GRAY LENSMAN by E.E. Doc Smith.

We continue down memory lane to the far future of galactic and intergalactic war, if there are any of you old enough to remember 1939 (the same year Superman came out), This essay will continue the format of my previous essay, where I speak a little bit about the book in question, and then rant about some unrelated topic, such as bimetallism or the Caledonian war.

Most second books, especially those in a multivolume series, suffer from a certain set of understandable defects: the characters no longer enjoy the freshness of having been recently introduced, the plot must grow out of the previous book but at the same time go in a new direction, and the antagonist is either a new villain, in which case the reader has no emotional investment in booing him, or is an old villain, in which case the reader has already seen him defeated once, which makes him less able to inspire fear.

Usually the second book is weaker than the first; in this case, it is stronger. Indeed, I will be bold enough to say that if it were not for GRAY LENSMAN and its sequels the first book, GALACTIC PATROL, would have been largely forgotten. That is, more largely forgotten.

E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith handles all these problems with an adroitness so skillful and yet so understated that it might not be noticed at first, and so clever that it is frankly astonishing that no other writer has copied these solutions.

 

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Originally published at John C. Wright's Journal. Please leave any comments there.