[ArtNJ]

I read them when I was younger and loved them. Recently, however, I read the Skylark series for the first time. I was enjoying them for a while, then towards the end something tickled my throat the wrong way and I couldnt stop vomitting cheese and corn. I think my mistake was probably reading them back to back rather than giving the cheese time to digest.

Anyway, I am nervous about re-reading the Lensman books based on this experience.

It would be an easier choice for me if they were available as an ebook, but they dont seem to be.

[nquixote]

I am listening to them on audiobook right now. It's much more fun than reading them. The narrator sounds like he's doing an old 50s radio serial, which I think is the point.

[psikeyhackr]

I am listening to them on audiobook right now. It's much more fun than reading them. The narrator sounds like he's doing an old 50s radio serial, which I think is the point.

That is the point of "space opera" in the original sense of the word. E. E. "Doc" Smith invented space opera in 1915 though it did not get published until 1928.

But the world has moved on since then. If you like it, it's great fun. If you don't like it then it is nothing to be ashamed of. I can enjoy it in the right mood and mostly I just laugh my ass off but I rarely want to read it.

It's campy.

Camp is an aesthetic sensibility wherein something is appealing because of its bad taste and ironic value. The concept is closely related to kitsch, and things with camp appeal are described as being "campy" or "cheesy". When the usage appeared, in 1909, it denoted: ostentatious, exaggerated, affected, theatrical, and effeminate behaviour, and, by the middle of the 1970s, the definition comprised: banality, artifice, mediocrity, and ostentation so extreme as to have perversely sophisticated appeal.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Camp_(style)

There is a bunch of Smith stuff in Project Gutenberg:

http://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/search.html/?default_prefix=author_id&query=9515

I would spend money on stuff that has gotten more refined since the 1940s.

psik

[nquixote]

In addition to the camp, which is fun, I like stuff like Lensman because it gives an insight into how smart people thought and imagined back in the early 20th century.

[ArtNJ]

Thanks. I did read them years ago and know they are campy. What I am asking is whether they are somewhat less campy than Skylark, or equivalent.

If equivalent, I'll pass, at least for a bit.

[Sparrow]

The underlying ideas and themes are rather interesting and you'll definitely see where the Lensman Books influenced future SF, but, they are quite dated and not all that well written by today's standards. I recently went back and read Foundation and Second Foundation and it was clear to me that some things in our youth should be left as they were and not dug up again.

[ArtNJ]

The underlying ideas and themes are rather interesting and you'll definitely see where the Lensman Books influenced future SF, but, they are quite dated and not all that well written by today's standards. I recently went back and read Foundation and Second Foundation and it was clear to me that some things in our youth should be left as they were and not dug up again.

This makes sense to me. At the same time, I have so totally forgotten the books I read as a teen that the few true gems can be re-read and enjoyed like new. This series probably isnt one of those true gems.

[nquixote]

One interesting thing I noticed in Gray Lensman is that Smith almost perfectly describes something like the Manhattan Project...well before the Manhattan Project existed.

[JunkMonkey]

A couple of years ago I reread them for the first time in 30+ years. I wrote about the experience on another forum...

Hang on... [Ctrl] + C... [Ctrl]+[Shif]+[Tab]... [Ctrl]+V... There we go...


They are indescribably awful, but where else could you find such gloriously bad writing as this, (from the 4th in the series, Grey Lensman*) which describes part of a ferocious battle between a bunch of Super-dreadnought, battle-cruiser space ships ('Maulers') - and a well armed office block (sic).

Now holocaust waxed doubly infernal. The wall was tight,
the only avenue of escape of all that fiercely radiant energy
was straight upwards: adding to the furore were the flaring
underjets - themselves destructive agents by no means to be
despised!
Inside the screens, then, raged pure frenzy. At the line raved
the maulers' prodigious lifting blasts. Out and away, down
every avenue of escape, swept torrents of superheated air at
whose touch anything and everything combustible burst into
flame. But there could be no firefighting - yet. Outlying fires,
along the line of destruction previously cut, yes; but personal
armour has never been designed to enable life to exist in such
an environment as that near those screens then was.

Grey Lensman, is a book which is not only reckoned by the cognoscenti to be the best of the Lensman books but, I am very sad to say, regularly turns up in fan lists as one of the hundred best SF books ever written! (Who says SF readers don't have a sense of humour?)

It was interesting reading it again after a gap of 30+ years. I remember these books being dreadful - but not this f**king bad. The thing that struck me this time - apart from the obvious hilarity of the awful prose - was the sheer relentless neo-fascism of the things. In this distant future, a eon long conflict between two opposing alien species is coming to a head as both use their cat's paw younger races to fight a galactic turf war.

