Its name? Skylark Five, of course.
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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 & diemaker 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
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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 clichés . . . and his male lead