Yeah... I read Doc Smith's Lensman novels in high school, at the enthusiastic recommendation of friends, and was bothered by how crap they were (considering the author's inexplicable high esteem among classic SF novelists) but also bothered by the fact that I could not stop reading.
Later I found out that, considered in the proper context, they were less crap than they seemed and the adulation for Smith was somewhat deserved. The copyright pages said they were from the Fifties, by which standard they'd have been shockingly naive; but they were really from the Thirties, by an author who had gotten his start in science fiction earlier even than that (his first novel was from 1928). Suddenly all the cliches in them seemed like important innovations. Also, they'd been damaged somewhat in their transition from magazine serialization to novel series: the whole first volume was a minor unrelated novel that had been badly pasted into the Lensman future history, in a manner that also gave away a big chunk of the ending.
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
no subject
Date: 2005-12-18 06:16 pm (UTC)Later I found out that, considered in the proper context, they were less crap than they seemed and the adulation for Smith was somewhat deserved. The copyright pages said they were from the Fifties, by which standard they'd have been shockingly naive; but they were really from the Thirties, by an author who had gotten his start in science fiction earlier even than that (his first novel was from 1928). Suddenly all the cliches in them seemed like important innovations. Also, they'd been damaged somewhat in their transition from magazine serialization to novel series: the whole first volume was a minor unrelated novel that had been badly pasted into the Lensman future history, in a manner that also gave away a big chunk of the ending.