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Jul 17, Drew Perron rated it liked it. This is a weird book, you guys. Weird even by the standards of sixties science fiction, weird even in the career of E. Which is not to say that it's a very good book, by either of those standards; but it pushes against the mores of time, place and genre in a way that's interesting if you're a weirdo like me, who views society through the lens of what kind of people get to be protagonists. Having read a lot of Smith's pre-World War II work, I was surprised at how different The Galaxy Primes felt - specifically, in the realm of character, it felt less like the other Smith work I've read, and more like the characterization of Smith's friend and compatriot Robert Heinlein.
This is not a great thing, though, because our Prime couple shows the traits of Heinlein's most annoying protagonists - highly competent and highly defensive, puffing themselves up at the drop of a hat and making big speeches about how the world really works at anyone the narrative designates as lesser. And naturally, when they apply this behavior to each other, no matter how nasty and petty it gets and no matter how painful in terms of sexism , it means they're Meant For Each Other.
At least, that's the status quo at the beginning of the book, when said couple and their not-quite-as-powerful-but-equally-competent-and-way-nicer friends are exploring the outer universe. Incidentally, the female member of that couple is a person of color who gets to be beautiful, powerful, kind and skilled. She does, however, get saddled with the nickname "Brownie", because we can't have nice things.
Halfway thru, though, after a thinly veiled and very angry satire of the Cold War, things shift. It feels like Smith, in the process of getting inside his characters' heads, realized - wow, being someone who's constantly a superior jerk to everyone around them would actually really suck!? At that point, we move back to Earth's galaxy, and our main couple travels around, discovering that nearly every inhabited planet has a pair of Primes, and almost every such pair are assholes who need to be taken down a peg before they're ready to be part of galactic civilization.
It feels like a direct attack on a particular idea of "toughness" and "strength", an acknowledgement - incredibly rare in this era, especially among non-hippies - that being the loudest and the pushiest and the most confrontational doesn't actually mean that you're the best, or even good at what you do. This is especially true when the most pressing problem is that our main pair realizes that they, too, need to be taken down a peg - but how?
Like I said, this is a weird book. It seems to be reacting intuitively against several things - the framework of masculinity in midth-century America, the mindset that being in the military imposes on you on what a Good Leader is and how they act. Yet at the same time, the not-so-intuitive level of the book is pushing the same old shit - a narrowly defined gender binary, the idea that military rank and discipline is preferable to debate and representative government.
It's very of its time - the copy I got from a secondhand bookstore had cigarette ads in it - but also very much in reaction against and dialogue with that time. It's a frustrating read, but it has definite historical value, and it's reaching for the stars. Oct 23, Julia rated it did not like it Recommended to Julia by: And I start wondering how it got published and was popular, but then I remember that it was still pretty innovative to be talking about running around to other planets, so it doesn't really matter what you say about what was there, or how confused the author is about human relations, it would have seemed really cool.
Though the imaginative bits actually read rather like someone writing Wow. Though the imaginative bits actually read rather like someone writing a story based on a dream -- and then there were these things, and then these other things came -- and trying to make some kind of sense of it. And it also reads like Smith just stayed up late one night writing the thing as fast as he could as Michael put it , and never went back and did anything with it, hence the constant contradictions and loose ends.
It frequently left me with the impression that the characters had forgotten what they were about and gone off on some tangent of the author's I gather that this is much less sexist than Smith's earlier works despite its contention that highly psionic women 'automatically' have big tits, to name one of the smaller offenses ; it's kind of funny to watch him try to kick himself into remembering that the female lead rather than the male sidekick is supposed to be the second-most-important character.
And, of course, not going back and trying to smooth things where he switched gears. It has the unfortunate result that Jim, the sidekick, is even more all-over-the-place than the other characters; given that his personality was determined by his role, since Smith kept having to argue with himself about the role For all that, though -- for how caricaturish the characters are and how bizarre the dialogue -- it's an oddly character-interaction-based novel.
Despite the stereotype that scifi writers of Smith's generation didn't think character development was worth spending time on; maybe some of them thought it was but just weren't very good at it. Well, OK, some of them even were good at it Two things always strike me whenever I pick up a book by the Doc: This, being one of his later books, doesn't take quite such a dismissive attitude to the role and capabilities of women I surprise myself by how shocking I find it. That aside, I've always found this book entertaining. It's a significant departure from his better known series, the Lensmen and Skylark Two things always strike me whenever I pick up a book by the Doc: It's a significant departure from his better known series, the Lensmen and Skylark books, in focussing on psionics and some of the ways that such capabilities might affect society and the new scientific avenues that might be explored though one should always remember that the author was never too concerned about scientific realism!