One side, is relentlessly dedicated and militaristic, with no civilian control or electoral system keeping it in check. Its agents are ruthless in their determination to exterminate their enemy, killing all who they identify as being on the other side without recourse to any judicial system. So fanatical are they in their efforts to wipe out their opponents that towards the end of this book they divert two planets out of their orbits, ship them to the next door Galaxy (sic) and crush an enemy's home planet between them. No warning. No: "Surrender or die! Puny scum!" Nothing. Just - wham! - squashed planet. Millions dead, everyone goes home.

And these are our heroes!

The worst things villains did, as far as I could make out during the whole course of the book (apart from having names with too many 'Z's and 'X's in) was deal in a bit of smack, have a complex management structure, and tend to be very stupid.

"What is your plan, Zygertllx?"
"My plan, mighty ZennoGlax, is to underestimate the strength of the opposition, one of whom cannot possibly asleep in the next room under a flimsy disguise listening to this conversation, because we took the exhaustive precaution of listening at the door to see if he was snoring before we called this meeting to order..."

For those with a strong stomach here's more:

Previously in Grey Lensman:
Our hero, Kimble Kinnison, has been rescued from horrible nasty alien types who have tortured him near to death. He is being rushed to a hospital ship where he is to be operated upon by Doctor Lacy. By an entirely predictable twist of fate Kimble's girlfriend, Clarrissa MacDougall, is the chief nurse on board - and does not yet know the identity their patient:

Now read on:

"How do you do. Doctor Lacy? Everything is ready." Clarrissa MacDougall met him, hand outstretched. Her saucy white cap was worn as perkily cocked as ever: perhaps even more so, now that it was emblazoned with the cross-surmounted wedge which is the insignia of sector chief nurse. Her flaming hair was as gorgeous, her smile as radiant, her bearing as confidently—Kinnison has said of her more than once that she is the only person he has ever known who can strut sitting down!—as calmly poised, "I'm very glad to see you, doctor. It's been quite a while. . ." Her voice died away, for the man was looking at her with an expression defying analysis.
For Lacy was thunder-struck. If he had ever known it—and he must have—he had completely forgotten that MacDougall had this ship. This was awful—terrible!
"Oh, yes ... yes, of course. How do you do? Mighty glad to see you again. How's everything going?" He pumped her hand vigorously, thinking frantically the while what he would — what he could say next. "Oh, by the way, who is to be in charge of the operating room?"
"Why, I am, of course," she replied in surprise. "Who else would be?"
"Anyone else!" he wanted to say, but did not—then. "Why, that isn't at all necessary ... I would suggest..."
"You'll suggest nothing of the kind!" She stared at him intently; then, as she realized what his expression really meant—she had never before seen such a look of pitying anguish upon his usually sternly professional face--her own turned white and both hands flew to her throat.
"Not Kim. Lacy!" she gasped. Gone now was everything of poise, of insouciance, which had so characterized her a moment before. She who had worked unflinchingly upon all sorts of dismembered, fragmentary, maimed and mangled men was now a pleading, stricken, desperately frightened girl. "Not Kim—please! Oh, merciful God, don't let it be my Kim!"
"You can't be there, Mac." He did not need to tell her. She knew. He knew that she knew. "Somebody else—anybody else."
"No!" came the hot negative, although the blood drained from her face leaving it as white as the immaculate uniform she wore.
I have learned, from painful experience, not drink hot beverages while reading this stuff.


I do not need to tell you. You know. I know that you know; they're shite!

*UK spelling.

[nquixote]

By far the best review (http://tenser.typepad.com/tenser_said_the_tensor/2006/02/the_lensmen_ser.html) of the Lensman series I've seen:

The Lensman Series

[In previous posts in this series I've focused on stories that have linguists as characters or language as important element of the plot. This post will be a little different—there's not much linguistics in the Lensmen books. Instead, I'm going to focus on the writing style and language quirks of the author. Fair warning, though: spoilers throughout.]

Over the last month, I've been re-reading Edward E. "Doc" Smith's Lensmen series (consisting of Galactic Patrol (1937), Gray Lensman (1939), Second Stage Lensmen (1941), Children of the Lens (1947), and two lesser prequels), a milestone in science fiction. Its popularity, huge at the time the stories were being published, has waned over the years, but the influence it had on a wide variety of other SF, including the Green Lantern comic book series, Star Trek, and Star Wars, still remains. You simply can't engage in space opera without standing on Doc Smith's shoulders. The stories are full of space pirates, determined heroes, and a series of space battles of exponentially increasing scale. Just as memorable, though, was Doc Smith's distinctive, enthusiastic lexical, idiomatic, and grammatical inventiveness.

