Who Goes There?

Edward Elmer Smith was born in 1890 in Wisconsin, and until he was about 25 he didn’t seem to have even a thought as to becoming a writer. Instead he trained to become a chemical engineer at the University of Idaho, eventually earning his PhD there. During World War I, but before the US became officially involved, Smith did some brainstorming with Carl Garby, a college friend of his, and Lee Hawkins Garby, Carl’s wife, as to the possibility of man-made space flight and life on other planets. Smith and Lee would end up writing much of The Skylark of Space throughout 1915 and 1916, with Smith doing much of the work and Lee writing a good portion of the dialogue, as well as being responsible for the female characters not being completely made out of cardboard. Eventually Smith finished the novel by himself in 1920, but he was unable to find a publisher for it. There was a near miss with Argosy in 1922, who almost accepted it; but while Argosy did sometimes print science fiction, Smith’s novel was considered a bit too heavy on the scientific end of things. It wasn’t until Amazing Stories launched in 1926 that Smith found his outlet.

Despite its publication being delayed by nearly a decade, The Skylark of Space was a smash hit with readers when it finally appeared. Smith, who previously didn’t have much ambition in the way of making it as a writer, became a sensation with a niche but passionate readership practically overnight. He didn’t waste time in writing a sequel, although he never worked with Lee again. Carl Garby died unexpectedly the same year Smith’s novel was serialized, and this was apparently a big reason for Lee staying out of the fledgling magazine SF scene for good. Speaking of delays, The Skylark of Space didn’t see book publication until 1946, and its history in book form is more than a little convoluted. While initially credited to both Smith and Lee, Smith took it upon himself to scrub out Lee’s contributions, so that later editions were credited to Smith alone.

Placing Coordinates

First published in Amazing Stories, where it was serialized in the August, September, and October 1928 issues. It first appeared in hardcover in 1946, with some revisions, and then was revised again in later editions. Since the magazine version has been in the public domain for a minute, you can read it on Project Gutenberg without issue.

Enhancing Image

Like a lot of great discoveries, the one at the beginning of this novel is made by accident. Dick Seaton is a brilliant but single-minded chemist who’s been working with “X,” an unknown metal which has not yet been added to the periodic table. Even more rare than radium, and perhaps even more dangerous, Seaton had come upon a wealthy deposit of X by sheer luck, and has wasted no time in toying with it. One day he mixes the strange metal with copper and effectively discovers a method of anti-gravity—if also damn near killing himself in the process. People who know their really old-timey SF may recall a similar thing happening early in H. G. Wells’s The First Men in the Moon, which Smith and Garby may well have been thinking of. In the early 20th century there seemed to be a recurring sentiment among the scientifically literate that some hypothetical anti-gravity device would take men to the stars, rather than developments in rocketry. Anyway, the problem Seaton soon runs into is that if you aren’t quite sure how to achieve a certain result in the first place then that would make it all the harder to replicate. Seaton knows it’s a combo of copper, X, and an electrical current, but when trying to repeat the anti-gravity effect to his colleagues he fails. His job at the Bureau of Chemistry is coming to a close, him being seen as an eccentric, but luckily he has connections…

Like every creative type I’m sure, Seaton is able to fall back on a rich friend of his, by the name of Martin Reynolds Crane. On his own Seaton isn’t able to accomplish very much, but his partnership with Crane quickly leads to the two men extrapolating on the solution Seaton had originally made. Seaton is the inventor, the pure creative, while Crane (aside from being quite wealthy) is more accustomed to worldly matters. It’s strange, for one, that Seaton has a fiancée, Dorothy Vaneman, since he’s borderline neglectful of her and doesn’t seem to be all that knowledgable of romance. (It’s worth mentioning that Smith, himself freshly married when writing the novel, admitted to lacking in confidence with regards to writing women and the relations men and women naturally have. Heterosexual men are so funny.) Still, the two buddies found the Seaton-Crane Company, with the hopes of developing a “space-boat” with X, as well as a power plant. As you can tell from this novel’s title and its reputation, we’ll be heading out into the reaches of space—eventually. But not in this installment. While this is one of the space stories that codified space opera, if not being the one to invent that subgenre outright, nobody in the novel has yet to call a spaceship a spaceship. It’s either a “space-boat” or a “space-car.” I think there’s a slightly catchier word that’ll do the trick, fellas. The Skylark of Space sets a few standards for classic spacefaring SF, one of them being the duo of an ambitious scientist and a benevolent capitalist. Unfortunately for Seaton and Crane, a nefarious competitor has been keeping eyes on their business.

