The Dragon Lensman

✍ Scribed by Smith, EE Doc; Kyle, David A

• Book ID: 107906788
• Year: 2011
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 142 KB
• Series: Lensman 8
• Category: Fiction

✦ Synopsis

Lensman series From Wikipedia

The Lensman series is a serial science fiction space opera by Edward Elmer "Doc" Smith. It was a runner-up for the Hugo award for best All-Time Series (the winner was the Foundation series by Isaac Asimov). The series was published in magazines, before being collected and reworked into the better-known series of books. The complete series in internal sequence and their original publication dates are:

1. Triplanetary (four parts, January–April 1934, Amazing Stories)

2. First Lensman (1950, Fantasy Press)

3. Galactic Patrol (six parts, September 1937–February 1938, Astounding Stories)

4. Gray Lensman (four parts, October 1939–January 1940, Astounding Stories)

5. Second Stage Lensmen (four parts, November 1941–February 1942, Astounding Stories)

6. Children of the Lens (four parts, November 1947–February 1948, Astounding Stories)

Originally, the series consisted of the final four novels published between 1937 and 1948 in the magazine Astounding Stories. However, in 1948, at the suggestion of Lloyd Arthur Eshbach (publisher of the original editions of the Lensman books as part of the Fantasy Press imprint), Smith rewrote his 1934 story Triplanetary, originally published in Amazing Stories, to fit in with the Lensman series. First Lensman was written in 1950 to act as a link between Triplanetary and Galactic Patrol and finally, in the years up to 1954, Smith revised the rest of the series to remove inconsistencies between the original Lensman chronology and Triplanetary.

As of June, 2011, IMDB reports a film adaptation under way, but, as it's still in development, the information is thin. According to various sources it will be produced by Ron Howard from a script by Babylon 5's J. Michael Straczynski for Universal Studios.

Plot

The series opens in Triplanetary, two billion years before the present time. The universe has few life-forms, except for the elder race of our galaxy, the Arisians and few planets besides their native world. The Arisians, a peaceful race native to this universe, are already ancient at this time and have forgone physical needs in preference for contemplative mental power which they have developed and refined to an exceedingly high degree. The underlying assumption (based on then-accepted theories of stellar evolution) is that, while stars are common, planetary formation is very rare. Thus there are comparatively very few planets in the universe.

Into this universe, from an alien space-time continuum, the Eddorians come, a dictatorial, power-hungry race. They have been attracted to this universe by the observation that our galaxy and a sister galaxy (later to be named Lundmark's Nebula, still later called the Second Galaxy) are passing through each other. According to an astronomical theory current at the time of writing Triplanetary called the tidal theory (the primary theory prior to the rehabilitation of the nebular hypothesis), this will result in a unique galactic formation of billions of planets and thus the development of life upon them. Dominance over these life forms would offer the Eddorians an opportunity to satisfy their lust for power and control.

Although the Eddorians have developed mental powers almost equal to those of the Arisians, they rely instead for the most part on physical power, exercised on their behalf by a hierarchy of underling races. They see the many races in the universe, with which the Arisians were intending to build a peaceful civilization, as fodder for their power-drive.

The Arisians, detecting the invasion of our universe by the Eddorians, recognize their rapacious, intractable nature. So they try to hide their existence from the Eddorians and then begin a covert breeding program on every world that can produce intelligent life, with the aim of producing a means to eventually destroy the Eddorian race. This they grasp that they cannot do by mental power alone, and they decide that much time is needed (during which Eddore must be kept ignorant of their plans) and new races must be developed which will better be able to breach the Eddorians' mental powers than they themselves are. The new races, having done so, will naturally be better guardians of civilization than the Arisians can be, and so the Arisians' role in the universe will be ended.

Triplanetary incorporates the early history of that breeding program on Earth, illustrated with the lives of several warriors and soldiers, from ancient times to the discovery of the first interstellar space drive. It adds an additional short novel (originally published with the Triplanetary name) which is transitional to the novel First Lensman.

