Edward E. Smith (1)Reseñas

The original stories were published in 1934, and later it was expanded and published in book form in 1948. One of the two prequels to the Lensman saga, since the core of the story begins with book 3 (Galactic Patrol).

"Doc" Smith was hugely influential and this was quite original stuff in the 30s. He was basically the inventor of grand pulp space opera sagas, and there are influences of this in Star Wars, for example. The style is energetic and full of action, and the ideas are big and, at the time, original. Two very advanced alien races: one benevolent and the other evil, are involved in a fight lasting many centuries. The benevolent Arisians, working in secret, have manipulated several younger races to produce heroes who will take the lead in fighting the evil Boskone. We briefly visit old Atlantis and the two world wars, before getting into the main part of the story.

Quite old-fashioned, of course, but I'm fine with reading it in context. There are strong-jawed heroes and beautiful damsels who are not strong-jawed or physical fighters, but who are morally brave.

Unfortunately, the writing was a bit too clunky for my taste. I'm not expecting high literature or anything. I know it's pulp, but I have read old pulp that flows much better than this. As soon as we have a passage with fast action, we have another one with long, rambling sentences that slow the pace.

All in all, an interesting read, but I would probably not recommend it except to people who have a historical interest in the origins of pulp space opera.

Doesn’t age well. If this had been the first I’d read I would not have read another.

It's sad that this is so dated as to be painful to read. The views of science, technology, government, gender, etc. are archaic, which is ok for period fiction, but not really for science fiction.

Probably one of the worst books I've ever read. The first half was stapled on in 1948 as a sort of prequel to the Lensman novels. The back half was the original story from 1934. Most fascinating is the anti-fascism fears mixed with cold war era fears as a result of being written at different times.

All that said...ugh.

The last book of the year 2013. An overly sexist contradictory work yet full of grand science fiction battles of truly huge scope. A product of its time before its time.

The pulp-era history of space opera is complicated, but E. E. “Doc” Smith is undoubtedly one of its icons. His Triplanetary is one of two prequels to the Lensman series. When its first version was published in 1934, the Buck Rogers radio series was in the middle of its run, and the comic strip had been out for five years. And, of course, the kid genius Tom Swift had been busy defeating bad guys with clever inventions since 1910. In 1948, a clunky, expanded fixup version of Triplanetary brought the beginning of the series into the Atomic Age. Reading the novel almost ninety years on, I was struck by the shifting style that veers from wartime slang to prose so purple it would make Bulwer-Lytton blush. At the heart of it all is the adoration of technology devoted to speed and power—especially force fields and beamed transmissions. Smith is especially fond of tractor beams, a term he may have coined as early as 1931.
Smith makes giant technological leaps seem easy. How about an inertialess tractor beam? “A tractor—inertialess?” Cleveland wondered. “Sure, why not?” Even fish, deep in the oceans of a distant planet, can do it because “those high-pressure boys were no fools.”
But my favorite bit of Smithian prose comes when the Nevians first appear in Tellurian space: “Space became suffused with a redly impenetrable opacity, and through that indescribable pall there came reaching huge arms of force incredible; writhing, coruscating beams of power which glowed a baleful, although almost imperceptible, red.”
Kids, they don’t write ‘em like that anymore.

Another "classic" sci-fi novel and another reminder of how much the genre --and really society, as if sci-fi existed separately from that-- has changed in the last 70 to 85 years (this was originally published serially starting in the early- to mid-1930's, I think, then collected and amended/rewritten for publication in 1948.)

More genre specific is the lower quality of the writing (reasonably decent here, considering, but still...) and the very time-specific plot/event style. E.g. "humans" discover some new technology based on some new physics and have a working, battleship-mounted weapon based on it in 3 days. E.g. the uber-competent agent/engineer/scientist builds a functioning first-of-its-kind "ultra wave" "camera" in-field in what sounds like hours, or at most days. I get it that (these days) that is a (sub-)genre specific trope and, moreover, that when e.g. someone on Star Trek picks a crystal up *off the ground* and "wires" it into their tricorder, or when someone in the Expanse decrypts and reprograms a Martian gunships' military-level encrypted computer with *hardware* tamper-triggers in what is apparently 9 to 90 minutes, that I am letting the exact same thing slide by... but it just seems so much worse and more obvious here.