A good story requires a good villain (usually), and we do get one in the form of Marc DuQuesne. Like Seaton, DuQuesne is a brilliant chemist who starts out at the Bureau, but unlike Seaton he has nothing in the way of a conscience. Indeed, much like the CIA, DuQuesne is not above murdering a few people in cold blood to get what he wants—a point that’s made in the very chapter where he’s introduced. And like Seaton, DuQuesne strays from the Bureau to have a covert partnership with Brookings (I don’t think we get his first name), head of the Steel Trust or “the Corporation.” Seaton has the solution but not the equipment for a spaceship at the moment, while DuQuesne has the equipment but the not the solution. This is a pretty robust hero-villain dynamic, possibly the first of its kind to arise out of magazine SF. Certainly there were villains in magazine SF, on top of the usual pulp heroes, but the rivalry between Seaton and DuQuesne holds all the action together rather than feeling like an accessory to it. It helps that these two fellows didn’t like each other even before the discovery with X, so that their rivalry has a personal element. Despite the two not really interacting at all during this first installment, we still get a good idea of the stakes and what each man sets to gain (and lose) from this solution. A chemist the Corporation had hired gets pretty unlucky trying to synthesize the solution and blows not only himself up but some 200 innocent people—just a whole frontier town off the map. Not that DuQuesne is bothered by this; it’s a small setback, and there will be more dead bodies to come.

The astute reader might’ve gathered that the first stretch of Smith’s novel reads less like spacefaring SF and more like an espionage thriller, albeit with an SFnal twist. X is a totally made-up element, and by the end of this installment we have a working spaceship that smacks more of steampunk than modern rocketry, but otherwise the narrative is grounded enough. Mind you that the spy genre was also in its infancy at the time, since novels like The Thirty-Nine Steps and The Man Who Was Thursday would’ve been fairly recent literature at this point. Smith doesn’t go into the pure action of the former or the strange metaphysics of the latter, but instead takes a pragmatic cloak-and-dagger approach. Reading about the accident with DuQuesne’s chemist, it becomes apparent to Seaton and Crane that somebody close to them was eyeing Seaton’s research, and had even gotten their hands on some X. They figure DuQuesne is the only person who has both the means and the motive for stealing Seaton’s reserch, but they have no hard evidence to use against him. For his part, DuQuesne isn’t too fond of getting his own hands dirty, but will resort to “direct action” if he feels the need. There’s a memorable and rather violent scene in which Shiro, Crane’s loyal servant, gets nearly killed alongside a couple bodyguards when DuQuesne raids the estate’s airfield (yes, they have an airfield, complete with a biplane) while in disguise. I should also mention that Shiro, the token non-white person in this novel thus far, comes off surprisingly well, despite being subjected to a particular racial slur.

There Be Spoilers Here

As I already said, we have a working spaceship by the end of the first installment, although it took a lot of resources and a failed attempt at sabotage. The lengthy descriptions we get of the ship’s mechanics are night incomprehensible to the modern reader, so I’ll stop there and say it was a smart choice to end the installment on this note. We have a good idea of what’s coming next, but Smith and Garby have been edging the reader and building intrigue at a good pace—honestly much better than I was expecting, considering this was Smith’s debut novel.

A Step Farther Out

Is this novel good on a prose level? Does the Pope shit in the woods? That’s not why we’re here. Admittedly, even by the time it saw book publication in 1946, Smith and Garby’s style must’ve struck readers as creaky. On the one hand this can be boiled down to a combo of poor timing and the novel becoming a victim of its own success, but at the same time it still reads unconventionally. This is not a totally predictable wish-fulfillment fantasy, but instead a melding of genres that was so ambitious in the early 1920s that there literally wasn’t a market for it at first. I’m a third of the way in and I’m not that sure as to the novel’s trajectory from this point, which has to be worth something. It’s also a lot more gripping than Triplanetary, the last Smith novel I tried to read.

See you next time.