "Lensman" saga-most of which had already run its course in the revived Astounding Stories. The missing link was First Lensman, which Smith wrote specially for book publication in 1950 to bridge the gap between Triplanetary and Galactic Patrol, first serialized in 1937-38. By that time Astounding readers had claimed "Doc" Smith for their own. Prodded by editor F. Orlin Tremaine, he had produced a third "Skylark" story which the magazine presented with a fanfare in 1934 and ran through seven issues. With the first installment of Skylark of Valeron the magazine's sales soared, and at the end the author had increased his fans by thousands. He had also put what seemed to be an irreversible end to the luckless DuQuesne by reducing him to a capsule of pure intellect and flinging him into the fourth dimension. But good villains die hard, and he was still immortal ...

  That Astounding was in its most expansive conceptual period at this time lent power to Smith's imagination, and thus Dick Seaton's mental capacity, his new spaceship and his area of operations were all enlarged to maximum proportions. After Valeron it seemed there was nothing left to explore, nor any more possible variations on the familiar themes which had made Smith's tales so popular. And he was still a part-time writer; he had business problems to wrestle with. For seventeen years he had been employed as chief chemist with a Michigan firm concerned with the specialist art of compounding doughnut mixes. In 1936 he moved to a new firm in which he had a financial interest, and it left him little time for science fiction. Yet, within a year, Smith was busily plotting the "Lensman" series, which began in Astounding at about the same time that Olaf Stapledon's Star Maker appeared, which outdistanced Stapledon's previous work Last and First Men.

  To equate the beloved "pulp" writer Smith with the equally genial philosopher Stapledon might seem almost profane; yet, though their methods and literary styles are poles apart, in the final analysis their works are essentially similar, especially in the scope of their projection and their concern with the eternal struggle of good and evil which, in Smith's stories, is reduced to its simplest elements. The idea of an interstellar police force protecting a community of worlds against piracy and insurrection was familiar in American science fiction when Smith devised his Galactic Patrol. But he used it to better effect against a more elaborate background in which the ancient Arisians, who had sown the seeds of life throughout the galaxy, enlisted the Lensmen in the struggle to subdue the power-crazy rulers of Eddore, a planet in another space-time continuum.

  The Lensmen and their ladies, selected from many worlds for their superior qualities, are so-called because they carry a device enabling them to communicate with any form of sentient life their creator can dream up, and which brings quick death to unauthorized users. Their leading heroes are First Lensman Virgil Samms, who extended the Triplanetary League to embrace the entire solar system; Grey Lensman Kim Kinnison, whose exploits range over two galaxies, and his mate Clarissa MacDougall, the redheaded nurse who made good as a Second Stage Lensman. Not until many tyrants have been overthrown on as many planets are Kim and "Mac" able to get married and complete the ages-long breeding program culminating in the five Children of the Lens, who are destined to succeed the Arisians as the Guardians of Civilization.

  In all, the "Lensman" series helped to fill out eighteen issues of Astounding over a ten-year period ending in 1948, during which that exacting editor John W. Campbell held sway. In between times the number of science fiction pulps had multiplied, but few of the newcomers survived the war years; the real boom came afterwards. One of the casualties was Comet Stories, edited by Tremaine, for whom Smith agreed to write new series featuring "Storm" Cloud, a nuclear physicist and spaceman whose job is to snuff out atomic power plants when they run wild like oilwells. Only one story appeared before the magazine was extinguished in 1941, leaving Astonishing Stories to feature two more before it too folded. Because of their loose connection with the "Lensman" tales, in 1960 the three stories were combined in a book titled The Vortex Blaster, published here more recently as Masters of the Vortex.

  The war hit Smith hard, too. He found himself redundant and was forced to live on his savings until, at 51, he went to work in an ordnance plant. Only when he was back in the cereals business in Chicago after the war did he essay Children of the Lens-with an eye to his own three children and their offspring. "This," he informed me, to settle arguments between his fans over the proper sequence of these stories, "is the real Lensman story, to which the other three are merely introductory material." This led up to something he especially wanted to say about his endings (and which he repeated elsewhere) : "It's a darn hard job to write a book which is part of a series and yet have it end clean, without a lot of loose ends dangling. Many authors-Edgar Rice Burroughs, for instance-didn't try. But I hate loose ends. Besides, suppose the author should die or something without ever finishing the damn thing? In Galactic Patr
ol and Grey Lensman I could clean them up without too much trouble, but in Second Stage Lensman it was practically impossible. I sweat blood ..." And how he got over the impasse he told in his essay on The Epic of Space.

  In 1957 Smith retired to live in Florida-and continue his writing. For he could not ignore the current trends in science fiction, which challenged his powers; especially after his earlier work, which he had spent ten years revising for book publication, had been diminished by relentless critics. For example, P. Schuyler Miller, who, reviewing Grey Lensman in 1952, lambasted his "incredible heroes, unbelievable weapons, insurmountable obstacles, inconceivable science, omnipotent villains, and unimaginable catacylsms." And Groff Conklin, in whom it evoked "alternate waves of incredulous laughter and dull, acid boredom" because, he suspected, "science fiction is growing up and leaving these primitive artifacts behind." So, in The Galaxy Primes, Smith introduced the sort of concepts that were being encouraged in Astounding, deriving from what editor Campbell termed `psi phenomena": Smith's pseudo-living, telepathic Lens, he instanced, was "essentially a psi machine." But Campbell didn't care so much for his new story, which Amazing found more acceptable and serialized in 1959 before it emerged, finally, as a paperback.

  Undaunted, Smith contrived to make his last appearance in Astounding the following year with Subspace Survivors, a short story paving the way for a novel-which Campbell found wanting. It reached Smith's devoted fans in 1965 as a hardcover book entitled Subspace Explorers. And towards the end he found a more receptive market for his work in the magazine Worlds of If, which in 1961-62 featured Masters of Space, a two-part tale which also carried in its by-line the name E. Everett Evans. Of all Smith's army of admirers, this one-time secretary of The Galactic Roamers fan club was the most constant, and when he died leaving this novel unfinished, Smith revised it completely.