I feel like I can also detect the fingerprints of the post-WWII, building Red Scare re-writes here. There are passages that either were super-awkwardly inserted and/or just leap out now. Some (one passage RE: an outside power riling up, essentially, "minorities") almost seem prescient a la "Russian election tampering" OR as simply being quite racist (e.g. the attraction of Communism for many black people in the period was because it spoke about and criticized American racism.) Others seem immensely callous OR as subtle criticisms (e.g. the worthy adversary that the "Earthlings" make peace with... nevermind that the Earthlings already realized that those same aliens have brutally subjugated and continue a total war against the other intelligent species on their planet... is this commentary on Communist Russia? Nazi Germany? "Worthy" adversaries in general?)

To be fair, I suppose that is another genre change. Early sci-fi was 100% action. The characters do not have, ah, "rich inner lives" nor do they live in societies.

Anyway, as a historical piece this was interesting; for my particular interest it was worth reading; as a story... eh, probably a waste of your time.

An unnecessary evil if you want to fully appreciate the classic Lensman series, which you can comfortably pick up at Volume 3: Galactic Patrol. On the other hand, once you've skipped over the multiple prologues, the main story is quite enjoyable on a level with, let's say, Spacehounds of IPC.

Great stuff. They don't write sci-fi like this any more. Absolutely non-stop action.

Well, that's done.

This has got to be the first novel I've read that opens with an introduction that prewarns that the author made a mistake with the first six chapters. And they weren't wrong. The first six chapters serve as an extended prologue. And it's boring and, for the most part, completely superfluous.

Most of the rest of the issues I have with the novel are simply because it's a product of its time. It contains that standard misogyny inherent to any action novel up to at least the 80s. Men are manly or cowardly, and women are there to look beautiful, be admired, and be saved so they can fawn over their manly men. The science part of the science fiction doesn't hold up whatsoever, with its outdated various rays and gases and ultrawave communication. And the dialogue, though quite typical of an action/adventure novel of the time, is shockingly bad. So bad that I actually laughed out loud at times. The aliens, in some cases supposedly emotionless, come across as bad gangsters. And all the aliens, no matter how removed from the human race they are, all talk like they're rough tough business men from the 1950s.

The final problem I have is with the actual narrator of this audiobook version. He's simply awful and, should he ever step near a microphone to record anything other than a spoof commercial for a K-Tel Goofy Greatest Hits of the 60s collection, then he should be bludgeoned into submission with a very large, very blunt instrument. Perhaps a Smart Car. Or a house.

Really. He's that bad.

So, unfortunately, I won't be diving into the other five adventures of the Lensmen. They'll just have to somehow muddle through without me.

Another great example of the old fashioned 'space opera' genre. This is true space opera. Giant spaceships with ray guys, implacable alien foes, noble heroes, the whole thing. These are easy and quick reads. If you like unrealistic space adventure and space warfare, this is for you. Note 'unrealistic' - this is space opera, not hard scifi.½

I first discovered E.E. 'Doc' Smith's Lensman books at the age of 14, on holiday in the Cumbrian fells in the early 1970s; in fact, my first copy of Grey Lensman came from the station bookstall on Carlisle Citadel station. I was first drawn in by the Chris Foss cover art, possibly the first UK paperback to show his work (though he had made professional sales already). Over the years, I read and re-read everything of Smith's that was published in the UK, but the Lensman novels remained my go-to for sf adventure, even though I quickly realised that they occupied a particular historical niche in the evolution of the genre. And then, as I matured, I turned away from these books as other people I knew and whose opinions I respected pointed out Smith's many flaws.

But with time came a different perspective. I kept reading histories of the genre that put Smith in context; and I read other so-called "Golden Age" sf that stacked up badly against Smith. Well, as Theodore Sturgeon said, "90% of everything is crap". So in the end, I decided that I should attempt a re-read, after something like fifty years. I knew what I was going to find; my question was going to be, "Just how bad is this?"

