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