Who Goes There?

There were once people who loved reading E. E. Smith, but they’re all dead now. Even at the time of his own death in 1965, Edward E. Smith was something of a dinosaur, albeit one treated with reverence within SF fandom, even if he remained totally unknown outside of it. Smith, as you might know, was perhaps the chief innovator of space opera; when his debut novel, The Skylark of Space, was serialized in 1928, there was nothing else quite like it on the market. The closest for comparison would have been Edmond Hamilton’s Interstellar Patrol series, but there was nothing on the scale of what Smith was doing. Unfortunately, to cop a line from Alexei and Cory Panshin’s review of The Best of Stanley G. Weinbaum, time has long since swallowed up what were once Smith’s virtues—an assessment that I think befits Smith a lot more than Weinbaum, for the record. You can still read and enjoy Weinbaum just fine, assuming you’re not of the sort that requires your SF to be dead serious; but with Smith, even if one were to keep an open mind, it can be a real challenge. Smith just wasn’t a good writer, sad to say, really in any sense of the word, except he did have a sixth sense for scale and action, mostly in the depths of space. Even Hamilton, Smith’s closest contemporary, holds up better to modern scrutiny, especially since he did end up evolving with the times, whereas Smith did not. Thus we have someone whose work strikes even the most retro-friendly of modern SF readers as a museum piece.

Why did I pick Triplanetary as my first Smith to cover here, then? The novelty of it was tempting. You see, along with the Skylark series there was the even grander Lensman series, which occupied Smith for much of the ’30s and ’40s. Smith didn’t see any of his novels get published in book form, however, until after the end of World War II, by which point some of these novels had not seen the light of day since they ran as serials more than a decade earlier. When Smith took hold of Triplanetary for book publication he revised and expanded it so as to make it almost unrecognizable from its serial version, to the point that whereas the serial version of Triplanetary is a standalone novel, the book version was retrofitted to be a prequel entry in the Lensman series. The book version is also about 1.5x the length of the serial version. The two are so different that they have separate ISFDB pages. Like I said, it’s the novelty of the thing.

Placing Coordinates

Triplanetary was serialized in Amazing Stories, January to April 1934. Smith had apparently hoped to sell it to Astounding, but that magazine went through a change in both editor and publisher, not to mention it’d gone on hiatus for about six months. The serial version of Triplanetary would remain stranded there for more than seventy years, until it was transcribed for Project Gutenberg in 2007. A few small publishers have since made this version of the novel available in book form, making sure to differentiate it from its book counterpart.

Enhancing Image

The space liner Hyperion is going on its merry way—or maybe not so merry, as the crew is aware that two ships from the Triplanetary League have gone missing in this part of space recently. Not destroyed, but simply vanished without a trace. (The Triplanetary League is a coalition of Earth, Mars, and Venus, from that distant time when Venus was thought to be hostile to human life, sure, but theoretically livable.) Conway Costigan is First Officer of the Hyperion, but also a member of the Triplanetary Secret Service, so he’s like if Spock and Jason Bourne were the same guy. Unfortunately, a pirate must’ve snuck aboard ship and taken on a disguise, as there’s an outbreak of Vee-Two gas, which incapacitates the crew. Costigan only has enough time to save himself and a single passenger, Clio Marsden, getting them into a lifeboat and reviving her. Costigan explains to Clio that Vee-Two is strictly forbidden, something she apparently already knows. (There’s quite a bit of dialogue wherein characters explain things to each other that they already know.) “The penalty for using it or having it is death on sight. Gangsters and pirates use it, since they have nothing to lose, being on the death list already,” says Costigan. Looking into Smith’s works, the death penalty was something he was just really keen on, to the point where he seemed to support its use even for drug dealers—a view that I wanna say has not aged well, but it looks like modern American conservatives are about as enthusiastic about capital punishment. History doesn’t repeat, but it does rhyme. Costigan heads back into the bowels of the Hyperion to track down the pirate, with a gas mask, space armor, and a nifty weapon on a tripod that’s so powerful that it not only jibs the pirate but turns him into a cloud of mist. This scene, the strongest in the installment, understandably provides the image for Leo Morey’s cover for the issue.

