Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding…

I think it was Damon Knight who said that, after such a beginning, there was not a lot that could be said that would not be anticlimactic. Nevertheless, Dr. E. E. Smith, perhaps the greatest author of those who survived the (from the perspective of 2004, short-lived) Age of Pulps, gave it his best try and ultimately produced six volumes of what he described as a “History of Civilization” (not be be confused with Will and Ariel Durant’s Story of Civilization, which ultimately ran to eleven volumes while covering material that most of us are more familiar with).

The original story concerned only the life and times of Lensman Kimball Kinnison, and was published as a series of three serials in Astounding Science-Fiction during the years immediately preceding America’s entry into World War II; one might argue that the ongoing struggle between Smith’s “democratic” Civilization and the totalitarian “Boskone” was, to some extent, his science-fictional take on the war then going on in Europe. Several years after the war, he produced a fourth serial, this one primarily about Kinnison’s super-powerful children, and at the same time created a preface to the series by modifying an independent novella that he had produced for Amazing Stories in 1934 in such a way that it would fit in with the series. In 1950 a sixth and final volume, to link that preface with the world of the Lensmen, appeared from Gnome Press. ⁽¹⁾

A quick overview of the plots:

The first volume, Triplanetary, gives us an introduction to the series; the line quoted above (it is the beginning of the story) is quickly supplanted by a description of two super-powerful races of beings, the Arisians, who are to become the mentors of civilization, and the noxious Eddorians, who, in their lust for personal power, will become the rulers and patrons of the archihierarchical Boskone. The Arisians cannot themselves whup the Eddorians, so they set out to create an intergalactic instrumentality that will be able to do so — one based around mankind and other species in our galaxy. The next two chapters show the fates of two early Terrestrial civilizations, that of Atlantis and that of Rome, ⁽²⁾ while the following three chapters show, in a rather thin slice of time, the struggles of some early Kinnisons against those three wights and arch-enemies of Civilization the Kaiser, Hitler, and the Tyrant of Asia, in three succeeding world wars. Then we get into the story proper.

Centuries after the end of the World Wars, the solar system is (mostly) united under the single Triplanetary (Earth-Mars-Venus) government, and all is well — except for the space pirates. Special agent Conway Costigan and beautiful young heiress Clio Marsden, along with Captain Bradley of the Hyperion, are captured by the ultra-villainous Gray Roger and later, after escaping from him, by the Nevians, an amphibious race from another star who have come to our solar system to harvest its iron, which is rare to unknown in their home system. Meanwhile, back on Earth, another group of agents in the Triplanetary Service — Rodebush, Cleveland, and primarily Virgil Samms — are putting the finishing touches on the first intertia-free supership ⁽³⁾ with which they will go chasing off after Costigan & co., put paid to Roger, and ultimately demonstrate to the Nevians the futility of taking on Earth (and Mars, and Venus).

Triplanetary introduces us to those who will become the first generation of Lensmen. In First Lensman, which takes place immediately after the war with the Nevians and the campaign against Roger, we get a better view of Samms, head of the Triplanetary Service, who, with his inseparable sidekick, Rod “The Rock” Kinnison, has to establish not only a galactic police force — the Galactic Patrol — but also a democratic galaxy-wide government. To make this possible, the enigmatic Bergenholm, inventor of the inertia neutralizer that makes interstellar travel not only possible but also fast and convenient, sends Samms to Arisia, where Samms is introduce to the Lens, a non-counterfeitable emblem which is, in fact, a powerful analogue to the mind of the person for which it is produced. Most of the rest of the story is an introduction to Civilization’s battle against the two branches of crime — piracy and drug-running — which are to be the major problems in the future. (There is also an extended campaign against political corruption, but it is so thoroughly trounced here that it will play little or no role in the future of Civilization.)

