The Wright Stuff
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Six Pillars of Space Opera Sept 11th, 2013 by Bill Wright. Rob Gerrand and Mervyn R Binns Synopsis This article provides information from different perspectives about six great pioneers of Space Opera, Edward Elmer ‘Doc’ Smith (1890 - 1965) Alfred Elton van Vogt (1912-2000) Isaac Asimov (1920 - 1992) Jack (John Holbrook) Vance (1916 - 2013) Paul Myron Anthony Linebarger (1913 – 1966) writing as Cordwainer Smith and Arthur Bertram Chandler (1912 – 1984), Most of the following was written by the 2013 DUFF winner, Australian fan Bill Wright. Rob Gerrand contributed his obituary to Jack Vance, who died aged 96 on May 26th, 2013. The science wasn’t always sound, but those six pioneers of SF wrote rattling good yarns, creating universes and peopling them with heroes and villains in an astonishing variety of ways. The information on Bert Chandler was provided by his friend Mervyn R Binns, winner of the Forrest J Ackerman Big Heart Award at Aussiecon 4, 68th Worldcon in Melboure (Australia) in 2010. One of many images of universal destruction that abound in early Space Opera After the trauma of the 1930s Great Depression and World War II, westerns, mystery writing and detective stories no longer satisfied a voracious public demand for escapist literature. Space Opera offered liberation from Earthly concerns – at least in one’s mind – and was embraced enthusiastically by millions. The atomic bomb had demonstrated the power of science, albeit most people were hazy about the scientific method if they had heard of it at all. That changed with education, which improved greatly from and including the 1960s. People began to understand what Science was about and that its benefits depend on how it is used. There were sharp increases in reader education and standards of literary criticism of science fiction, as universities became interested in the genre as both a product and part of the social consciousness of the contemporary world. At the end of the twentieth century, belief in science as a panacea for the World’s ills had waned. Fantasy and Horror took over from Science Fiction as the dominant sub-genres in speculative fiction. But that’s another story, except for a common thread that runs through all of literature - reluctance on the part of some writers to sufficiently acknowledge their sources. It means that their not-so-well-read fans give offending authors more credit than they deserve. If you need an example, ask yourself ... Was Jurgen a model for Cugel? James Branch Cabbel (1879 – 1958) wrote his master work Jurgen, A Comedy of Justice in 1919. The story can be read on line at: http://docsouth.unc.edu/southlit/cabell1/jurgen.html). It is considered by some reviewers to be the unsung inspiration of such authors as Jack Vance in his Dying Earth epic and Robert A Heinlein in his novel Stranger in a Strange Land – the latter being hailed today as an accurate guide to the morés of the 1960s; and so it is, but only for two thirds of the story after which its quality dwindles. Vance, too, was not a writer who went out of his way to reveal his sources, It is obvious to me that Vance’s character Cugel the Clever is modelled in part on Cabell’s Jurgen. Edward Elmer ‘Doc’ Smith (1890 - 1965) Science fiction fans like two kinds of epic fiction: Space Opera begun in 1929 by Doc Smith, and Epic Fantasy Skylark Smith E. E. ‘Doc’ Smith ushered in the era of Space Opera when his novel The Skylark of Space was serialised in Amazing Stories commencing with the August 1928 issue. By taking adventure stories off-planet he captured the imagination of a generation, then the next, and the one after that. At left is the cover of the novel’s first book publication by the Buffalo Book Co. in 1946 The novel was re-edited in the 1958 with Lee Hawkins Garby. It retains its entertainment value to this day, as do the sequel novels Skylark Three (1948) and Skylark of Valeron (1949). Scientist Richard "Dick" Seaton teams up with inventor and millionaire Martin Crane to build a spaceship using a new propulsion formula. Fellow scientist Marc DuQuesne is in league with the evil World Steel Company and works to undermine them. He kidnaps Seaton and Crane’s girl friends and carries them off into interplanetary space. The characters unite to face spectacular dangers including black holes, hostile planets with weird inhabitants, friendly planets with not-so-weird inhabitants, and a planet-wide war. This is raw, primal stuff. Suspend disbelief, win with the hero, despise the villain and enjoy the ride. A fourth novel published two decades later, Skylark DuQuesne (1966), sought to reconcile bitter antagonists in the earlier books. It came across as stodgier