Then just a few days before I embarked on this task, I read a 1993 issue of the journal of the UK's academic Science Fiction Foundation, Foundation 59. Apart from finding some remarkably apposite comments in reviews of books set in the impossibly distant future year of 2021, I came across the following quote in an article by Czech fan/academic Cyril Simsa on the probably little-remembered US author Henry Slesar, and it put me in an interesting frame of mind for the upcoming re-read:

"A lot of [Slesar's] stories are perfectly respectable examples of the way sf was written in the '50s, and may even have seemed well above average for their day. But so much has changed in the genre in the interim: plot-lines which may once have seemed agreeably adventurous now seem trite and melodramatic, ideas which were part of sf's stock-in-trade are now unbearable clichés, the little philosophical homilies with which so many '50s sf writers liked to finish off their stories (the "moral", if you like) seem dated and prevent the story reaching a proper conclusion. In a world where fascism and civil war have come back to the streets of Europe, where naked manipulation of the political process by the mass media has become the norm, where rival drug gangs regularly shoot at one another with Uzi machine-pistols in the ruins of Los Angeles and computer networks will soon be offering us sex in cyberspace for real, it's difficult to read a story about a mad scientist with a beautiful blond daughter, or a solitary genius who invents a new variety of domestic robot, or indeed any story in which the moral turns out to be (in the words of the '50s B-feature) that "there are things man isn't meant to know", without disguising a smirk behind the palm of one's hand. (Then again, in fairness to Slesar, one has to ask whether the second-generation cyberpunks like Walter Jon Williams will seem any less ridiculous in 2022, and whether we won't perhaps be just as incapable of taking seriously anything with voguish references to "ice", "jacks", designer drugs, artificial intelligence, multinational corporations, computer voodoo, banghramuffin orbital rave platforms, elephants in mirrorshades and so on, in an age no doubt as unimaginably different from where we are now, as the '80s were to the writers of the '50s.)"

So, armed with that thought, I tackled, not Grey Lensman but the book immediately before it in the sequence, Galactic Patrol, on the grounds that it was written first and forms the basis of the whole series. I quickly found the authorial style familiar, because Smith adopted a slightly portentous fake archaic style for the text, which immediately put me in mind of William Hope Hodgson's The Night Land, though nowhere near as extreme as Hodgson. I suspect Smith used that style to try to lend some sort of maturity and gravitas to the text, possibly to make his 14-year-old readership feel that they were in the presence of an adult.

We are pitched into the story of the Galactic Patrol, who provide law and justice throughout the galaxy (does this sound familiar yet?). At the apex of the Patrol are the Lensmen (and they are all men), who wear the Lens, a piece of bio-engineered super-science from the mysterious Arisians that confers various telepathic powers on the wearer. We are then shown the conflict between the Patrol and the pirates of Boskone who are preying on the space shipping lanes. Again, this feels very familiar territory; the theme of an eons-long conflict between two ancient and powerful races, played out through proxies, was the background for Joe Straczynski's 1990s television series Babylon 5, although in the case of that series, the motives of the two races were less clear-cut. In Smith's case, the Arisians are Good and Boskone is Evil.

Smith describes Boskone in terms that immediately made me think of the idea that the modern corporation is a dysfunctional organisation, where the ends justify the means, and progress up the corporate ladder is achieved through back-stabbing, lies, deceit and trampling on those who are not strong enough to stand up against such naked ambition. We now recognise this as typical of Type A personalities and organisations which show a tendency towards the psychopathic; the worrying thing is that having set up the Patrol in general and the Lensmen in particular as the Good Guys, Smith then allows his elite, the Grey Lensmen, full freedom of thought and action. They can determine truth through the use of the Lens, and so can act as judge, jury and executioner because they are all so incorruptible that their word of law is incontrovertible. And they can employ any means to achieve their end - just the trait that Smith originally laid at the feet of Boskone. But there is no room in Smith's universe for ambiguity (it was just this ambiguity and the conflict it gives rise to in the real world that made Babylon 5 such an engaging piece of sf drama).

The dialogue in the novel is excruciating 1930s slang, extrapolated forward. I skimmed as much of the dialogue as I could. Interestingly, the minions of Boskone have dialogue that is far less purple, in line with the depiction of the organisation as cold, ruthless and efficient. I found myself taking to them, though some of the lesser Boskonians sound like 1940s RAF pilots.

