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Customer Review: Smith Sizzles
Brilliant scientist Richard Seaton builds the first (many times) faster than light spaceship and travels the universe with a band of friends. Along the way he saves a race of aliens, helps decimate another, rescues his girlfriend and thwarts the misdoings of his arch rival Marc DuQuesne. This is the first E.E. Smith book I've read and I must say that for the type of book that it is, The Skylark of Space isn't too bad. Think old school comic books. It has high adventure, a smart/strong/handsome protagonist, a loyal sidekick, gee whiz technology, an extremely evil bad guy, and pretty girls. For a large part of the book, the story is fairly interesting. Smith moves the action along quickly and provides a respectable amount of tension to the drama. Even though I knew everything would turn out fine in the end, I still wanted to know how Smith would accomplish it. At a short 159 pages, it was a quick and fun diversion. The Skylark of Space is not, however, without issues. Many of them are given: flat, completely unreal characters, rigid gender roles, featherweight science, wildly campy. I won't fault the book for these sorts of things. It's a product of its time that targeted a specific audience. What I do want to point out is that Smith treats war very lightly. Although this book was completed in 1920, Smith revised it in 1958. It's surprising to me that even though Smith had seen the effects of two world wars, mass destruction of life is a very casual act in his book. For those of you who aren't already huge Doc Smith fans, you'll probably enjoy this book if you know what you're getting into. Understand that it doesn't hold up very well under careful (or even casual) scrutiny. But, for what it is, Smith wrote a great book.
Customer Review: A gen-X perspective
I'm guessing a lot of folks who've reviewed these books experienced them in the original printings, prior to Star Wars and the mass-popularization of space opera. I didn't- I "discovered" Doc in the late-80's as a teenager, and have become a huge fan. But heed the warnings of "camp" and "cheese": if there were an MST3K of books, his would be regular fodder. The gender stereotypes and roles as well as the frequent commission (and implicit condonement) of genocide by the heroes in particular are very hard to get past for a modern reader. Character development is non-existant (all protagonists are basically Boy Scouts or Girl Scouts), dialogue is awkward and unbelievably cheesy, genocide is repeatedly condoned, and the fact that the books were originally written as serials is painfully evident (almost every chapter ends with a CLIFFHANGER!). If you are a conesseur of camp, these books are a *rich* source of material. But what I love about Doc's books is not rooted in irony: the incredible creativity in visualizing advanced technology, fast-forward and entertaining action plots, and the sheer scale of the "build up" within each book and from one book to another. Technology: Although very quaint by modern standards (especially in "Skylark of Space"), put in context the creativity Doc displays in envisioning future technology is second to none. Not in terms of "accuracy", but in terms of their self-consistency and imaginativeness. Skylark was written pre-television, pre-laser, pre-NASA, and pre-nuke. What Doc built from that base is incredible, entertaining, and fun, viewed from the perspective that even relativity was a comparatively new theory when it was written (Doc obviously knew about it, and chose to ignore it). In "Skylark of Space", the result is spacesuits made out of leather, descriptions of how the spaceship's hull is fashioned from heavy steel, faster-than-light travel by simple accelertaion, and "energy beams" of different frequencies with different effects. I think Skylark of Space actually remains too tied to the technology of the day, but those shackles are unleashed in Skylark Three (the sequel) and Doc's vision really shines. "Action": I understand that this book is the origin of spaceships shooting at each other. Doc's battle and action sequences need make no apologies for their age or context. This is why you put up with all the sexist attitudes, the bad speeches and the cheesy exclamation. Unless they are encountering the brief setbacks necessary to create some semblance of dramatic tension, Doc's heros kick so much alien bad guy butt it's amazing. "Scale": Doc obviously is a big believer in the "orders of magnitude" theory of plot development. The formula is this: at the beginning of the book, the main characters are on top of the world, and their power seems nearly limitless. Then they nearly get their butts kicked by bad-guy aliens who are so much more powerful that the good guys look like gnats. Then the good guys bulk up (in technology, knowledge, etc...) to the point that the bad guys are completely and easily decimated. Repeat as often as necessary. What is amazing and enjoyable is how long Doc can keep this up: by the end of the series, literally whole galaxies are being destroyed. Yes, it's completely implausible, but dammit! It's fun! Anyway, if you only are going to read one "Skylark" book, I'd actually recommend the sequel: Skylark Three. It's not very hard to get into the plot, and enough trappings of 30's earth technology have fallen away at that point to let Doc's real creativity shine. In summary: Smith is a must-read for sci-fi buffs. Stick with it, and you will be rewarded. But don't expect any of your friends or family to enjoy it.
Product Description
Great Sci Fi adventure novel by Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D. and Lee Hawkins Garby!
Customer Review: Free SF Reader
A get into space opera, if you like, with some of your standard Smith elements, good good guys, sneaky bad guys, and lots of blowing stuff up. It is not too bad, but certainly isn't the Lensman series, by any stretch, and the fact that it is an earlier work probably shows. Still, pioneering sort of stuff for the time, but shows a bit more of the late 19th century type influences, I think.
Customer Review: Would've preferred the original text...
I think I'd give this 5 stars, just for being the original... if it WERE the original. E. E. Smith did some serious re-writing on this one, sometime during the 1950s. In this version, Greedo shoots first.
Okay, that's a joke, but the Star Wars fan-boys get what I mean. I didn't want something revised, with mushroom clouds and television sets. I wanted something written in 1915. I think that's when Smith claimed to have started "Skylark of Space".
Anyway, it's still a fun story, and since it sets you up for "Skylark 3" and "Skylark of Valeron" (both better written and more engaging), it's important reading. I think I'm like a lot of people who read something this old-- I'm trying to fill in the cracks in my understanding of the progression of sci-fi. It's an entertaining history lesson.
I can still glean what the untouched book must have been, but I wish I could actually read the original version. If you can find that one, read it. If you can't, read this one.
***UPDATE*** I've just discovered that Project Gutenberg has the original "Skylark of Space," taken from the 1928 Amazing Stories, available as a FREE html download. It includes the original cover and interior artwork. So what are you waiting for?
Customer Review: Careening recklessly through space was never so fun!
For someone like me, who grew up on old Tom Swift books often purchased at antique stories, Doc Smith is the paragon of lightspeed adventure. Not particularly keen on technical accuracy ("After all, Einstein's theory is just a theory," one character says upon discovering that he's traveling many times the speed of light) and full of predictibly stalwart or nefarious characters, Smith still manages to spin a great yarn. The main characters seem to exhibit a joyous recklesness remniscient (for me, at least) of Douglas Adams' Hitchhiker's trilogy. The "testing" of the flight systems and nuclear-powered bullets, in particular, are quite memorable.
If you're looking for gritty realism in characters or technical accuracy in technologies, you probably won't be able to enjoy this book. But for those who wish to put their brains in neutral and have a jolly good time, I can think of few books better than The Skylark of Space.
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