First up, though, there is a little bit about language in the series, and that has to do with the Lens itself. Among other useful tricks, the Lens acted as a universal translator:

"The Lens receives as pure thought any pattern of force which represents, or is in any way connected with, thought. My brain receives this thought in English, since that is my native language. At the same time my ears are practically out of circuit, so that I actually hear the English language instead of whatever noise is being made. I do not hear the foreign sounds at all. Therefore I haven't the slightest idea what the pirates' language sounds like, since I have never heard any of it."

"Conversely, when I want to talk to someone who doesn't know any language I do, I simply think into the Lens and direct its force at him, and he thinks I am talking to him in his own mother tongue." (GP p. 40) [all page numbers refer to the Old Earth Books facsimile editions published in the late '90's]

As is pretty common in adventure science fiction, Smith used the Lens as a plot device to avoid having to deal with the fact that many of his characters spoke different languages throughout the books. (As with the lingual-translator in Ron Goulart's Flash Gordon novels, it sounds like it ought to also be the ultimate code-breaker, too.) Smith didn't write much about language, but he used language in a bunch of interesting ways, and his style is unique.

I don't use the word "unique" lightly. Some of his prose, I think you'll agree, was downright odd, as in this exchange between Our Hero Kimball Kinnison and his buddy, the mighty, deadly Dutchman (you read that right) vanBuskirk:

"Better go free, hadn't we?" whispered vanBuskirk.

"Daren't!" Kinnison grunted. "At this range they'd spot us in a split second..." (GP p. 37)

Daren't? Who talks that way, especially in the heat of battle? Smith had a strange way of mixing registers like that, but that's just the tip of the iceberg; check out this corker of a paragraph, noting the bolded phrases in particular:

"Better we insulate those leads a little heavier and put the cans back in our armor," he suggested finally. "They'll charge just as well in place, and it doesn't stand to reason that this drain of power can go on for the rest of the night without somebody noticing it. And when that happens those overlords are bound to take plenty of steps—none of which we have any idea what are going to be." (GP p. 71)

That's three distinct oddities all in one paragraph: a rather archaic inversion, an oddly placed negation that produces a sentence that may not mean what Smith thinks it means, and an honest-to-God subjacency violation in the wild—go back and read it again slowly in case you unconsciously supplied a resumptive they like I did. It's a hell of a prose style.

Smith, it has to be admitted, was far from immune to pulpish hack writing. His handling of accents could be pretty silly, for example. At one point in the stories, a bunch of pirates were identified by Kinnison as "'Terrestrials—North Americans!'", but at least one of them, the pilot, must have been from across the pond, because he speaks in pure Hollywood Limey, as in the following excerpts:

"The blighter's got his spy-ray screens up."
"We'll bally soon know."
"Righto—we've been jolly well had."
"They wouldn't have sent those jaspers out without cover, old bean...better get ready to run, what?"
"Tally ho, old fruit! ... It's a mauler and we've been bloody well jobbed." (GP pp. 172-4)

Still, Smith's prose could really sing when he worked up a head of steam. His space battle scenes had a kind of terrible beauty to them, sometimes simultaneously evoking fantastic imagery and describing savage violence. Here's a passage describing an assault on a Boskonian pirate base located on "Neptune's moon" (which must mean Triton; Nereid wasn't discovered until 1949) by the Patrol's newly-constructed super-ships called "maulers":

Boskonian outer screens scarcely even flickered as they went down before the immeasurable, the incredible violence of that thrust. The second course offered a briefly brilliant burst of violet radiance as it gave way. The inner screen resisted stubbornly as it ran the spectrum in a wildly coruscant display of pyrotechnic splendor; but it, too, went through the ultra-violet and into the black. Now the wall-shield itself—that inconceivably rigid fabrication of pure force which only the detonation of twenty metric tons of duodec had ever been known to rupture—was all that barred from the base metal of Boskonian walls the utterly indescribably [sic] fury of the maulers' beams. Now force was streaming from that shield in veritable torrents. So terrible were the conflicting energies there at grips that their neutralization was actually visible and tangible. In sheets and masses, in terrific, ether-wracking vortices, and in miles-long, pillaring streamers and flashes, those energies were being hurled away. Hurled to all the points of the sphere's full compass, filling and suffusing all nearby space. (GP pp. 149-50)

