The Story So Far

The rivalry between Dick Seaton and Marc DuQuesne has escalated to the point where the latter plots to kidnap Dorothy, Seaton’s fiancée, along with Margaret Spencer, the daughter of a scientist whose research the Steel Trust had stolen. The plan goes sideways, though, as the ship DuQuesne’s team had built takes off by accident and the three, along with Perkins, a crooked detective DuQuesne had hired, are thrust into the deep dark reaches of outer space. This should’ve killed them all, but instead it just renders them unconscious, with DuQuesne even managing to halt the ship before passing out, despite several Gs of thrust. He’s just that tough. What started as a kidnapping has turned into a rescue operation, as Seaton and his good buddy Martin Crane take the Skylark out in search of the other ship. DuQuesne kills Perkins, which is actually a good thing for everyone since the detective had gone practically insane by this point. In fact, once we reach outer space, DuQuesne, who is ostensibly the villain of the novel, more or less stops doing villainous things. In fairness, he’s a practical-minded man and he knows he’s both outnumbered and outgunned in this situation. Once everybody’s come together on the Skylark he takes the important position of the crew member nobody likes or trusts. It would be easy enough to toss the man out the door, but Seaton reasons that while he is certainly treacherous, DuQuesne is too brilliant and useful to kill right now.

The crew have to find their way back to Earth, but they also need materials for the Skylark, namely copper and the fictional metal called X. After a couple false starts on different planets, including run-ins with some beasties and a highly intelligent and telepathic alien lifeform, the ship lands on the planet Osnome, where they’re treated as guests by Nalboon, leader of Mardonale. The Osmonians are a humanoid race split into two factions, those being the Mardonalians and the Kondalians. These are basically humans with a different coat of paint, and with some customs that aren’t even that unusual by human standards. The strangest thing is that while the Mardonalians have some pretty advanced technology, having to do with electricity, they’re unaccustomed to simple things like matches and firewood. Indeed, wood-based technology seems to be foreign to them. This is the most interesting thing we learn about them without delving into negative criticisms toward the novel. Nalboon welcomes Seaton and company, but Our Hero™ gets the sneaking suspicion that something is not right with these Mardonalians—a suspicion that is soon proved correct.

Enhancing Image

Unfortunately The Skylark of Space stumbles in the last third, although the fact that it took this long for me to start getting tired of it is something maybe worth praising. I could not get into Triplanetary for the life of me, but I have to admit that this novel does a much better job of pulling in the reader, along with the cast of characters being more likable—up to a point. The introduction of the Osmonians ends up being the point where the novel sort of loses me. For one, this was in the days before Stanley G. Weinbaum, where it became reasonable to expect really alien aliens in one’s magazine SF. The Osmonians, regardless of faction, can hardly be considered alien at all. There are also some customs of these people that both the humans and authors let slide by uncritically, namely their fondness for slavery and war. The Kondalians, despite ostensibly being “the good guys” in that they side with the humans, see no issue with slavery or genocide. They’re also polygamous. Are they supposed to be Space Mormons? Having multiple partners is fine (as it should be), but also warmongering and racism are cool. Very strange. The humans don’t question any of this except, funnily enough, the polygamy. I have to say this is very telling of the authors’ politics, although it also pains me to say that such views were not uncommon, even among left-leaning Americans, in the early 20th century. Being that this novel was the first space opera on such a scale, it makes sense that it also set the standard for shitty politics often found in the subgenre.

The good news, I guess, is that there’s a double wedding. After rescuing Dorothy, Margaret, and DuQuesne, Crane immediately takes a liking to Margaret—and why not, she’s the only woman aboard who’s available. Having also rescued themselves from the Mardonalians’ clutches, and now safely with the Kondalians, the humans think now is the time to get married. With Seaton and Dorothy this makes sense enough, since they were already engaged and there’s no guarantee they’ll survive their voyage home; but with Crane and Margaret it’s much harder to take. Margaret was introduced earlier in the novel as a pretty strong-minded young woman, out to get revenge against the Steel Trust for what they did to her father; but as the novel has progressed, she has inexplicably softened. What these two see in each other, I’m not sure; they have the chemistry of two dead fish being smacked against each other. I had read that Garby was responsible for the romance subplots and the dialogue therein, but while I have to think Smith would’ve done a worse job with the same material, I hesitate to call the romance good. (Dorothy, like Margaret, has similarly taken a backseat in the narrative.) There’s also the problem of the fact that I swear these two had just fucking met. The passage of time in this novel is rather vague, but between the beginning of the second installment and the double wedding it seems like only maybe a week has passed. There’s a shotgun wedding, and then there’s this. Well, good for them.

This is all on the eve of the Kondalians waging total war against the Mardonalians; it’s also right as Seaton and company are working to rebuild the Skylark, which had been badly damaged while in the Mardonalians’ hands. (As a side note, both in-text descriptions and interiors drawn for the serial version make out the Skylark to be a big metal sphere, similarly to the ship constructed in H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon. It’s a little hard to take seriously.) What follows is the epic climactic battle in which the “good guys” try and indeed succeed in annihilating the enemy civilization. I’m not terribly interested in this, which is not necessarily the novel’s fault, as action in prose often makes my eyes glaze over. What’s more the fault of the authors is that the only difference between the alien factions, in the context of the story, is that one supports the “heroes” while the other doesn’t; otherwise they both seem like rather horrid cultures. We are told that one side is good and the other is bad, but this is not convincing at all. The Skylark of Space loses juice in the final stretch because it starts relying on what now reads as been-there-done-that spaceship action, but also the narrative (probably unintentionally) starts to stink of fascism. This same stink will, of course, hover over space opera like an invisible cloud for decades to come. There’s a dissonance between what we’re expected to think of as good and what now reads as draconian reactionary nonsense.

As for DuQuesne, who survives this whole battle and even comes aboard the Skylark for the return trip, it’s awfully convenient that he figures out a way to escape once they reach Earth before Seaton and Crane can figure out what to do with it. There is no logical reason for why DuQuesne should still be alive by the end of the story, but for sake of the readers it’s a good thing he lives to fight another day, as he is easily the novel’s most memorable character. Hell, if E. E. Smith came up with only one really good character in his entire writing career (which might be true, for all I know), then DuQuesne is that figure. He is simply too good to not return for a sequel—which is exactly what we got, just two years later, although I’m not sure if Smith had already intended to write a sequel.

A Step Farther Out

Is The Skylark of Space good? Not really, certainly not by the standards of, say, even twenty years after its publication. Is it stupid? Oh yes. Is the science laughably outdated? You bet. Are its politics questionable at best? Absolutely, and I say this while having a high tolerance for reactionary politics in old-timey SF. Is it entertaining? For the most part, surprisingly yes. Smith was not a very good writer, plainly put. Even comparing him to Edgar Rice Burroughs, who would’ve been his closest contemporary, he doesn’t have the gift for fluidity of storytelling and action that Burroughs does, nor does he ignite one’s imagination in [the current year] like Burroughs still sometimes does. He also suffers in comparison to the best of the early magazine SF writers like Edmond Hamilton, Jack Williamson, and David H. Keller. But with some effort, one can see beneath all the dirt and rust what would’ve made readers in 1928 lose their shit.

See you next time.