Modern commentators brand Smith's work as sexist and racist. Sexist it certainly is: there are no female Lensmen, and the one female character, though feisty, is as stereotypical as a 1940s pin-up poster (and not Rosie the Riveter, either). On the racism, though, things are not quite so clear-cut. True, there do not seem to be any black Lensmen; but Smith introduces a variety of alien races who have unpleasant or strange appearances but who have many good qualities - intelligence, nobility, and honour - and who are put into the classification of "Good Guys". This was perhaps Smith's contribution to the genre; he depicted aliens who were not just nasty monsters who abducted the girl in the brass bikini, to be blasted into oblivion because they were obscene to our eyes, but who were worthy to be called Civilised. Smith wasn't the first to do this - Stanley Weinbaum usually takes that honour with the Martian Tweel in A Martian Odyssey - but within the context of blood-and-thunder space opera, his depiction of the good alien was out of the ordinary. Even the villains of Boskone were given the credit for having intelligence and morals, even if they were the wrong sort of morals.

After all this, if you can cope with the outdated slang, the purple prose and the propensity of the heroes to pull new advances in super-science out of thin air with each new chapter, the story itself holds up reasonably well, only really lapsing when Kimball Kinnison, the Grey Lensman, subverts an entire base of Boskone through mental manipulation, and allows many of their personnel to live - and indeed, receive a pardon for any crimes - because they are all basically Good People Who Have Gone Wrong. Amongst all the action, such an act that is almost out of Gilbert and Sullivan feels out of place. After all, the villains of Boskone are usually gunned or hacked down to a man, without quarter.

In the end, I emerged from the (rather abrupt) end of the novel intact. I read little that makes me want to re-read more, especially as the later Lensman novels keep upping the stakes in the evil-doing of the villains and the goodness and ingenuity of the good guys; whilst the prequels (Triplanetary and First Lensman) did a lot of plot gymnastics to arrive at the universe of Galactic Patrol. I feel myself more likely to go back to Dave Langford's Doc Smith pastiche Sex Pirates of the Blood Asteroid. But at least I have had my re-read, and I can put that particular demon to rest.½

This book did not age well. I can perhaps give it points for being the first "space opera", but it is just so bad in every way -- horribly overwrought writing, stupid plot full of holes and plugged with magic, annoying and uninteresting characters, etc.

One from one of the Fathers of science fiction. Love how he writes and how archaic the written word can sound in these pages. This volume completes my Lensman collection.

One from one of the Fathers of science fiction. Love how he writes and how archaic the written word can sound in these pages. This volume completes my Lensman collection.

I'm reading this mainly because it's on the ballot for the retro Hugos for 1953 and, incidentally, I've read the fourth in the series already because it keeps being put on the "best SF ever lists". (I don't think it should be, but I may be a minority.)

Moving on.

I cringed a lot while reading this. Mostly I just went intellectual and pointed at all the Kirk-like alpha gets the alien girls swooning for him, the pleasure planets that pretend not to be (nudist planet of women, anyone?), or the equally cringeworthy ugly-factor for competent women.

Okay. This was pulp SF of '53. Have you SEEN THOSE COVERS? Like, ANY OF THEM? It's interesting to note which Golden-Age SF actually HAS scenes of naked women leaning up against silver spaceships both IN the text and ONLY on the cover. :)

MOVING ON.

Despite all this, Toots, I was actually rather surprised to find some BIG SF going on here. Maybe it's all cliché now, with Star-Trek tractor beams and boarding parties and pirates in space as well as deep infiltration tactics so wildly implausible that it could only be the work of Bond, James Bond, but let's put this in its proper place. The early fifties. This kind of thing is POPULAR. Add super super super powerful telepathic abilities and a weakness for the ladies, and we've got a square-jawed hero that later becomes the Green Lantern.

No. Wait. He was never the Green Lantern. Just as powerful as, perhaps, and as a Corpsman devoted to justice with uber powerful aliens using these gene-sports as their proxy weapons...

Oh, wait. Well. Never mind. This is STILL 1953 and no one takes SF seriously. Except those who do. And those who did, back then, ALSO found a lot of decent and exciting action and adventure with super-heroic and courageous derring-do right here in E. E. "Doc" Smith's work.

I didn't hate this. I did want to tear my eyes out for the first quarter or so. Certain depictions. But once we went into the whole infiltration of the baddies' empire, using telepathy to cloud the minds of all the aliens to make them think he was one of them, I was pretty much hooked and rocking along.

The good. The bad. The action is always pretty awesome. Think Star Wars meets Babylon 5 meets Pirates of the Carribean. Add James Bond with the powers of Voldemort. It can be VERY FUN, too!