than the others and failed to capture the popular imagination. Smith’s Galactic Roamers Doc Smith’s Ph D was in food chemistry, not in any of the flashier technologies featured in his space opera. Like a great many authors before and after him, he needed collaborators to enrich his storytelling. His group, which included published writers, called itself the Galactic Roamers and were largely responsible for the impetus that kept Smith’s epic Lensmen novels at or near the top of best seller lists for decades. The Universe of the Lens The Roamers were the sounding board for Doc Smith during the years he was painstakingly mapping the Lens Universe. He listened to, and often took, their advice; but still felt free to disregard ideas that did not fit within his vision.. The Universe of the Lens The Lensmen stories were long in gestation. Smith wrote the rough draft of Galactic Patrol and the concluding chapter of the last book in the series, Children of the Lens, as far back as the mid-1930s. Galactic Patrol was serialized in Astounding from September 1937 to February 1938. Obviously intended to be a stand-alone novel, it was not even in the same universe as the Lensmen series. A revised text became the third Lensmen novel. Publication years of all six novels in Smith’s Universe of the Lens are… Triplantary (1948) Gray Lensman (1951) First Lensman (1950) Second Stage Lensmen (1953) Galactic Patrol (1950) Children of the Lens (1954) The Vortex Blaster (Gnome Press 1960) was a fix-up novel from a number of versions appearing in SF magazines in 1941 and 1942. Set partly in the Lensmen universe and parallel to the main story line, it introduces another dimension to the mental horizons of the Universe of the Lens. Smith invented an interesting classification method in Gray Lensman and Children of the Lens to differentiate the multiplicity of life forms native to various worlds in the Lensmen universe. True Homo Sapiens is classed AAAAAA, whereas evil Ploorans (in what British writer and publisher David Langford calls “their horrid cryogenic metamorphosis”) register straight Zs to ten places. Any science fiction fan alive today who has not explored Doc Smith’s Universe of the Lens at a tender age is culturally deprived. Get your copy of Triplanetary now from the Internet or your friendly neighbourhood second hand book shop and begin your journey… “Two thousand million or so years ago, when two galaxies were colliding,…” You will never be the same. Subspace The novel Subspace Explorers (1965) is an expansion of the first 60 pages which were published as a novella in the July 1960 issue of Astounding. Subspace Encounter (1983) is a sequel to Smith’s Subspace Explorers. Non-series works Smith wrote three novels in separate universes that were different from those created for his series novels... Spacehounds of IPC (Amazing Jul–Sep 1931, Fantasy Press 1947, Ace 1966); The Galaxy Primes (Amazing Stories Mar–May 1959, Ace 1965); and Masters of Space (written in collaboration with E Everett Evans and first published in 1976). Collections The Best of E.E. "Doc" Smith (1975) Have Trenchcoat — Will Travel, and Other Stories (2001). Doc Smith clones David Kyle, co-founder of Gnome Press with Martin Greenberg in 1948, wrote a series of novels based on three of the four Second Stage Lensmen, viz. The Dragon Lensman (1980) Lensman from Rigel (1982) Z-Lensman (1983). Between 1976 and 1985, Stephen Goldin spun out a series of ten books based on Doc Smith’s novella Imperial Stars. (The novella itself is included in the collection The Best of E. E. Smith published in 1975). Between 1978 and 1980, Gordon Eckland wrote a series of four books based on Doc Smith’s novella Lord Tedric. (Smith’s novella is included in the collection The Best of E. E. Smith published in 1975). Collaborations between living writers are often successful, but the same can’t always be said for living authors who take over a deceased author’s characters. Even when it works, there are differences that jar None of the clones mentioned above quite measure up to exemplary standards of primitive literature set by Edward Elmer Smith Ph D. Indeed, whereas the clones are out of print, his Lensmen stories are as widely read today as when they were written. Alfred Elton Van Vogt (1912-2000) Van Vogt’s first published SF story was Black Destroyer (Astounding Science Fiction, July 1939), The story begins with the famous line, “On and on Coeurl prowled!” and depicts a fierce, carnivorous alien stalking the crew of an exploration spaceship. To drive the plot, Van Vogt introduces the idea of an all-encompassing system of knowledge that he calls Nexialism to analyse the alien’s behaviour. In his early years A E Van Vogt wrote mainly short stories.