From the e-bookshelf: The Skylark of Space
Sep. 6th, 2007 05:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
krpalmerWhen I was looking for information for my Saga Journal essay on E.E. "Doc" Smith's Lensman books, I turned up an intriguing collection of scans of pulp magazines three quarters of a century old. It seems that the copyrights on some of Smith's earliest versions of his first space operas were never renewed, and those works were being prepared for potential inclusion in Project Gutenberg. There were enough scanned pages among that collection to let me hope that Smith's breakthrough story, "The Skylark of Space," would be included, if not to let me see the whole thing just then. I had heard about it before, started in 1916, published at last in 1928, one of the first if not the very first science fiction stories to open the galaxy to imaginative exploration (and never mind the hard dictates of modern physics)... but while I had seen a version of that story, it was one revised by Smith in the late 1950s for paperback republication, including references to television and computers and the actual mechanics of atomic energy his story had bounded beyond years before they were actually set down.
It did bother me a little that I was curious about what the 1928 version of the story would have been like; all the bleating that no author can ever hope to revise a work once it's actually popular (unless he's Peter Jackson) does leave me aggravated. Even so, I did happen to take a look at the official Project Gutenberg site somewhat later, and spotted the work at last... and when reading it, I realised something quite significant. Smith hadn't just dropped a few references to 1950s technology into his story; he'd significantly rewritten it. In place of the admittedly glib, slangy tone I tended to associate with a lot of his dialogue in the Lensman books, the original writing seemed stiff and fusty to me. As with other cases I've experienced before, the conversion of "the sacred original" from something that demonstrates just how much trouble those who laud it have gone to to find it to something readily available establishes a mere two versions, each interesting in their own way.
In any case, for all the low pulpiness of the story, a rigourous dose of historical perspective brings the drive of its plot forward. It begins with Richard Seaton, physical and mental marvel stuck all the same doing chemistry work in a government lab in Washington, D.C. (which is the exact same job E.E. Smith had when he started writing his story), discovering that "X, the unknown metal" will help with the effortless conversion of copper into pure energy. He immediately resigns his position and goes into partnership with his independently wealthy friend Martin Crane to build a great steel ball bearing of a spaceship, the Skylark. A coworker of Seaton's, Marc C. "Blackie" DuQuesne, has also figured out just what Seaton is up to, and returns to the equally ruthless World Steel Corporation to steal Seaton and Crane's secret. In a "space-car" of his own built from stolen plans, DuQuesne kidnaps Seaton's fiancee, Washington socialite Dorothy Vaneman, to try and lure his rival to his destruction, but in the melee his ship exceeds the speed of light just by stepping on the gas and Seaton and Crane set out in hot pursuit... The exploration of strange new worlds follows from there, winding up on the distant world of Osnome. It may, though, feel a little more "conventional" in pulp science fiction terms to me, what with its noble aristocrats in jeweled harnesses handing out vast quantities of radium and platinum (the chemist in Smith shows through when his characters reflect on how useful this will be to the chemists of Earth) but saddled with a severe lack of table salt.
The story may not be for everyone: it's easy enough to wonder about its writing, and the unconscious attitudes of an age towards race and gender show through at points. Within those quaint limits, though, I did find it entertaining... if unintentionally so at times. Just as an example, the HTML version available on Project Gutenberg features the original illustrations, including one showing the fur spacesuits Smith envisioned from the perspective of the 1920s. In the illustration, they have a faint resemblance to me to the "diving helmet on top of a gorilla costume" made infamous by "Robot Monster..."
It did bother me a little that I was curious about what the 1928 version of the story would have been like; all the bleating that no author can ever hope to revise a work once it's actually popular (unless he's Peter Jackson) does leave me aggravated. Even so, I did happen to take a look at the official Project Gutenberg site somewhat later, and spotted the work at last... and when reading it, I realised something quite significant. Smith hadn't just dropped a few references to 1950s technology into his story; he'd significantly rewritten it. In place of the admittedly glib, slangy tone I tended to associate with a lot of his dialogue in the Lensman books, the original writing seemed stiff and fusty to me. As with other cases I've experienced before, the conversion of "the sacred original" from something that demonstrates just how much trouble those who laud it have gone to to find it to something readily available establishes a mere two versions, each interesting in their own way.
In any case, for all the low pulpiness of the story, a rigourous dose of historical perspective brings the drive of its plot forward. It begins with Richard Seaton, physical and mental marvel stuck all the same doing chemistry work in a government lab in Washington, D.C. (which is the exact same job E.E. Smith had when he started writing his story), discovering that "X, the unknown metal" will help with the effortless conversion of copper into pure energy. He immediately resigns his position and goes into partnership with his independently wealthy friend Martin Crane to build a great steel ball bearing of a spaceship, the Skylark. A coworker of Seaton's, Marc C. "Blackie" DuQuesne, has also figured out just what Seaton is up to, and returns to the equally ruthless World Steel Corporation to steal Seaton and Crane's secret. In a "space-car" of his own built from stolen plans, DuQuesne kidnaps Seaton's fiancee, Washington socialite Dorothy Vaneman, to try and lure his rival to his destruction, but in the melee his ship exceeds the speed of light just by stepping on the gas and Seaton and Crane set out in hot pursuit... The exploration of strange new worlds follows from there, winding up on the distant world of Osnome. It may, though, feel a little more "conventional" in pulp science fiction terms to me, what with its noble aristocrats in jeweled harnesses handing out vast quantities of radium and platinum (the chemist in Smith shows through when his characters reflect on how useful this will be to the chemists of Earth) but saddled with a severe lack of table salt.
The story may not be for everyone: it's easy enough to wonder about its writing, and the unconscious attitudes of an age towards race and gender show through at points. Within those quaint limits, though, I did find it entertaining... if unintentionally so at times. Just as an example, the HTML version available on Project Gutenberg features the original illustrations, including one showing the fur spacesuits Smith envisioned from the perspective of the 1920s. In the illustration, they have a faint resemblance to me to the "diving helmet on top of a gorilla costume" made infamous by "Robot Monster..."