All in all, I'd have to give it a 5 star on the one and a single star on the other. If you read this, manage your expectations and you might have a grand time or just find so much fodder for your ire that you'll have a different kind of a good time. :)

Sometimes, I'm a fool. I thought, perhaps, that the "so called" golden age of sci-fi before Heinlein would be as painful to read as the old Jules Verne. I even tried to read the first ten pages of the first book of the Lensman of E. E. Smith PHD and cringed down to my soul. I was thinking that nothing would be worth the pain of reading this trash. And yet, all of my favorite past couple of generations of sci-fi authors swore by the old doc, and there are still generations of readers that are surprised and delighted by the stories. Heck, the fourth book is considered by some to be the 98th best sci-fi book of all time. I buckled down, gritted my teeth, and picked up the fourth without so much as reading eleven pages of the first three.

I WAS DUMBFOUNDED. I was awestruck. I was plainly amazed and giddy in the reading of these little serialized bubblegum stories of sci-fi heroes. I'm too young to have watched Flash Gordon, but I understand the draw. I'm certainly old enough to have sat amazed through all the Star Wars at the inception. I've watched all of the original Star Treks, (not to mention every iteration after). I was forced to re-evaluate my entire internal consistency engine of sci-fi idea sources and lineage, and all of a sudden, the mitochondrial eve of sci-fi tropes (at least the best surviving eve) is FOUND. Now I understand. The light shines upon my mind. The great cosmic egg lights up like a big bulb.

So I asked in a small voice... "So the Lensman series is what encouraged the Green Lantern Comics into being? It also encouraged the biggest space operas? It took over as the sci-fi successor to all westerns and greek hero myths?" And E. E. Smith replied, "Yes, you dumbshit."

AAaaahhhh... ok... I feel like a moron now, but at least I didn't proliferate that weird-ass idea about galaxies colliding... whew... I'm back on my moral high ground again. :)

I might just have to read them in order again and ignore, dutifully, the Really Bad Physics in favor of the Great Fun.

Update:
I can't get this out of my head: The proper term for the collision of two planets is "Squishingly". I can't unread what I have read, so I pay it forward. :)

classic space opera: good vs evil, noble spacemen against bug eyed horrors, ray guns, super science. This was one of the first. Fun romp as long as you realize it's from a simpler time in sci fi.

The audio book has an intro. At first, it's a little interesting - talking about the historic environment in which this novel was written, and discussing this series relative to several of Smith's contemporary authors. Then it gushed about the story in a way that made me begin to get cross, OK, yes, on with the story then, please! And then it began to tell me what happens in the story. I shouted "WHAT?!" and turned it off. On inspection, there's not a chapter break that will let me skip the introduction and go straight to the book in the audio version, so I guess I'll be waiting to read this book when the voter's packet comes out. SO annoying. If I need to be told what happens in the story for me to be able to understand the story, then it's not a very good story. If I don't need to be told what happens in the story, then let me enjoy the story and learn about all of this for myself in the way the author intended, please! Thank you!

Some spoilery thoughts here:
http://ciaracatscifi.blogspot.com/2014/07/galactic-patrol-by-e-e-smith.html

EE 'Doc' Smith

the prose is not Coruscating. The plot is limp, and the whole production uninviting. Something is invented to turn the tables on the baddies....ho......hum.

Wow, I have really mixed emotions about this one...

On the one hand, I really enjoyed it. I mean, as epic space opera goes, it's right up there. I was attached to Kim as a character (eventually), and was rooting for him to defeat Helmuth.

On the other hand, sexist much? Yeah, yeah, I know, when this was written things were just that way. Uh, this took it a step beyond in places. There were literally NO female characters until the end of the book when Mac is finally introduced and is treated and even talked about by everyone but Kim as simply good breeding stock. She is a fairly strong character, not your wilting violet. I'll give him that, but it isn't much compared to the author's treatment of her. The rest of the women are just faceless nameless nurses. Here is a prime example of what I'm talking about:

"Therefore she passed along her illogical but cheering thought, and the nurses, being also women, accepted it without question as the actual and accomplished fact." Chapter 20

Uh...what?

You don't even want me to quote the Dr. & Haynes discussing her for a breeder with Kim...