The second book, First Lensman, concerns the early formation of the Galactic Patrol and the first Lens, given to First Lensman Virgil Samms of "Tellus" (Earth). Samms is one side of the vast Arisian breeding program which will produce Clarissa MacDougal, the female half of the penultimate result of their breeding program. Moreover, along with Roderick Kinnison (a member of the other side, which will produce the male half), they are natural leaders as they are supremely intelligent, forceful, and capable. The Arisians, through the scientist Bergenholm (actually an Arisian entity appearing as a human, and who "invented" the interstellar drive), make it known that if Samms, the head of the Triplanetary Service which administers law enforcement to Tellus, Mars and Venus, visits the Arisian planetary system—and only if he visits the Arisian system—he will be given the tool he needs to build the Patrol he dreams of. That tool is the Lens. The Arisians further promise him that no entity unworthy of the Lens will ever be permitted to wear it, but that he and his successors will have to discover for themselves most of its abilities. They otherwise maintain a highly distant profile and refuse to talk to other beings, stating that they have given civilization the tool it needs to bring about a good future and that people should otherwise not have reason to contact them.

The Lens is a form of "pseudo-life," created by the Arisians who understand life and life-force in a way no other race does. It gives its wearer a variety of mental capabilities, including those needed to enforce the law on alien planets and to bridge the communication gap between different life-forms. Thus, it can provide mind-reading and telepathic abilities while connected directly or indirectly to the skin of its user. It cannot be worn by anyone other than its owner, will kill any other wearer, and sublimates shortly after the owner's death. Virgilia Samms, Virgil Samms's daughter, is later told that there is a gender difference that renders the Lens more compatible with male minds and that only one woman will ever become a Lensman.

Using the Lens as a means to test quality and identify the very few exceptional individuals able to help him, Virgil Samms visits races in other star systems, recruiting the best of them and forming a Galactic Patrol of exceptional individuals from a wide range of species. Their opponents in turn are discovered to be a widespread civilization based around dominance hierarchies and organized crime. The leaders of this civilization are the Eddorians, but only the Children of the Lens, who must ultimately defeat these, know of their existence.

The series contains some of the largest-scale space battles ever written. Entire worlds are almost casually destroyed (see "Super-Science Weapons" below), while some weapons are powerful enough to warp space itself. Huge fleets of spaceships fight bloody wars of attrition. Alien races of two galaxies sort themselves into the allied, Lens-bearing adherents of "Civilization" and the enemy races of "Boskone".

Centuries pass and eventually the final generations of the breeding program are born. On each of four planets, a single individual is born who realises the limits of his initial training and perceives the need to return to Arisia to seek "second stage" training, including: the ability to slay by mental force alone; a "sense of perception" which allows seeing by direct awareness without the use of the visual sense; the ability to control minds undetectably; the ability to perfectly split attention in order to perform multiple tasks with simultaneous focus on each; and to better integrate their minds for superior thinking.

As the breeding program reaches its ultimate conclusion, Kimball Kinnison, the brown-haired, gray-eyed second-stage Lensman of Earth, finally marries the most advanced product of the complementary breeding program, Clarissa MacDougall. She is a beautiful, curvaceous, red-haired nurse, who eventually becomes the first human female to receive her own Lens. Their children, a boy and two pairs of fraternal twin sisters, grow up to be the five Children of the Lens. In their breeding, "almost every strain of weakness in humanity is finally removed." They are born already possessing the powers taught to second-stage Lensmen, with mental abilities from birth that are difficult to imagine. They are the only beings of Civilization ever to see Arisia as it truly is and the only individuals developed over all the existence of billions of years able finally to penetrate the Eddorians' defense screens.

Undergoing advanced training, they are described as "third-stage" Lensmen, transcending humanity with mental scope and perceptions impossible for any normal person to comprehend. Although newly adult, they are now expected to be more competent than the Arisians and to develop their own techniques and abilities "about which we [the Arisians] know nothing."

