Doc Smith and the Singularity

You've probably heard that everything old becomes new again. I've been looking at the Skylark books by Edward Elmer Smith. If you are unfamiliar with these, I'll refer you to Wikipedia:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Skylark...

John W. Campbell wrote a similar series of stories, involving characters named Arcott, Wade, and Morley.

Conventional wisdom would say that this style of super-science space opera had fallen out of favor by the 1940's and would never be heard from again. I'm beginning to think that isn't quite true.

If you've never read either Smith or Campbell's books I can describe their plots as follows:

A small group of scientists makes a discovery that makes interstellar space flight a possibility, and incidentally gives them a source of wealth that they can use to make a starship. Neither series concerns itself much with our solar system, or even any of the nearby stars. The story finds them going to stars so distant that anything the author might make up about them will seem plausible.

In the case of the Skylark books, the hero's girlfriend is abducted by the villain. He intends to take her no farther than Mars, but she puts up resistance which ends up throwing the ship off course and eventually they are so far out in space that only the hero could hope to rescue her.

Eventually they come across an alien civilization, more advanced than Earth in some ways and less in others. One of the gadgets the aliens have is a device that can transfer knowledge directly from brain to brain, so the hero and the aliens quickly learn each other's languages and everything else. Of course these aliens have their own enemies, and the hero must help them too. He ends up building a new spacecraft combining Earth technology and alien technology, and the aliens do too.

In the books that follow, the same things happen again. The aliens have new enemies, and the hero has made a new discovery that he doesn't know how to make practical use of, so off everyone goes to the alien's planet. Then even more powerful enemies arrive on the scene, with more advanced technology, and the only way to fight them will be to find a planet with an old enough intelligent race that they have already solved the technical problems that the hero needs to solve to fight the new enemies.

I don't remember the Arcott, Wade and Morley stories that well, but I remember that they follow a similar pattern. The heroes discover alien races and learn all their secrets. At the end of the story they have learned things these other races took thousands or millions of years to learn. That's basically the point of these stories. The heroes start off their adventures in the near future and by the end of them they have god like powers.

These godlike powers don't get evenly distributed back on Earth. The people of Earth have to settle for cheap electricity and some alien jewelry. Only the heroes get to leapfrog over millions of years of scientific progress.

In my novel Shree Krishna and the Singularity I named one of the protagonists Doctor Charles Seaton, inspired by the name Dick Seaton from the Skylark books. I didn't give a great deal of thought to this, but E.E. Smith's hero and mine have something in common, in that they will make a discovery that will greatly accelerate human progress. The biggest difference is that in my novel the accelerated progress will affect everyone on Earth, many of whom will not be well equipped to deal with it.

Imagine Dick Seaton returning to Earth with his mechanical educators and other scientific miracles and making Earth absorb a thousand years of progress overnight. That might be a good story.

Unfortunately, in the world we live in half the people have rejected current scientific progress, or at least such progress as affects their view of the world and how God wants it to be. The alien races Smith writes about are more receptive to new ideas than we are.

One example of super science that Smith didn't see coming is an artificial brain more powerful than any living brain could be. Some of his aliens had powerful brains, but they got that way through evolution. (Girls go for guys with the big brains, and vice versa). It never occurred to Smith that his heroes could have super science without leaving home.