Expanded Universe

LARGER THAN LIFE

A Memoir in Tribute to Dr. Edward E. Smith

August 1940 - aback road near Jackson, Michigan - a 1939 Chevrolet sedan:

"Doc" Smith is at the wheel; I am in the right-hand seat and trying hard to appear cool, calm, fearless - a credit to the Patrol. Doc has the accelerator floor boarded ... but has his head tilted over at ninety degrees so that he can rest his skull against the frame of the open left window - in order to listen by bone conduction for body squeaks.

Were you to attempt this position yourself - car parked and brakes set, by all means; I am not suggesting that you drive - you would find that your view of the road ahead is between negligible and zero.

I must note that Doc was not wearing his Lens.

This leaves (by Occam's Razor) his sense of perception, his almost superhuman reflexes, and his ability to integrate instantly all available data and act there from decisively and correctly.

Sounds a lot like the Gray Lensman, does it not?

It should, as no one more nearly resembled (in character and in ability - not necessarily in appearance) the Gray Lensman than did the good gray doctor who created him.

Doc could do almost anything and do it quickly and well. In this case he was selecting and road - testing for me a secondhand car. After rejecting numberless other cars, he approved this one; I bought it. Note the date:

August 1940. We entered World War Two the following year and quit making automobiles. I drove that car for twelve years. When I finally did replace it, the mechanic who took care of it asked to be permitted to buy it rather than have it be turned in on a trade... because, after more than thirteen years and hundreds of thousands of miles, it was still a good car. Doc Smith had not missed anything.

Its name? Skylark Five, of course.

So far as I know, Doc Smith could not play a dulcimer (but it would not surprise me to learn that he had been expert at it). Here are some of the skills I know he possessed:

Chemist & chemical engineer - and anyone who thinks these two professions are one and the same is neither a chemist nor an engineer. (My wife is a chemist and is also an aeronautical engineer - but she is not a chemical engineer. All clear? No? See me after class.)

Metallurgist - an arcane art at the Trojan Point of Black Magic and science.

Photographer - all metallurgists are expert photographers; the converse is not necessarily true.

Lumberjack

Cereal chemist

Cook

Explosives chemist - research, test, & development

- product control

Blacksmith

Machinist (tool & die maker grade)

Carpenter

Hardrock miner - see chapter 14 of FIRST LENSMAN, titled "Mining and Disaster." That chapter was written by a man who had been there. And it is a refutation of the silly notion that science fiction does not require knowledge of science. Did I hear someone say that there is no science in that chapter? Just a trick vocabulary - trade argot - plus description of some commonplace mechanical work - So? The science (several sciences!) lies just below the surface of the paper.. . and permeates every word. In some fields I could be fooled, but not in this one. I've been in mining, off and on, for more than forty years.

Or see SPACEHOUNDS OF IPC, chapters 3 & 4, pp. 40 - 80... and especially p.52 of the Fantasy Press hardcover edition. Page 52 is almost purely autobiographical in that it tells why the male lead, "Steve" Stevens, knows how to fabricate from the wreckage at hand everything necessary to rescue Nadia and himself. I once discussed with Doc these two chapters, in detail; he convinced me that his hero character could do these things by convincing me that he, Edward E. Smith, could do all of them... and, being myself an experienced mechanical engineer, it was not possible for him to give me a "snow job." (I think he lacked the circuitry to give a "snow job" in any case; incorruptible honesty was Dr. Smith's prime attribute - with courage to match it.)

What else could he do? He could call square dances. Surely, almost anyone can square - dance ... but to become a caller takes longer and is much more difficult. When and how he found time for this I do not know - but, since he did everything about three times as fast as ordinary people, there is probably no mystery.

Both Doc and his beautiful Jeannie were endlessly hospitable. I stayed with them once when they had nine houseguests. They seemed to enjoy it.

But, above all, Doc Smith was the perfect, gallant knight, sans peur et sans reproche.

And all of the above are reflected in his stories.

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.