<span class="SFPTagline"> From SCIFIPEDIA </span>

E. E. "Doc" Smith, (Edward E. Smith, Ph. D.) (May 2, 1890 – August 31, 1965, in Sheboygan, Wisconsin) was the foremost writer of space opera, a term coined in the 1940s to refer to grandiose galactic adventures. (The term is a humorous play on "horse opera," which came into currency circa 1928 to refer to Westerns.)

Smith began planning an interplanetary adventure novel in about 1915, finished it around 1920, and eventually sold it in 1928 to the first science fiction specialty magazine, Amazing Stories, as The Skylark of Space. He recruited a neighbor, Mrs. Lee Hawkins Garby, to help him with the female characters (although Smith subsequently revised the novel for book publication on his own). Smith seems to have read Homer Eon Flint's "super-science" stories very carefully; particularly in the Skylark stories, where he seems partial to Flint's dialog technique. Unlike Flint, however, Smith had a college education (and held a doctorate in food chemistry). This tended to give an air of reality to Smith's scenes dealing with laboratory work and speculation on the evolution of science that really had no antecedents.

Eventually Smith wrote three more "Skylark" novels, Skylark Three (1930), Skylark of Valeron (1934-35), and Skylark DuQuesne (1965, which is extremely nostalgic and self-indulgent). The "Skylark" novels concern the development of an interstellar spacecraft by a young inventor, who travels to the stars and gets caught up in the political machinations of other space-faring civilizations. It is worth noting that in these novels Smith was one of the first to do work based on the hypothesis that the Milky Way galaxy is a structure separated by millions of light years from other similar nebulae; prior to 1928, science had assumed that space was filled with stars, occasionally clumped into the objects Messier had cataloged.

Never before had there been a more exuberant exposition of the human need to explore the cosmos. A great deal of the energy of the stories derives from the fact that their voyages of discovery are conducted by a small group of people without any government or bureaucracy to support them. Nevertheless, by the mid-1930's it was clear that the days when an inventor could, like Edison, set up an entire industry on his own were coming to an end. A future space industry, inevitably growing out of the field of aviation, would require a large-scale effort along the lines of what would be needed to win World War II -- a crisis that also began to appear over the horizon at that time.

Doc Smith appears to have wrestled with these issues in the middle 1930's and produced the "Lensman" novels as a result. The short novel Triplanetary (serialized in 1934 and extensively re-written to fit into the series in 1948) pointed the way forward by focusing on how an interplanetary society developing in Earth's solar system would have to deal with crime. This in turn led Smith to consider the ultimate source of evil, which for the purposes of the "Lensman" books turns out to be a highly advanced civilization called Boskone, made up of creatures who reproduce asexually and who therefore never evolved the concepts of love or compassion.

Boskone, fortunately for sexually producing species, is opposed by a highly advanced civilization called Arisia. For millions of years the Arisians have been directing the evolution of intelligent species in order to counter the Boskonian threat. The lens -- attached to a bracelet that expands the mental and extrasensory abilities of the wearer -- is a device the Arisians deploy to create a multi-species, inter-galactic league to promote decency and to control crime. For the Boskonians are the ultimate source of crime and wrong-doing, as it turns out, although this is not fully evident until the series ends with Boskone's defeat. The enormous scope of the saga was revolutionary in its day. But on a more practical level, it is Smith's ability to combine elements from mystery and espionage fiction with SF in the "Lensman" novels that is perhaps his most enduring contribution to the field.

Since his death, Doc Smith's works have remained in print and have spawned numerous posthumous collaborations and stories set in the universes he created. Smith never over-estimated his literary ability, always maintaining that he simply tried to tell entertaining stories to the best of his ability. The continued popularity of his work, without which such film epics as Star Wars would probably not exist, is evidence that he succeeded in this goal. That said, his characterization of women was consistently weak, although he was relatively more successful in creating strong female characters in the "Lensman" series than in the "Skylark" books.

After World War II, when the last "Lensman" novel ran serially in Astounding Science Fiction, several readers wrote letters of comment noting that it was impossible to ignore the "sound of hoof beats along the spaceways" in Smith's writing. Nevertheless, most science fiction readers who first encounter Doc Smith in adolescence find it possible to re-read him as an adult because he continues to exude a sense of fun that, unfortunately is lacking in Smith's foremost rival as a writer of space opera, John W. Campbell.

"Lensman" series: Triplanetary (1948); First Lensman (1950); Galactic Patrol (1950); Gray Lensman (1951); Second-Stage Lensman (1953); and Children of the Lens (1954).

Independent books: Spacehounds of IPC (1947); The Galaxy Primes (1965); Subspace Explorers (1965); The Best of E. E. "Doc" Smith (1975); and with E. Everett Evans, Masters of Space (1976).

Books about Doc Smith: Ron Ellik and Bill Evans, The Universes of E. E. Smith (1966); the chapter on Smith in Sam Moskowitz, Seekers of Tomorrow (also 1966).