The key discovery comes when they try mind-merging, which they have not tried since before their various third-stage trainings, and discover that this is completely changed. No longer are they simply five beings in mental contact as before. Now they discover they can merge their minds into a hive-mind, to effectively form one mental entity, a being with incalculable abilities called the Unit. The Arisians call this the "most nearly perfect creation the universe has ever seen" and state that they, who created it, are themselves almost entirely ignorant of almost all its higher powers.

The Children of the Lens, together with the mental power of unknown millions of Lensmen of the Galactic Patrol, constitute the Arisians' intended means to destroy Eddore and make the universe safe for their progeny species. The Galactic Patrol, summoned to work together in this way for the first time in its existence, contains billions of beings who in total can generate immense mental force. The Children of the Lens add their own tremendous mental force to this. As the Unit gather, they focus all power onto one tiny point of the Eddorians' shields. Thus attacked with this incalculable strength and precision, the Eddorians' strongest shields finally, after billions of years, are destroyed and the Eddorians with them.

The Arisians, with their child races successful and safe, remove themselves from the Cosmos in order to leave the Children of the Lens uninhibited in their future as the new guardians of Civilization.

Sequels

Using the same fictional universe, but not concerning the central plot, Smith also wrote the Vortex Blaster stories, including "Storm Cloud on Deka" (June 1942) and "The Vortex Blaster Makes War" (October 1942) for Astonishing Stories. These stories and later additions were collected and published by Gnome Press as The Vortex Blaster in 1960 and later reprinted by Pyramid Books as Masters of the Vortex in 1968.

This story collection can be explicitly identified as set in between Second Stage Lensman and Children of the Lens. During the course of the story in Vortex Blaster, the protagonists make first contact with a race of aliens known as the "Dhilans." During Children of the Lens, explicit reference is made to a "Dhilan Roadster" as a type of vehicle, clearly setting the events in it after that first contact.

The story Spacehounds of IPC, while very similar to the Lensman series in some ways, is not part of it. The technology and the lifeforms in the story can't be reconciled with the Lensman series so it must be considered a non-series, stand alone story.[citation needed]

In Larger Than Life, a tribute to E.E. Smith written by Robert Heinlein, and included in Expanded Universe, Heinlein writes:

The Lensman 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.

On July 14, 1965, Smith gave written permission to William B. Ellern to continue the Lensman series, which led to the publishing of "Moon Prospector" in 1966, New Lensman in 1975 and Triplanetary Agent in 1978.

Biography From Wikipedia - E. E. Smith

Born: Edward Elmer Smith, May 2, 1890. Sheboygan, Wisconsin

Died: August 31, 1965 (aged 75), Seaside, Oregon

Pen name: E. E. "Doc" Smith

Occupation: Food Engineer and Writer

Nationality: American

Genres: Space Opera

Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D., also, E. E. Smith, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Doc Smith, "Skylark" Smith, and (to family) Ted (May 2, 1890 – August 31, 1965) was a food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes) and early science fiction author who wrote the Lensman series and the Skylark series, among others. He is sometimes referred to as the father of space opera.

Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin on May 2, 1890 to Fred Jay Smith and Caroline Mills Smith, both staunch Presbyterians of British ancestry. His mother was a teacher born in Michigan in February 1855; his father was a sailor, born in Maine in January 1855 to an English father. They moved to Spokane, Washington the winter after Edward Elmer was born, where Mr. Smith was working as a contractor in 1900. In 1902 the family moved to Seneaquoteen, near the Pend Oreille River, in Kootenai County, Idaho. He had four siblings, Rachel M. born September 1882, Daniel M. born January 1884, Mary Elizabeth born February 1886 (all of whom were born in Michigan), and Walter E. born July 1891 in Washington. In 1910, Fred and Caroline Smith and their son Walter were living in the Markham Precinct of Bonner County, Idaho; Fred is listed in census records as a farmer.