With Galactic Patrol, which takes place some hundreds of years after First Lensman, the main story begins. Young Kimball Kinnison graduates head of his class at the academy of the Galactic Patrol, and is immediately thrown into the battle against piracy, which bids fair to destroy Civilization. Put in command of the Brittania, Kinnison captures a pirate ship, acquires its secret weapon (control of cosmic radiation), then escapes to bring the information back to Earth. En route, he discovers the dragonoid Velantians and their nemeses the Overlords of Delgon, and helps the former defeat the latter. After returning to Earth, he goes out on another recon, gets a bit busted-up, meets beautiful nurse Clarissa MacDougall and later rescues her from a pirate base, becomes the first person ever to get “advanced training” from the Arisians, eventually tracks down the extragalactic base from which Helmuth “who speaks for Boskone” commands all the pirates ( = military operations) in our galaxy, and wipes it out like that (a snap of fingers). A short summary, but overall this is, in my opinion, one of the two best books in the series.

In Gray Lensman Kinnison, now an unattached or “gray” Lensman — one who is no longer subject to orders from above, but can do pretty much anything he wants to do — sets out to explore the second galaxy, aka Lundmark’s Nebula, and discovers and brings back the highly advanced and independence-minded planet Medon. ⁽⁴⁾ After completing this operation, he attempts to trace Boskone upwards through its still-active drug-running activities, and ultimately follows them back first to a regional director, Jalte, and then to the Council of the frigid-blooded, indescribable, Eich. In the process of scouting the Eich world, Kinnison is captured and horribly tortured, suffering blindness and multiple amputation; but, returned home by his boon companion, the Velantian Worsel, who has also attained the second stage of lensmanship, he arrives just in time to serve as something of a guinea pig in a new process of medical regeneration, and recovers in time to lead the attacks that will destroy the world on which Jalte has his base and the homeworld of the Eich. And, now that Boskone has been destroyed, Kinnison can marry his beloved nurse Clarissa …

…or maybe not. In Second Stage Lensmen it turns out that Boskone hasn’t been completely annihilated after all, and is about to launch a destructive attack on Earth. Kinnison, of course, foils that, and now attempts to trace Boskone back to its new origins through another line, which takes him first to matriarchal Lyrane, where it turns out that Clarissa — who has in the meantime become the only Lenswoman in history — can work better than he can, and then to Thrale, over in Lundmark’s Nebula, a human world ruled by the Tyrant Alcon for Boskone. Kinnison takes over from Alcon and leads a Thralian attack against the independent world of Klovia, now controlled by Civilization’s Grand Fleet, an attack doomed to fail. In the process of attacking Klovia, Kinnison has to take on his Prime Minister Fossten, who is actually Gharlane of Eddore (who first appeared in Triplanetary and again in First Lensman, but in none of the later books until this one). Ultimately, Boskone is destroyed (again), Thrale is liberated, and Kinnison can really marry Clarissa. (I kid you not!)

Jump to 20 years in the future and Children of the Lens. Kim Kinnison is Coordinator of the second galaxy, living on Klovia with Clarissa and their five children — Kit, who himself is about to graduate as a Lensman, directly into grays, and the two sets of twins, Kathryn and Karen the elder, Constance and Camilla the younger. But Civilization is again in danger, and it is the job of Kit and the girls — all of whom would seem to be about an order of magnitude more intelligent and physically competent than anybody else in the human race — to resolve the problem, as the ultimate instrumentality created by the millenia-long breeding program of the Arisians. Working with the Arisians, they and the four second stage Lensmen (Kinnison, Worsel, Tregonsee of Rigel and Nadreck of chilly Palain) manage to track Boskone back to the horrendously variable planet Ploor, which they destroy, and finally to Eddore itself, where — almost anticlimactically — the kids, the Lensmen (all of them in their billions) and the Arisians succeed in finally putting paid to the Eddorians, who for millions of years have been causing all our major problems.

There are many, many criticisms that can be made of this series, particularly from the point of view of the year 2004, more than half a century after the last of the books was written, and John Clute has no hesitation about making them in his introductions to the books. I find, for instance, that Smith was incredibly “tolerant” when it came to the many alien races that populate the books — no question that dragonoid Worsel, Tregonsee who looks much like an ambulatory oil drum, and the cowardly Palainian Lensman Nadreck are treated with great respect by Smith — but with regard to humans … well, all the Lensmen we ever see are white males (with the exception — and she is an exception — of Clarissa MacDougall); the only black man I remember from the series is a parking-structure attendant on page 51 of First Lensman.

