It is customary today among self - styled "literary critics" to sneer at Doc's space epics - plot, characterization, dialog, motivations, values, moral attitudes, etc. "Hopelessly old - fashioned" is one of the milder disparagements.
As Al Smith used to say: "Let's take a look at the record."
Edward Elmer Smith was born in 1890, some forty years before the American language started to fall to pieces - long, long before the idiot notion of "restricted vocabulary" infected our schools, a half century before our language was corrupted by the fallacy that popular usage defines grammatical correctness.
In consequence Dr. Smith made full use of his huge vocabulary, preferring always the exact word over a more common but inexact word. He did not hesitate to use complex sentences. His syntactical constructions show that he understood and used with precision the conditional and the subjunctive modes as well as the indicative. He did not split infinitives. The difference between "like" and "as" was not a mystery to him. He limited barbarisms to quoted dialog used in characterization.
("Oh, but that dialog!") In each story Doc's male lead character is a very intelligent, highly educated, cheerful, emotional, enthusiastic, and genuinely modest man who talks exactly like Doc Smith who was a very intelligent, highly educated, cheerful, emotional, enthusiastic, and genuinely modest man.
In casual conversation Doc used a number of clichйs ... and his male lead characters used the same or similar ones. This is a literary fault? I think not. In casual speech most people tend to repeat each his own idiosyncratic pattern of clichйs. Doc's repertory of clichйs was quite colorful, especially so when compared with patterns heard today that draw heavily on "The Seven Words That Must Never Be Used in Television." A 7 - word vocabulary offers little variety.
("But those embarrassing love scenes!") E. E. Smith's adolescence was during the Mauve Decade; we may assume tentatively that his attitudes toward women were formed mainly in those years. In 1914, a few weeks before the war in Europe started, he met his Jeannie - and I can testify of my own knowledge that, 47 years later (i.e., the last time I saw him before his death) he was still dazzled by the wonderful fact that this glorious creature had consented to spend her life with him.
Do you remember the cultural attitudes toward romantic love during the years before the European War? Too early for you? Never mind, you'll find them throughout Doc Smith's novels. Now we come to the important question. The Lensman novels are laid in the far future. Can you think of any reason why the attitudes between sexes today (ca. 1979) are more likely to prevail in the far future than are attitudes prevailing before 1914?
(I stipulate that there are many other possible patterns. But we are now comparing just these two.)
I suggest that the current pattern is contrasurvival, is necessarily most temporary, and is merely one symptom of the kaleidoscopic and possibly catastrophic rapid change our culture is passing through (or dying from?).
Contrariwise, the pre - 1914 values, whatever faults they may have, are firmly anchored in the concept that a male's first duty is to protect women and children. Pro survival!
"Ah, but those hackneyed plots!" Yes, indeed! - and for excellent reason: The ideas, the cosmic concepts, the complex and sweeping plots, all were brand new when Doc invented them. But in the past half century dozens of other writers have taken his plots, his concepts, and rung the changes on them. The ink was barely dry on SKYLARK OF SPACE when the imitators started in. They have never stopped - pygmies, standing on the shoulders of a giant.
But all the complaints about "Skylark" Smith's alleged literary faults are as nothing to the (usually unvoiced) major grievance:
Doc Smith did not go along with any of the hogwash that passes for a system of social values today.
He believed in Good and Evil. He had no truck with the moral relativism of the neo - (cocktail - party) Freudians.
He refused to concede that "mediocre" is better than "superior."
He had no patience with self - pity.
He did not think that men and women are equal - he would as well have equated oranges with apples. His stories assumed that men and women are different, with different functions, different responsibilities, different duties. Not equal but complementary. Neither complete without the other.
Worse yet, in his greatest and longest story, the 6volume Lensman novel, he assumes that all humans are unequal (and, by implication, that the cult of the common man is pernicious nonsense), and bases his grand epic on the idea that a planned genetic breeding program thousands of years long can (and must) produce a new race superior to h. sapiens ... supermen who will become the guardians of civilization.
The Lensman novel was left unfinished; there was to have been at least a seventh volume. As always, Doc had worked it out in great detail but never (so far as I know) wrote it down... because it was unpublishable - then. But he told me the ending, orally and in private.
I shan't repeat it; it is not my story. Possibly somewhere there is a manuscript - I hope so! All I will say is that the ending develops by inescapable logic from clues in CHILDREN OF THE LENS.
So work it out for yourself. The original Gray Lensman left us quite suddenly - urgent business a long way off, no time to spare to tell us more stories.
SPINOFF
On 2 July 1979 I received a letter calling me to testify July 19th before a joint session of the House Select Committee on Aging (Honorable Claude Pepper, M.C., Chairman) and the House Committee on Science and Technology (Honorable Don Fuqua, M.C., Chairman) - subject: Applications of Space Technology for the Elderly and the Handicapped.
I stared at that letter with all the enthusiasm of a bridegroom handed a summons for jury duty. Space technology? Yeah, sure, I was gung - ho for space technology, space travel, spaceships, space exploration, space colonies - anything about space, always have been.
But "applications of space technology for the elderly and the handicapped"? Why not bee culture? Or Estonian folk dancing? Or the three - toed salamander? Tantric Yoga?
I faced up to the problem the way any married man does: "Honey? How do I get out of this?"
"Come clean," she advised me. "Tell them bluntly that you know nothing about the subject. Shall I write a letter for you to sign?"
"It's not that simple."
"Certainly it is. We don't want to go to Washington. In July? Let's not be silly."
"You don't have to go."
"You don't think I'd let you go alone, do you? After the time and trouble I've spent keeping you alive? Then let you drop dead on a Washington sidewalk? Hmmph! You go - I go."
Some hours later I said, "Let's sum it up. We both know that any Congressional committee hearing, no matter how the call reads, has as its real subject 'Money' - who gets it and how much. And we know that the space program is in bad trouble. This joint session may not help - it looks as if it would take a miracle to save the space program - but it might help. Some, maybe. The only trouble is that I don't know anything about the subject I'm supposed to discuss."
"So you've said, about twenty times."
"I don't know anything about it today. But on July 19th I'm going to be a fully - qualified Expert Witness."
"So I told you, two hours ago."
Ginny and I have our own Baker Street Irregulars. Whether the subject be Chaucer or chalk, pulsars or poisons, we either know the man who knows the most about it, or we know a man who knows the man who knows the most. Within twenty - four hours we had a couple of dozen 1f 1ft% f {$// public - spirited citizens helping us. Seventy - two hours, and information started to trickle in - within a week it was a flood and I was starting to draft my written testimony.