My last issue, the reason this is a 3 star rather than 4 or 5 (aside from the above) is that there is a decided lack of wit. Where's my witty banter? I'm thinking Han Solo style? There was none of that. I can take my testosterone overload a lot better with some humor, clever, sassy, humor. One liners needed, stat!

So, action, cleverness of the sci-fi, great hero/villain, all there. I was totally on board. But, it fell a little short for me in areas.

(Original Review, 1980-08-08)

I also picked up a couple of the Lensmen books after reading about them here in the SF-Lovers newsletter. Umm, as one of those narrow-minded types who happens to think the Golden Age of Science Fiction is right now, I recommend that anyone else who is tempted to do so scour your local used book stores before laying out real cash money for them.

The Lensmen books have all those neat features that gave SF its good name among middle-aged High School English teachers. All the problems that arise in the book (in this case, Galactic Patrol) threaten to End Civilization before the end of this chapter, if not by the next page. Oh My! But not to worry, our heroically heroic heroes (HHH's) have foreseen this very circumstance, allowing them to deus-ex-machinate a solution in the next paragraph. Whew. [2018 EDIT: Even in 1980 I already thought this was crap...]

The dialogue is, well, juvenile (oh but the descriptions are vivid, the valiant war-machine turned suddenly, thrusters blazing. Suddenly from all gun-ports a brilliant cone of orange destruction spewed forth, sundering the armored hull of the startled pirate ship.) Ships are boarded with grappling hook and sword, and space battles are concluded by hand to hand combat, in a fine swashbuckling tradition, though accompanied by the complication of taking place in free fall (this, incidentally, is not a problem for our HHH's, due to their swift reflexes and superior strength).

Well, it was okay when I was ten years old, but I only got halfway through the book before my strength gave out.

Actually, I think the Golden Age of S.F. is actually the extended present -- including all the good stuff from years gone by (Stanley G. Weinbaum, Cordwainer Smith, etc.). Not including Doc Smith, however.

[2018 EDIT: This review was written at the time as I was running my own personal BBS server. Much of the language of this and other reviews written in 1980 reflect a very particular kind of language: what I call now in retrospect a “BBS language”.]

"Nobody does anything for nothing. Altruism is beautiful in theory, but it has never been known to work in practice."

In “The First Lensman” by E. E. Doc Smith

In many or most written SF, certainly in SF films, the canny audience member engages in a willing suspension of disbelief. The question for me often comes down to just a couple considerations--is it a bridge too far, just too many stupidities of too gross a scale for me to be able to buy-in? And am I enjoying myself on other levels--is it just so fun or cool or exciting, or are the characters and story just so damned compelling, that I can't help but have a good time? So, if I'm not offended by the stupidity, and the work in question as a narrative, then I'm happily able to suspend my disbelief and enjoy it.

Ok. it's only SF but..

Kimball Kinnison, gains a “sense of perception,” allowing him to perceive nearby objects without using the standard five senses. He can “see” through solid objects, for example. That does involve interaction with inanimate matter, of course; but the interaction is all one way—he can’t affect the things he perceives.

...is Kimball Kinnison’s quantum data idea perceiving nearby objects without using the standard five senses that far fetched? Kimball can “see” through solid objects, for example. That does involve interaction with inanimate matter, of course; but the interaction is all one way—he can’t affect the things he perceives. Too bad we don’t have any Black Holes. Imagine if you had a pair of entangled photons, kept one and sent the other off to the black hole, then the remaining one would "resolve" itself - it's wave-function would collapse - when the first one reaches the horizon. And that could give you some information about the horizon. But if the first photon passes through the horizon without incident, then you could get information from within, which probably violates several important theories about this kind of stuff. Maybe. What I’d give to read what Doc Smith would make of Back Holes...

Anyway, some of treatments I’ve been reading in contemporary SF books dealing with Black Holes have no excuse. Nowadays the theoretical body of knowledge is vast. It’s difficult to find a SF novel dealing with the latest views about black holes related to Planck objects and compact surfaces. There’s where the meat is. There is nothing inside a black hole, everything gets smeared on the surface. So no wormholes and no quick jump to another planet, just a kind of file compression for matter and energy.