That'd make a hell of a movie scene with today's special effects, I think. Note the use of the word coruscant. It was one of Smith's favorites, and just as an author using the word eldritch is almost always making an H. P. Lovecraft reference, I think the naming of the capital of the Star Wars galaxy Coruscant must have been a nod to Smith, even if the design of the planet was a nod to Asimov's Trantor (we'd have to ask Timothy Zahn to know for sure, I guess). Smith was also inordinately fond of bus-bars, the solid bars of metal used for conducting very large electric currents. Smith mentioned them regularly when he was trying to convey just exactly how much power each new generation of super-uber-mega-dreadnoughts were capable of putting out:

Her bus-bars, instead of being the conventional rectangular coppers, of a few square inches cross-sectional area, were laminated members built up of coaxial tubing of pure silver to a diameter of over a yard—multiple and parallel conductors, each of whose current-carrying capacity was to be measured only in millions of amperes. (GL p. 55)

Those sound like some pretty nice conductors—I'll bet there'd be an audiophile market for speaker cables manufactured to those specifications. Another favorite word of Smith's was refractory (in the sense of 'resistant to heat'), as in this continuation of the space battle, above:

For, that last defense gone, nothing save unresisting metal was left to withstand the ardor of those ultra-powerful, ravening beams. As has already been said, no substance, no matter how refractory or resistant or inert, can endure even momentarily in such a field of force. Therefore every atom, alike of vessel and of contents, went to make up the searing, seething burst of brilliant, incandescently luminous vapor which suffused all circumambient space. (GP p. 150)

Let me make sure I've got this straight: the thrust of the impossibly rigid beams ruptured the last stubborn defenses, which could not possibly resist their violent ardor? Enough, already, I get it—message received, loud and clear. Paging Dr. Freud! This imagery must have been intentional, right? Smith was certainly capable of unintentional double-entendre (e.g. Kinnison, summoning two other Lensmen for a mental conference call: "Gerrond! Winstead! Three-way!" (GL p. 88)) but it seems impossible that he could have written the above paragraph without realizing what he was getting at.

Smith, a working chemist, often displayed in his descriptions an engineer's affinity for machines and technology. For a different sort of effect, though, try this bit of visceral prose, which describes vanBuskirk in battle:

"...the gigantic Dutchman waded in happily, swinging his frightfully massive weapon with devastating effect. Crunch! Splash! THWUCK! When that bar struck it did not stop. It went through; blood, brains, smashed heads and dismembered limbs flying in all directions." (GL p. 192)

THWUCK! That's just plain good writing...although it sounds like someone will be needing a moist towelette later.

As you've already seen, Smith's prose was often pretty purple, in that way that pre-Hemingway prose often was. In contrast, much of his dialog is in a very informal and irreverent register I think of as Mid-Century American Wiseass:

"Seal that, Cliff, or I'll climb up you like a squirrel, first chance I get!" Kinnison retorted.

"So they've got you skippering an El Ponderoso, huh? Think of a mere infant like you being let play with so much high-power! What'll we do about this heap here?" (GP p. 156)

A little later, Cliff signs off with a classic bit of Smith's future-that-never-was lingo: "Clear ether, spacehound!" Smith was very fond of coining such space-related idioms:

Why, she was a real beauty—a knockout—a seven-sector callout..... (GP p. 192)

I'm not sure what a "seven-sector callout" is, exactly, but it sounds pretty good. Is there an analogous Earth-based idiom that Smith was imitating? Did people used to call a beautiful woman a "seven-county callout" or something? Here's some more snappy dialog featuring Kinnison and the aforementioned "callout", Nurse Clarissa MacDougall:

"Beautiful, but dumb!" the Lensman growled. "Can't you and those cockeyed croakers realize that I'll never get any strength back if you keep me in bed all the rest of my life? And don't talk baby-talk at me, either. I'm well enough at least so you can wipe that professional smile off your pan and cut that soothing bedside manner of yours."

"Very well—I think so too!" she snapped, patience at long last gone. "Somebody should tell you the truth. I always supposed that Lensmen had to have brains, but you've been a perfect brat ever since you've been here. First you wanted to eat yourself sick, and now you want to get up, with bones half-knit and burns half-healed, and undo everything that has been done for you. Why don't you snap out of it and act your age for a change?" (GP pp. 201-2)

I should mention, in case you missed it, that at this point in the story they're falling in love with each other. And why not? Their skeletons are perfect:

"...I believe it's going to turn out to be the first absolutely perfect male skeleton I have ever seen. That young man will go far, Haynes." (GP p. 194)

"Man, look at that skeleton! Beautiful! The only really perfect skeleton I ever saw in a woman....." (GP p. 195)

Don't ask me to explain the skeleton thing—it's just weird.