Smith worked primarily as a manual laborer until he injured his wrist, at the age of 19, while escaping from a fire. He attended the University of Idaho. He was installed in the 1984 Class of the University of Idaho Alumni Hall of Fame. He entered its prep school in 1907, and graduated with two degrees in Chemical Engineering in 1914. He was president of the Chemistry Club, the Chess Club, and the Mandolin and Guitar Club, and captain of the Drill and Rifle Team; he also sang the bass lead in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His undergraduate thesis was Some Clays of Idaho, co-written with classmate Chester Fowler Smith, who died in California of tuberculosis the following year, after taking a teaching fellowship at Berkeley. It is not known whether the two were related.

On October 5, 1915, in Boise, Idaho he married Jeanne Craig MacDougall, the sister of his college roommate, Allen Scott (Scotty) MacDougall. (Her sister was named Clarissa MacLean MacDougall; the heroine of the Lensman novels would later be named Clarissa MacDougall.) Jeanne MacDougall was born in Glasgow, Scotland; her parents were Donald Scott MacDougall, a violinist, and Jessica Craig MacLean. Her father had moved to Boise, Idaho when the children were young, and later sent for his family; he died while they were en route in 1905. Jeanne's mother, who remarried businessman and retired politician John F. Kessler in 1914 worked at, and later owned, a boarding house on Ridenbaugh Street.

After college, Smith was a junior chemist for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., developing standards for butter and for oysters. Smith may have served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War I, but in what capacity is not known Smith apparently requested exemption from the draft, partly because his wife was solely dependent on him, and partly perhaps because of his service as a civilian chemist in the war effort.

First publication of Skylark Three, Amazing Stories, August 1930

On one evening in 1915, the Smiths were with visiting his former classmate from the University of Idaho, Dr. Carl Garby, who had also moved to Washington, D.C. They lived near the Smiths in the Seaton Place Apartments in Washington with his wife, Lee Hawkins Garby. A long discussion about journeys into outer space ensued. Then, it was suggested to Smith that he should write down his ideas and speculations as a story about interstellar travel. Although he was interested, Smith thought that some amount of romantic elements would be required as well—a task that he found himself uncomfortable with.

Mrs. Garby then made an offer to take care of the love interest and the romantic dialogue, and Smith decided to give it a try. The sources of inspirations for the main characters in the novel were themselves. The "Seatons" were based on the Smiths while the "Cranes" were drawn from the Garbys. About one-third of The Skylark of Space was completed by the end of 1916, when Smith and Garby gradually abandoned work on it.

Smith earned his master's degree in chemistry from the George Washington University in 1917, studying under Dr. Charles E. Munroe. Smith completed his Ph.D. in chemical engineering, in 1918, emphasizing food engineering with a thesis entitled The effect of bleaching with oxides of nitrogen upon the baking quality and commercial value of wheat flour, which was published in 1919. Warner and Fleischer instead give the thesis title as The Effect of the Oxides of Nitrogen upon the Carotin Molecule — C40H56, which is difficult to explain. Sam Moskowitz instead gives the date of the degree as 1919, which may reflect the differences between the thesis submission date, its defense date, and the degree certification date.

Writing Skylark

In 1919 Dr. Smith was hired as chief chemist for F. W. Stock & Sons of Hillsdale, Michigan, at one time the largest family-owned mill east of the Mississippi, working on doughnut mixes.

Late in 1919, after moving to Michigan, one evening Smith was baby-sitting (presumably for Roderick) while his wife attended a movie; he resumed work on The Skylark of Space, finishing it in the spring of 1920. He submitted it to many book publishers and magazines, spending more in postage than he would eventually receive for its publication. He received an encouraging rejection letter from Bob Davis, editor of Argosy, in 1922, saying that he liked the novel personally, but that it was too far out for his readers. (According to Warner, but no other source, Dr. Smith began work on the sequel, Skylark III, before the first book was accepted.) Finally, upon seeing the April 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, he submitted it to the magazine; it was accepted, initially for $75, later raised to $125. It was published in the August–October 1928 issues. It was such a success that managing editor T. O'Conor Sloane requested a sequel before the second installment had been published.

