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
clichés. Doc’s repertory of clichés 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 lief 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.
Page 204
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