Smith's characters also refer to a strange variety of futuristic space deities. Apparently, vanBuskirk worships somebody named "Noshabkeming the Radiant" (GP p. 78), while Kinnison is constantly swearing by "Klono", who apparently has a great variety of metallic body parts:

"Holy Klono" (GP p. 60)
"Holy Klono's claws!" (GP p. 98)
...by Klono's golden gills... (GP p. 267)
"Klono's brazen whiskers..." (GL p. 37)
"...Klono's own gadolinium guts..." (GL p. 46)
"...Klono's carballoy claws..." (GL p. 293)
"Klono's brazen hoofs and diamond-tipped horns!" (GL p. 148)
"Holy—Klono's—Iridium—Intestines!" (GL pp. 280-1)

In Gray Lensman, Smith gives a little bit of explanation about who exactly these gods are. It's light on the theology:

"By the way, Kim," she asked idly as they strolled back toward the ball-room, "who is this Klono by whom you were swearing a while ago? Another spaceman's god like Noshabkeming, of the Valerians?"

"Something like him, only more so," he laughed. "A combination of Noshabkeming, some of the gods of the ancient Greeks and Romans, all three of the Fates, and quite a few other things as well. I think, originally, from Corvina, but fairly wide-spread through certain sections of the galaxy now. He's got so much stuff—teeth and horns, claws and whiskers, tail and everything—that he's much more satisfactory to swear by than any other space-god I know of." (GL p. 40)

Another stylistic quirk of Smith's was using wh-words as intensifiers. This construction isn't very common in American English any more, I don't think (except maybe in a few fossilized idioms like and how!), and when using it Smith often put focus stress in places that sounds odd to my ear:

"Eleven light-years—what a range!" (GP p. 80)
"Some of those lads coming in have got plenty of just what it takes, and how we can use them!" (GP p. 87)
[Describing the Boskonian base] And what a personnel! (GP p. 120)

What's more, he repeatedly used such phrases in a very characteristic repetitive pattern I don't believe I've seen elsewhere:

A space-ship it was—but what a ship! (GP p. 13)
...always and everywhere upon Trenco there is a wind—and what a wind! (GP p. 108)
"What a world—what a world!" (GP p. 118)
"In our eyes it is fundamentally wrong, but it works—how it works!" (GP p. 145)
"What an outfit—what an outfit," he breathed. (GP p. 162)
"Thank God I'm not young any more. They suffer so." "Check. How they suffer!" (GL p. 43)
"It checks—how it checks!" "To nineteen decimals." (GL p. 67)

Smith's characters were always checking each other to nineteen decimals. That may seem like a lot of significant digits, but when all the good guys are so superlatively good in exactly the same way, it's only natural they'd think so much alike.

Most memorably, though, Smith's fiction is dense with invented vocabulary that continuously reminds the reader that his stories take place in the future. (And how they take place!) The most common example (and probably the silliest) is that his characters continuously say QX where we would say OK. It's futuristic! I've seen it suggested that QX was actually one of the old ham radio Q signals, but as best I can tell, those were all three letters long, and none of them included the string "QX". On top of that, QX seems to be used syntactically in exactly the way you'd use OK but not a radio call. For example, I don't think you'd hear anyone use ten-four in the following construction (which Kinnison says to a girl at a dance who's trying to figure out how to address him), but OK sounds fine:

"It'll be QX if you just call me 'say'." (GL p. 31)

Smith's fondness, nay, irrational exuberance for futurespeak wasn't limited to QX, though. Every page of the series is dense with invented words and novel uses of existing ones: DeLameter pistols, Bergenholm inertialess drives, tractor beams, pressor beams, shear-planes, duodec bombs, spy-rays, visiplates, sunbeams, wide-open N-ways, wall-shields, negaspheres, Q-type helices, speedsters, zwilniks, primary beams, free and inert for 'inertialess' and its opposite, lights for 'multiples of the speed of light', and dozens more.

Smith's style is full of the enthusiasm and inventiveness of Golden Age SF. It will either strike you as hopelessly old-fashioned and silly or as gloriously, entertainingly old-fashioned and silly. As you've probably guessed, I'm in the latter camp, so I'm off to continue re-reading Second Stage Lensmen where I left off. Clear ether, spacehounds!

I'm in complete agreement.