It raises a number of intriguing ideas but, that said, they never seem to be fully fleshed out or developed; this book feels, in some ways, rather less complete than many of his other stories. I've come across no evidence that there was ever meant to be a sequel but that's to me it certainly feels like book one in a series. Nonetheless, it's a standard E. And it's pretty good fun. Feb 17, Bard Bloom rated it did not like it. Well, I am quite fond of E. Smith's Skylark and Lensman books.
I reread some of them recently, and had a blast. Then I reread The Galaxy Primes. Oh, gods, but it's bad. I think it's Smith's attempt to write a romance, which is Smith's weakest literary point. The main characters are total Mary Sues: An Well, I am quite fond of E. And the universe is pretty odd, too. I guess Smith was being creative here, but he didn't pull it off very well.
Most planets in most galaxies are inhabited by humans, genetically identical to Earth humans. Actually galaxies are alive, and humans are somehow the equivalent of red blood cells. Some other aliens are around there too; they're the equivalent of white blood cells. Our galaxy is an ovum, and the super-powered characters are some components of that. Anyways, this is the worst of E. Smith's books I've read. The same points of contention I had with his other two novels that I've read, both in the Skylark series, are present here.
I was hoping my opinion on the author might change with a different book. That notion proved false. Not a bad representative from the "Golden Age" of Sci-Fi. Looking at this, I wonder if Smith intended the story to be about man's reaction as new technologies are discovered; the uncertainties, the immaturity, the self doubts that come when we encounter and need to adapt to new technologies. Some of the character relations are dated, but in some ways this adds to the Not a bad representative from the "Golden Age" of Sci-Fi.
Some of the character relations are dated, but in some ways this adds to the quaintness of the story. Once I saw an underlying theme, I was able to get past the anachronism and see a message that can still apply over half a century after this story was published. Aug 21, Stewart Ogilvie-Goddard rated it it was amazing. I spent a lot of time in John Menzies, a newsagent-ish store in Dundee pondering what to spend my 50p on.
I'd never heard the term Space Opera before but the blurb on the back of this novel got my attention. My Golden Age was beginning. Sep 05, Miles rated it did not like it Shelves: I mean really bad. Couldn't finish it and wanted back the time I put into it sort of bad, plus I would've thrown the book if I hadn't been reading it in electronic format.
Unlikable, perfect, super-powered cardboard characters travel space at random for no very good reason. Reads like a cross between the Gor novels and a Flash Gordon serial, taking some of the worst from both. Needless to say, not recommended. A rip roaring blast from the past, pre PC and all that entails. Nov 25, Kate rated it liked it Shelves: Old school sci-fi, with a lot of sexism.
The Galaxy Primes has ratings and 26 reviews. Steve said: No likable characters. It's like every character is a Blackie duQuesne in personality. Ulti. Edward Elmer Smith (May 2, – August 31, ), better known by his pen name E. E. .. Galaxy Primes was written after critics such as Groff Conklin and P . Schuyler Miller in the early '50s accused his fiction of being passé, and he made .
Spent while hanging in there, hoping that the story would pick up pace, but got bored. Smith is an excellent author. His work is such that you are left wanting far far more without feeling left out.
Jun 15, Lindsay rated it it was ok Shelves: This didn't really go anywhere and the characters were pretty two dimensional. Once Dawn Doughnuts became profitable in late , Smith wrote an page outline for what became the four core Lensman novels; in early , Tremaine committed to buying them.
Gray Lensman , the fourth book in the series, appeared in Astounding ' s October through January issues.
Weird even by the standards of sixties science fiction, weird even in the career of E. Moskowitz also notes that Smith's "reading enthusiasms included poetry, philosophy, ancient and medieval history, and all of English literature". George S rated it really liked it Jul 05, Lists with This Book. Kessler in [13] worked at, and later owned, a boarding house on Ridenbaugh Street.
Note that the frequent British spelling "grey" is simply a recurrent mistake, starting with the cover of the first installment; Moskowitz's usage, "The Grey Lensman", is even harder to justify. Campbell 's editorial in the December issue suggested that the October issue was the best issue of Astounding ever, and Gray Lensman was first place in the Analytical Laboratory statistics "by a lightyear", with three runners-up in a distant tie for second place. Smith saying he and Hubert Rogers agreed on how Kinnison looked. Moore 's Northwest Smith , and met fans living near him in Michigan, who would later form the Galactic Roamers, which previewed and advised him on his future work.
