Years ago I reread and reviewed The Skylark of Space by E. E. Smith (1890-1965), a seminal work of science fiction for one salient fact—it was the first ever depiction of a starship. It was written well over a hundred years ago and first published in 1928, serialised by editor Hugo Gernsbach in Amazing Stories, and it must have been an immediate hit because the second novel appeared, also in Amazing, from August, 1930.
I have the Panther/Granada paperback editions from the early-mid 1970s—the very same copies I bought when I was a preteen. The Chris Foss covers were major selling points, paintings that just jumped off the shelf at the browser and said ‘buy me!’ That was the glory days of Foss’s productivity: he could churn out three covers a week, so much in demand was his work—it characterised his generation, in a sense. His paintings certainly spoke to the young me with a sense of not just futurism but of the most up to date sort, a compelling vision that lent credence to the work between the covers (not that his paintings ever really depicted what was going on in the book).
The cover of Skylark Three shows a great space vessel in the act of blowing up as three very different craft race by, implicitly an act of battle. Fair enough, there are space battles in the book, and with the visual hook dispensed with, as well as the nostalgia, what’s under the covers?
A most interesting sojourn, to say the least, made curious and oh, so much a period piece, for the simple fact this novel was written 95 years ago. It reflects then-current American society—strong moral values, a willingness to get tough when the need arises (as it frequently does), women who fetch food and black people don’t seem to exist. What else would it depict? It moves on from the stereotypes in the first novel in a way, because the woman accompany their husbands as functional members of the ship’s compliment, taking part in its operation (as well as fetching food). To be fair, Seaton’s wife is show to be a brilliant classical musician, taking he violin with them into the depths of space, a surprising artistic interlude amongst the unremitting technicality of the piece.
Smith, considered the founding father of the “space opera” subgenre, wrote almost compulsively in the vernacular of his times, and sometimes the reader puzzles over the slang of 1930. The characters talk so quaintly to our ears, and not the formal, over-verbose 19th century way so familiar from the writers of the previous generations, but in a strange admixture of both precision and slang that must have been how the mass market expressed itself in those days. It underlines the way H P Lovecraft thought (they were born in the same year), for he was writing at the same time and his characters and narrative sound precisely nothing like this, even when he is dealing with his contemporary United States.
In Skylark Three, Smith takes is heroes Seaton and Crane and their wives, Dorothy and Margaret, back into the depths of space, to the system of the multiple green suns near the heart of the galaxy, into the midst of war and terror. A new power has emerged, destroying wherever it touches—the Fenacrhone, travelling from far across the galaxy bent on universal conquest. It is up to Seaton (the acknowledged ‘Overlord’ of the planetary systems since his last visit—yes, a white American is the unquestioned ruler of multiple civilisations!) to convince the many races of the cluster of the green suns to work together to resist this scourge, and he recruits the best science and industrial capacity of each to this end. He ends a war between old adversaries, visits multiple planets with strange civilisations (Smith had a lot of fun creating them), and orders the construction of a new vessel to replace his now clearly obsolete Skylark II.
Smith was a scientist, a chemist by training like Isaac Asimov, and it is clear that his mind ran on through tracts of technical thought, addressing concepts that would become familiar much later in time. Star Trek, 35 years later, drew on concepts well known to Smith’s readers—the tractor beam, for instance, directed energy weapons, force fields, and of course faster than light travel. The manipulation of matter, its interchange with energy, is also depicted, though in different terminology, as we see “force” beams and “orders of force” levitating objects, assembling them from raw materials and so forth.
A prime tool is the “educator,” a machine of alien derivation, which allows the transfer of knowledge, experience and empirical data between minds (shades of the “BIG RAT”in Gerry Anderson’s 1968 series Joe-90, which formed the central gadget of a whole show). The characters use the device to absorb instantly the language of any alien race they encounter, and to provide knowledge of English to other races, as well as acquire the technical and scientific knowledge of the finest minds out there, thus improving their own ship over and over. This neatly avoids the elephant in the room of so much TV science fiction—why almost all the alien races and isolated cultures we ever encounter not only look fundamentally the same as ourselves but speak fluent English, most of them with American accents...
The speed of light is mentioned, though no relatavistic effects or consequences. Perhaps, when the publisher gave Smith a free hand to update his narratives for their re-release in later decades, he found incorporating Einsteinian cosmology either prohibitively difficult, or that it simply forbade the possibility of his narrative, and he sidestepped the issue by ignoring it. Indeed, Smith acknowledged his Skylark novels to be science fantasy, in contrast to his 1930-31 novel Spacehounds of IPC, (completed immediately after Skylark Three) which takes place entirely within the solar system and was, he felt, his only work of genuine science fiction. (Readers did not respond so well to it for this very restriction, however, and no sequels followed.)
Interestingly, amongst all these concepts, the word computer never appears, though he describes automated systems which to us seem obviously computerised.
The thing that jumps off the page, however (after his often erratic narrative to dialogue balance—early chapters seem almost entirely composed of the latter) is attitude. Seaton, the polymath, though not the most brilliant mind on the ship, is a self-appointed master of worlds, willing to scheme the destruction of a whole civilisation to save others—redeemed by his humanistic inability to do so at the last moment: that task he left to a friend from a warrior race who had no compunction about pushing the button. Would we call that a cop-out today? Smith certainly revelled in the absolute destruction of a malevolent foe: every last ship in space, one by one, then incinerating their homeworld. Finally, when the eponymous Skylark Three actually takes flight, he details a racing voyage out of the galaxy on the trail of a vessel bearing survivors of the evil Fenachrone to a new world in a distant galaxy to begin again, bent on returning one day to annihilate all competition in the home galaxy. The outcome is of course their inevitable destruction. This, we would call today, genocide—and it was done by the hero.
That’s the difference a century makes, but consider the time in which he was writing. This is the same general era in which Edgar Rice Burroughs wrote his Venus novels, and I think I see a parallel, inasmuch as that both writers were observing the insidious rise of fascism. The Nazi Party in Germany was parading and trumpeting and throwing its weight about, eventually taking power in 1933, and writers were using fiction as a way of saying something about it. Burroughs highlighted the armies and secret police forces, the evils redolent in such rogue states, while Smith, just a few years earlier, described technology coming to the rescue, stopping very dead indeed an entity bent on doing what Hitler did, but on a galactic, even universal scale. In that light, perhaps the nature of the story is understandable, reassuring its readers that the will to defend against an implacable enemy really did exist.
One last bit of nostalgia begs to be mentioned. When I reached Chapter 3, there was a bookmark in the volume, just a business card, for an engine rebuilders. The phone number has too few digits, not even the eighth digit added to all Australian phone numbers in 1976 or so. That bookmark must indicate where I got up to when I read the book as a preteen, before finding it too heavy going and moving on to something else. I doubt that business has existed in a great many years. I put the card back where I found it, and there it shall remain, another piece of history that is now much older than the novel was when I bought this edition. Passage of time, eh?
Mike Adamson