Mrs. Garby was not interested in collaborating further, so Dr. Smith began work on Skylark Three on his own. It was published in the August through October 1930 issues of Amazing. (In 1930 the Smiths were living in Michigan, at 33 Rippon Avenue in Hillsdale.) This was as far as he had planned to take the Skylark series; it was praised in Amazing's letter column, and he was paid 3/4¢ per word, surpassing Amazing's previous record of half a cent.

The early 1930s: between Skylark and Lensman

Dr. Smith then began work on what he intended as a new series, starting with Spacehounds of IPC, which he finished in the autumn of 1930. In this novel he took pains to avoid the scientific impossibilities which had bothered some readers of the Skylark novels. Even in 1938, after he had written Galactic Patrol, Dr. Smith considered it his finest work; he later said of it, "This was really scientific fiction; not, like the Skylarks, pseudo-science"; and even at the end of his career he considered it his only work of true science fiction. It was published in the July through September 1931 issues of Amazing, but with unauthorized changes by Sloane. Fan letters in the magazine complained about the novel's containment within the solar system, and Sloane sided with the readers. So when Harry Bates, editor of Astounding Stories, offered Smith 2¢/word—payable on publication—for his next story, he agreed; this meant that it could not be a sequel to Spacehounds. This book would be Triplanetary, "in which scientific detail would not be bothered about, and in which his imagination would run riot."

The Lensman series

In January 1936, a time period where he was already an established science fiction writer, he took a job for salary plus profit-sharing, as a food technologist (a cereal chemist) at the Dawn Doughnut Company of Jackson, Michigan. This initially entailed almost a year's worth of eighteen-hour days and seven-day workweeks. Individuals who knew Dr. Smith confirmed that he had a role in developing mixes for doughnuts and other pastries, but the contention that he developed the first process for making powdered sugar adhere to doughnuts cannot be substantiated. Dr. Smith was reportedly dislocated from his job at Dawn Doughnuts due to pre-war rationing in early 1940.

Dr. Smith had been contemplating writing a "space-police novel" since early 1927; once he had "the Lensmen's universe fairly well set up", he reviewed his science fiction collection for "cops-and-robbers" stories. He cites Clinton Constantinescue's "War of the Universe" as a negative example, and Starzl and Williamson as positive ones. Tremaine responded extremely positively to a brief description of the idea.

Once Dawn Doughnuts became profitable in late 1936, Dr. Smith wrote an eighty-five page outline for what became the four core Lensman novels; in early 1937 Tremaine committed to buying them. Segmenting the story into four novels required considerable effort to avoid dangling loose ends; Dr. Smith cites Edgar Rice Burroughs as a negative example. After the outline was complete, he wrote a more detailed outline of Galactic Patrol, plus a detailed graph of its structure, with "peaks of emotional intensity and the valleys of characterization and background material." He notes, however, that he was never able to follow any of his outlines at all closely, as the "characters get away from me and do exactly as they damn please." After completing the rough draft of Galactic Patrol, he wrote the concluding chapter of the last book in the series, Children of the Lens. Galactic Patrol was published in the September 1937 through February 1938 issues of Astounding; unlike the revised book edition, it was not set in the same universe as Triplanetary.

Gray Lensman, the second book in the series, appeared in Astounding's October 1939 through January 1940 issues. (Note that the frequent British spelling "grey" is simply a recurrent mistake, starting with the cover of the first installment; Moskowitz's usage, "The Grey Lensman", is even harder to justify.) Gray Lensman (and its cover illustration) was extremely well received. Campbell's editorial in the December issue suggested that the October issue was the best issue of Astounding ever, and Gray Lensman was first place in the Analytical Laboratory statistics "by a lightyear", with three runners-up in a distant tie for third place. The cover was also praised by readers in Brass Tacks, and Campbell noted, "We got a letter from E. E. Smith saying he and Hubert Rogers agreed on how Kinnison looked."