Smith worked for the US Army between and An extended segment in the novel version of Triplanetary , set during World War II, suggests intimate familiarity with explosives and munitions manufacturing.
Some biographers cite as fact that, just as Smith's protagonist in this segment lost his job over failure to approve substandard munitions, Smith did, as well. Smith began work for the J. Allen Company a manufacturer of doughnut and frosting mixes in and worked for them until his professional retirement in After Smith retired, his wife and he lived in Clearwater, Florida , [21] in the fall and winter, driving the smaller of their two trailers to Seaside, Oregon , each April, often stopping at science fiction conventions on the way.
Smith did not like to fly. Heinlein , which was reprinted in the collection Expanded Universe in A more detailed, although allegedly [67] error-ridden biography is in Sam Moskowitz's Seekers of Tomorrow. Robert Heinlein and Smith were friends. Smith perhaps took his "unrealistic" heroes from life, citing as an example the extreme competence of the hero of Spacehounds of IPC. He reported that E. Smith was a large, blond, athletic, very intelligent, very gallant man, married to a remarkably beautiful, intelligent, red-haired woman named MacDougal thus perhaps the prototypes of 'Kimball Kinnison' and 'Clarissa MacDougal'.
In Heinlein's essay, he reports that he began to suspect Smith might be a sort of "superman" when he asked Smith for help in purchasing a car. Smith tested the car by driving it on a back road at illegally high speeds with their heads pressed tightly against the roof columns to listen for chassis squeaks by bone conduction —a process apparently improvised on the spot.
Galaxy Primes was written after critics such as Groff Conklin and P. Campbell encouraged his writers to make stories. Despite this, it was rejected by Campbell, and it was eventually published by Amazing Stories in His late story "The Imperial Stars" , featuring a troupe of circus performers involved in sabotage in a galactic empire, recaptured some of the atmosphere from his earlier works and was intended as the first in a new series, with outlines of later parts rumored to still exist.
Editor Frederik Pohl introduced it with a one-page summary of the previous stories, which were all at least 30 years old. These were almost completely forgotten until after Smith's death. In , a compendium of Smith's works was published, entitled The Best of E. In Smith's original short stories, Tedric was a smith both blacksmith and whitesmith residing in a small town near a castle in a situation roughly equivalent to England of the s. He received instruction in advanced metallurgy from a time-traveler who wanted to change the situation in his own time by modifying certain events of the past.
From this instruction, he was able to build better suits of armor and help defeat the villains of the piece. Unlike Eklund's later novels based on these short stories, the original Tedric never left his own time or planet, and fought purely local enemies of his own time period. A few years later and 13 years after Smith's death, Verna Smith arranged with Gordon Eklund to publish another novel of the same name about the same fictional character, introducing it as "a new series conceived by E.
Eklund later went on to publish the other novels in the series, one or two under the pseudonym "E. The protagonist possesses heroic qualities similar to those of the heroes in Smith's original novels and can communicate with an extra-dimensional race of beings known as the Scientists, whose archenemy is Fra Villion, a mysterious character described as a dark knight, skilled in whip-sword combat, and evil genius behind the creation of a planetoid-sized "iron sphere" armed with a weapon capable of destroying planets.
As a result, Smith is believed by many to be the unacknowledged progenitor of themes that would appear in Star Wars. In fact, however, these appear in the sequels written by others after Smith's death. Smith's novels are generally considered to be classic space operas , [70] and he is sometimes called the first of the three " novas " of 20th-century science fiction with Stanley G.
Weinbaum and Robert A.
Heinlein as the second and third novas. Heinlein credited him for being his main influence: Smith expressed a preference for inventing fictional technologies that were not strictly impossible so far as the science of the day was aware but highly unlikely: Vortex Blasters also known as Masters of the Vortex is set in the same universe as the Lensman novels.
It is an extension to the main storyline which takes place between Galactic Patrol and Children of the Lens , and introduces a different type of psionics from that used by the Lensmen. Spacehounds of IPC is not a part of the series, despite occasional erroneous statements to the contrary. It is listed as a novel in the series in some paperback editions of the s. Heinlein reported that Smith had planned a seventh Lensman novel, set after the events described in Children of the Lens , which was unpublishable at that time the early s.
Careful searches by people who knew Smith well including Frederik Pohl, Smith's editor, and Verna Smith Trestrail, Smith's daughter have failed to locate any material related to such a story. On July 14, , barely a month before his death, Smith gave written permission to William B. Ellern to continue the Lensman series, which led to the publishing of "Moon Prospector" in and New Lensman in Smith's long-time friend, Dave Kyle , wrote three authorized added novels in the Lensman series that provided background about the major nonhuman Lensmen: Smith was widely read by scientists and engineers from the s into the s.