You can accuse Triplanetary of a lot of things, but it is certainly not slow in its pacing, unless you’re talking about the book version. I’ve gathered that the biggest change Smith made was that he wrote six chapters of backstory to pad out the beginning of the book version, working mainly to wedge Triplanetary into the Lensman continuity. I don’t know how anyone is supposed to survive a single chapter of lore written by E. E. Smith, let alone six. The serial version, for all the bad writing on display, wastes the reader’s time as little as possible. In the course of three chapters we’re introduced to the hero, the (probable) love interest, the villain, and what’s at stake. Speaking of which, when it looks like the Hyperion’s troubles are over, the crew is taken hostage by a ship that appears to be invisible, with Costigan, Clio, and Captain Bradley meeting face to face with the owner of an artificial “planetoid” (listen, it’s not the Death Star, got it?), named Roger. Yes, Roger. That’s his name! We know this is about as old-school a space opera as you can get because tractor beams are mentioned. Roger is a mad scientist, although he considers himself not to be mad but perfectly calm and collected; indeed he doesn’t do a Bond villain laugh or anything like that, but rather is calculated in his malice. Even his threat to rape Clio (I suspect it’s implied rather than explicit because of censorship) is stated in so many words, rather than bluntly put. Much of Roger’s workforce is also robotic, rather than flesh-and-blood people, despite what the pirate in the first chapter would make us believe. Thankfully Costigan, being a badass secret agent, has a plan for getting at least himself and the others out of prison. They escape, thanks to some tech that somehow Roger’s goons were unable to detect, but their victory is short-lived as there turns out to be yet another villain, apparently alien, even bigger of a threat than the mad scientist.

Oh, it’s bad.

Putting his ridiculously bland name aside, Roger’s actually not a bad villain. Smith doesn’t bother much with describing his characters physically, but he does give Roger special treatment:

Not only was [Roger] dressed entirely in gray, but his heavy hair was gray, his eyes were gray, and even his tanned skin seemed to give the impression of grayness in disguise. His overwhelming personality radiated an aura of grayness—not the gentle gray of the dove, but the resistless, driving gray of the super-dreadnaught; the hard, inflexible, brittle gray of the fracture of high-carbon steel.

Mind you that this all happens, with Costigan and company getting attacked by pirates and then introduced to Roger, in the first chapter. If the book version of Triplanetary suffers from being too slow, as in frontloaded with exposition, then the serial version might have the opposite problem. And yet, despite having breakneck pacing, Smith still finds room to insert dialogue that is, let’s say redundant. For example Roger spends rather too much time saying, indirectly, that he plans to make a sex toy out of Clio, if only because she’s apparently too slow on the uptake to get his point. A common criticism I’ve seen when reading about Smith is that his characters don’t talk like real people, or even people you’d read about in SF published a decade later, but almost like old-school comic book characters. It’s writing in the old pulp tradition, although even within that context I’d still say Smith is more stilted than, say, Edgar Rice Burroughs, who for all his faults went out of his way to not irritate the reader unless one thought about his racism or dodgy science too deeply. Three chapters in and we have one character who feels like he has real presence, except Roger turns out to not even be the greater-scope villain, if the third chapter’s anything to go by.

There Be Spoilers Here

My eyes started glazing over towards the end, although I’m not sure how much of that was the quality of the novel and how much was the awful mood I’ve been in lately. I’ll let you know.

A Step Farther Out

On the one hand I believe that once I start writing about a serial then I really ought to finish it, as I probably will in this case. I’ll be honest with you, though, it’s been rough going already and we’re only a quarter into it. Maybe I just like Smith as a writer; something about him, aside from his obvious faults, bugs me. I tend to be generous with old-timey SF, even of the pre-Campbell sort, but this might be the threshold for me. But, it’s also possible that this is as bad as it gets.

See you next time.