Triplanetary

I read this, book 1 of the Lensman series as an introduction to First Lensman which is on the list for 1950 on the 50s SF challenge.

Smith was a massive star of the SF genre back in the 40s and 50s with his spectacular space operas. Square jawed determined young men, some pretty, plucky but weak young love interest, lots of space battles, explosions, vicious aliens, fantastic super duper ships that are the ultimate high tech, though next week the ultimate will be surpassed by an ultra super duper ship. Dire dialogue, dire prose, and slapdash in the way such books were as the author desperately tossed off something to earn the pittance paid by publishers so as to put food on the family table.

And yet, I actually found it quite enjoyable. I just adjusted my expectations to the 1950s juvenile audience, and I could see why Smith went down a storm. Extravagance follows spectacle, the evil villains almost overwhelm our brave heroes, there are huge battles, evil schemes planned and executed over millennia, cool tech, and young heroes full of the right stuff who will sort out the baddies while improvising a completely new technology in an offhand brilliant way during the course of an afternoon.

To the general public this is still what they have in mind when they think of science fiction. The simplicity has gone now, if we do have space opera it has to be a bit knowing, self referential and have some weighty theme. But is it as much fun?

Not first rate, but interesting in the development of science fiction. As ever with 50s books World War II and Hiroshima loom over all. Atlantis is actually destroyed by atomic weapons, and the world is devastated for centuries during the second millennium because of nuclear war, and war occupation and destruction are there throughout the book.