Dr. Smith worked for the US Army between 1941 and 1945. An extended segment in the novel version of Triplanetary, set during World War II, suggests intimate familiarity with explosives and munitions manufacturing. Some biographers cite as fact that, just as Smith's protagonist in this segment lost his job over failure to approve sub-standard munitions, Smith did as well. Smith began work for the J. W. Allen Company (a manufacturer of doughnut and frosting mixes) in 1946 and worked for them until his professional retirement in 1957.

After Dr. Smith retired, he and his wife lived in Clearwater, Florida, in the fall and winter, driving the smaller of their two trailers to Seaside, Oregon, each April, often stopping at science fiction conventions on the way. (Dr. Smith did not like to fly.) In 1963, he was presented the inaugural First Fandom Hall of Fame award at the 21st World Science Fiction Convention in Washington, D.C. Some of his biography is captured in an essay by Robert A. Heinlein, which was reprinted in the collection Expanded Universe in 1980. There is a more detailed, although allegedly error-ridden, biography in Sam Moskowitz's Seekers of Tomorrow.

Robert A. Heinlein and Dr. Smith were friends. (Heinlein dedicated his 1958 novel Methuselah's Children "To Edward E. Smith, Ph.D.") Heinlein reported that E. E. Smith perhaps took his "unrealistic" heroes from life, citing as an example the extreme competence of the hero of Spacehounds of IPC. He reported that E. E. Smith was a large, blond, athletic, very intelligent, very gallant man, married to a remarkably beautiful, intelligent red-haired woman named MacDougal (thus perhaps the prototypes of 'Kimball Kinnison' and 'Clarissa MacDougal'). In Heinlein's essay, he reports that he began to suspect Smith might be a sort of "superman" when he asked Dr. Smith for help in purchasing a car. Smith tested the car by driving it on a back road at illegally high speeds with their heads pressed tightly against the roof columns to listen for chassis squeaks by bone conduction—a process apparently improvised on the spot.

Critical opinion

Smith's novels are generally considered to be the classic space operas, and he is sometimes called the "first nova" of twentieth century science fiction.

Dr. Smith expressed a preference for inventing fictional technologies that were not strictly impossible (so far as the science of the day was aware) but highly unlikely: "the more highly improbable a concept is—short of being contrary to mathematics whose fundamental operations involve no neglect of infinitesimals—the better I like it" was his phrase.

Extending the Lensman universe

Vortex Blasters (also known as Masters of the Vortex) is set in the same universe as the Lensman novels. It is an extension to the main storyline which takes place between Second Stage Lensmen and Children of the Lens, and introduces a different type of psionics from that used by the Lensmen. Spacehounds of IPC is not a part of the series, despite occasional erroneous statements to the contrary. (It is listed as a novel in the series in some paperback editions of the 1970s.)

Robert A. Heinlein reported that Smith had planned a seventh Lensman novel, set after the events described in Children of the Lens, which was unpublishable at that time (the early 1960s). Smith told Heinlein that the new novel proceeded inexorably from unresolved matters in Children, a statement easily supported by a careful reading of Children. Careful searches by people who knew Smith well (including Frederik Pohl, Smith's editor, and Verna Smith Trestrail, Smith's daughter) have failed to locate any material related to such a story.[citation needed] Smith apparently never wrote any of it down.

On 14 July 1965, barely a month before his death, Smith gave written permission to William B. Ellern to continue the Lensman series, which led to the publishing of "Moon Prospector" in 1965 and New Lensman in 1976. Smith's long-time friend, Dave Kyle, wrote three authorized added novels in the Lensman series that provided background about the major non-human Lensmen.