(*someone-waving-in-back-and-shouting: “you lost me at OK!”*)

(*another-one-waving-in-back-and-shouting: “Wouldn't work - entanglement would break down as the photon fell into the back hole. Nothing other than Hawking radiation gets out, including light. At best what you'd get would be an entangled photon that forever seemed to be frozen in space, doing nothing. Remember, Einstein's relativity.”*)

Me: “And how many photons would you need to entangle to get useful information from the edge of a black hole anyway? Billions?”

(*another-sceptic-snoozing-in-back!: ZZZZZzzzzzzzzz...........*)

(*the-same-another-one-waving-in-back-and-shouting: “Only kidding..! Wish I could grasp some of this malarkey as all I seem to be able to do at parties to empty them is turn my eyelids inside out and gurn.”

Me: “I agree. But then I'm as thick as a Planck, Constantly.”

(*another-one-waving-in-back-and-shouting: “I like the idea of zooming off into space, accelerating to near the speed of light for a few days, then coming back to Earth to find that several hundred years have passed and that your 100 euros invested in Nat West is now worth 10 000 000 euros. Or not.*)

(*the-one-snoozing-in-back-just-woke: “Thanks for spoiling the fun, Manuel! You're the frigging scientist, but I always thought the better means of space travel was going to be something like the Spacing Guild of "Dune" uses where they "fold" space. Are any scientists working on that?”*)

Me: “I am in NO way a scientist, but can't someone here work out a formula for this? Mix in entertainment factor over reality over production investment over other 'sciency stuff'. See, I told you I was no scientist, but I love those mad looking scrawls on blackboards...*)

(*another-one-waving-in-back-and-shouting: “Wait, so there's no benevolent aliens who might have parked a wormhole besides Saturn so we crazy, self-destructive primates might find another planet to exploit as capitalism rapes and ruins Mother Earth? That sucks.*)

Nb: For those of you who don’t know, “First Lensman” was the last one to be written.

"Immediately before the Coalescence began there was one,and only one, planetary solar system in the Second Galaxy; and, until the advent of Eddore, the Second Galaxy was entirely devoid of intelligent life"

In "Triplanetary" by E. E. "Doc" Smith

There are only three real approaches to physics in SF:

1. Absolute hard core real physics with speculative aspects;
2. Realistic sounding nonsense;
3. Unrealistic sounding nonsense.

(bought in 1999; cost = 1980 Portuguese escudos, around 9.88 euros in today's European currency)

I am personally a fan of approach 2. This gave us stuff like "Triplanetary", "First Lensman", etc.

In response to those suggesting that dissecting the science in SF novels is redundant and possibly silly, I would argue for a dichotomy. On the one hand, you have SF that are just that, fiction (in case of "Triplanetary", crap fiction). Importantly, they do not claim to be more. They could be set in the distant future, use blatantly non-existent faux-physics terms to drive the plot (e.g. "dilithium" crystals, inertialess drives, colliding galaxies (*), etc.), not address time-travel paradoxes etc. That's fine... they stay within the realms of their claim and no-one expects them to be accurate. On the other hand, there's stuff that claims to be based on what we currently know about space and physics (e.g. Apollo 13, Gravity, Interstellar). I think this category of SF needs to get things right as much as possible. When truth and fiction are mixed, it is important to be able to tell which is which. As a parallel, I do know that "Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter" is not a historically accurate biography.

If a film made the claim that it was a Lincoln biography, I would expect it to be broadly accurate. Otherwise, I would be misled. Yep, it is silly to suggest that Apollo 11 did not land on the moon... having said that, Apollo 13 also reached and successfully landed on the moon (not shown in the film). This was never disclosed because the secret world government does not want you to know that that's when we first made contact with aliens. This tripartite agreement for secrecy between the world government, the Bush family and Elvis representing the aliens, came about because humanity is not yet considered ready for alien contact. Furthermore, the aliens do not want you to know that tin-foil hats are indeed the best defense against their mind-control weapons. One day, the truth will come out thanks to people like me writing reviews and trying not to make derogatory comments on Doc Smith's "science". This story was published in serial form in 1934 ffs, more than 80 years ago! What did we know about science in the 30s when it came to Astrophysics and Cosmology! Nothing!

PS. (*) Galaxies do actually collide, within local clusters and superclusters, just because of gravity. It's only on the very largest scales that they are all moving apart. So, Doc Smith was not that far off...

NB: Read in 1985 for the first time. Re-read in 1995.

SF = Speculative Fiction