There is also the question of “democracy”. I used the term earlier, but it’s pretty obvious — particularly from First Lensman — that Smith’s idea of democracy is more that of a meritocracy; all the ruling elements of his Civilization come, de facto, from among his Lensman (which, of course, excludes women and non-whites from participation, at least here on Earth). In fact, in terms of structure the only difference between Civilization and Boskone is that, in Civilization, the people like their dominant hierarchy.

(Note: In Second Stage Lensmen, pp. 182-184, Smith describes the Civilizing of the planet Lonabar; those who have watched the development of post-Saddam Iraq can see something of a similar program at work, the only difference being that Smith’s estimate of the time scale involved seems considerably more realistic than that of the current U.S. government.)

Nevertheless, the series moves. This is particularly obvious with the battles. These range from the destruction of Pittsburgh, in a Nevian iron-absorbing beam, in Triplanetary

Office buildings, skyscrapers towering majestically in their architectural symmetry and beauty, collapsed into heaps of debris as their steel skeletons were abstracted. Deep into the ground the beam bored; flood, fire, and explosion following in its wake as the mazes of underground piping disappeared. And the humanity of the buildings died: instantaneously and painlessly, never knowing what struck them, as the life-bearing iron of their bodies went to swell the Nevian stream.

Triplanetary, p. 214

through the negasphere that destroyed Jalte’s base planet, the dirigible planets that squished Jarnevon, the homeworld of the Eich, the sunbeam, utilizing the entire energy output of the sun as a ray gun, to the Nth-space worlds traveling at many multiples of the speed of light and used to annihilate the Ploorans:

At the impact of the second loose planet, accompanied by the excess energy of its impossible and unattainable intrinsic velocity, Ploor’s sun became a super-nova. How deeply the intruding thing penetrated, how much of the sun’s mass exploded, never was and perhaps never will be determined. The violence of the explosion was such, however, that Klovian astronomers reported — a few years later — that it was radiating energy at the rate of some five hundred and fifty million suns.

Children of the Lens, p. 261

Overall, this is an enjoyable story, of somewhat more, I think, than merely historic value. I still like it, and I think others will, as well.

⁽¹⁾ I don’t count here Smith’s The Vortex Blaster, which falls into the same historical sequence but is not itself part of the Lensman series. Nor do I count a number of interpolations written by individuals other than Smith.
⁽²⁾ Chapter 2, “The Fall of Atlantis”, was separately anthologized somewhere in the early fifties and served as my own introduction to the series, a year or so before I found the complete Gnome Press Triplanetary in a used book store in Portland.
⁽³⁾ The super-ship Boise is described by Costigan at one point as “fuller of bugs than a Venarian’s kitchen” (p. 159 of the recent Old Earth Books paper edition). At the latest (1948, when the Gnome Press edition of which this is a facsimile appeared), this would have been written right around the time that Grace Hopper was coining this use of the word “bug”; if it appeared in the earlier, 1934, publication — and I have no reason to doubt that it did — it would put paid to this interesting urban legend. (Of course, if you look around on the net, you can find a quote from a 19th century letter in which Thomas Alva Edison uses the word “bugs” in exactly the same way …)
⁽⁴⁾ This section has what I consider one of the best lines in the series. Kinnison, discovering that Medon is not part of Boskone’s totalitarian system, suggests: “We come from a neighboring galaxy. You are fairly close to the edge of this one. Why not move over to ours?” If only my moves, back when I was in the Air Force, had been as easy …

Excellent books - I would thoroughly recommend them to anyone who likes science fiction. Don is correct in saying that E. E. Smith’s world view is definitely old-fashioned, but having read them several times the only evidence for concepts such as sexism is the lack of female characters rather than their description - something that hardly proves him guilty of anything deliberate (we are all products of our age remember).

“Overall, this is an enjoyable story, of somewhat more, I think, than merely historic value.”

The understatement of the century.