An inarguable influence was described in a June 11, , letter [77] to Doc from John W. Campbell the editor of Astounding , where much of the Lensman series was originally published. In it, Campbell relayed Captain Cal Laning 's [78] acknowledgment that he had used Smith's ideas for displaying the battlespace situation called the "tank" in the stories in the design of the United States Navy 's ships' Combat Information Centers. In your story, you reached the situation the Navy was in—more communication channels than integration techniques to handle it.
You proposed such an integrating technique and proved how advantageous it could be. As the Japanese Navy—not the hypothetical Boskonian fleet—learned at an appalling cost. One underlying theme of the later Lensman novels was the difficulty in maintaining military secrecy—as advanced capabilities are revealed, the opposing side can often duplicate them. This point was also discussed extensively by John Campbell in his letter to Doc. The use of "Vee-two" gas by the pirates attacking the Hyperion in Triplanetary in both magazine and book appearances also suggests anticipation of the terrorist uses of poison gases.
But note that Smith lived through WW I, when the use of poison gas on troops was well known to the populace; extending the assumption that pirates might use it if they could obtain it was no great extension of the present-day knowledge. The beginning of the story Skylark of Space describes in relative detail the protagonist's research into separation of platinum group residues, subsequent experiments involving electrolysis, and the discovery of a process evocative of cold fusion over 50 years before Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann.
He describes a nuclear process yielding large amounts of energy and producing only negligible radioactive waste—which then goes on to form the basis of the adventures in the Skylark books. Another theme of the Skylark novels involves precursors of modern information technology. The humanoid aliens encountered in the first novel have developed a primitive technology called the "mechanical educator", which allows direct conversion of brain waves into intelligible thought for transmission to others or for electrical storage.
By the third novel in the series, Skylark of Valeron , this technology has grown into an "Electronic Brain" which is capable of computation on all "bands" of energy—electromagnetism, gravity, and "tachyonic" energy and radiation bands included. This is itself derived from a discussion of reductionist atomic theory in the second novel, Skylark Three , which brings to mind modern quark and sub-quark theories of elementary particle physics.
In his essay "The Epic of Space", Smith listed by last name only authors he enjoyed reading: Sprague de Camp , Robert A. Heinlein, Murray Leinster , H. Lovecraft , and A. Weinbaum specifically "Tweerl" [80] , and Jack Williamson. In a passage on his preparation for writing the Lensman novels, he notes that Clinton Constantinescu's "War of the Universe" was not a masterpiece, [81] [82] but says that Starzl and Williamson were masters; this suggests that Starzl's Interplanetary Flying Patrol may have been an influence on Smith's Triplanetary Patrol, later the Galactic Patrol.
The feeding of the Overlords of Delgon upon the life-force of their victims at the end of chapter five of Galactic Patrol seems a clear allusion to chapter 29 of The Moon Pool , Merritt's account of the Taithu and the power of love in chapters 29 and 34 also bear some resemblance to the end of Children of the Lens.
Smith acknowledges the help of the Galactic Roamers writers' workshop, plus E. Everett Evans , Ed Counts, an unnamed aeronautical engineer, Dr. James Enright, and Dr. Smith's daughter, Verna, lists the following authors as visitors to the Smith household in her youth: Smith cites Bigelow's Theoretical Chemistry—Fundamentals as a justification for the possibility of the inertialess drive.
Sam Moskowitz 's biographical essay on Smith in Seekers of Tomorrow states that he regularly read Argosy magazine, and everything by H. Wells , Jules Verne , H. Moskowitz also notes that Smith's "reading enthusiasms included poetry, philosophy, ancient and medieval history, and all of English literature". Some influence of 19th-century philosophy of language may be detectable in the account in Galactic Patrol of the Lens of Arisia as a universal translator , which is reminiscent of Frege 's strong realism about Sinn , that is, thought or sense.
The original outline for the Lensman series had been accepted by F. Orlin Tremaine , [58] and Smith angered Campbell by showing loyalty to Tremaine at his new magazine, Comet , when he sold him "The Vortex Blaster" in The novel describes friendship and rivalry among pulp writers of the s.
It is also suggested that he was one of the inspirations for Heinlein's character Lazarus Long. Because he died in , the works of E. Smith are now public domain in countries where the term of copyright lasts 50 years after the death of the author, or less; generally this does not include works first published posthumously.
Works first published before , are also public domain in the United States. Additionally, a number of the author's works have become public domain in the United States due to non-renewal of copyright. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.