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Best of E. E. Doc Smith

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The title just about says it all. This book is a collection of eight stories from the master of the space opera, E.E. "Doc" Smith. Some of it is familiar sampling to anyone who has read much Doc Smith's books: To the Far Reaches of Space is a short section from the first Skylark book, Skylark of Space, and Imperial Stars feature the Flying D'Alemberts, a family of intergalactic spies. And to round out the familiar, there's a segment from Triplanetary, the first of the great Lensman books and one from the Vortex Blaster, the very last of the series.

Other stories are not so well known. In two of the stories, the lead character is Lord Tedric, a much more intelligent and humorous version of Conan the Barbarian. Then there's Subspace Explorers and Robot Nemesis, two short stories; one from the 30's and the other from the 60's but both stories show Doc Smith at his best.

Doc Smith influenced so many sci-fi writers such as Heinlein, James H. Schmitz, and others, and his ideas of negative matter bombs and hyperspatial tubes, subspace radio, and the like were the basis for such popular movies and series as Star Trek, Star Wars, and Babylon 5. This book is both a fine introduction to Doc Smith and a rare find for his fans who are looking for more of his great works of science fiction and fantasy.

Don't get me wrong, I love E. E. Doc Smith, and was really looking forward to this collection. I imagined it having a wide variety of short stories that I couldn't find elsewhere. Imagine my disappointment when two of the short stories are excerpts from his longer novels. These are much better in the novels then as stand alone stories. Anther story D'Alembert is, I believe the last thing he wrote, and was intended to be the beginning of another long series that would probably become a book. It did eventually become a series of books finished by another author, which you can probably find at many used book stores.

So, if you dont include stories which are excerpts from books, you are only left with 4 stories. These are:

Tedric, Lord Tedric-- These stories involve time travel and sword and sorcery, which I thought was a great idea, but the stories weren't all that good. The main problem is that the hero, Tedric, always achieves what he wants in the most linear fashion possible with nobody being able to stand in his way.

Robot Nemesis--This is a pretty good story about robots wanting to destroy humanity and the people who fight them.

Subspace Explorers--A story about people on a ship when the subspace drive suddenly breaks, and how they go about surviving. This is mostly a good hard science fiction story, though there is an entirely unnecessary part about what seem to be space gangsters which most have been tacked on to add more action to the story.

Probably the best part of the collection isn't the stories, but a short essay on the end where Smith discusses how he writes his stories. It isn't long, but it does give you real insight into what he thinks about the writing process.

In all, it's not a must have even for an E.E. "Doc" Smith fan, but it is entertaining enough to read for a couple days.

Aside from this being the author who invented space opera (and because of that, Star Wars and Star Trek both owe their creation to this guy!) his imagination and story come together like a thunderclap of pure interest. This author hung out with Robert Heinlein and was a pretty amazing engineer when he wasn't writing awesome sci fi. His stories are simply amazing; the way science fiction should be.

_The Best of E.E. "Doc" Smith_ (1975) is a collection of eight short selections from The Master, assembled roughly ten years after his death. They span a period from 1928 to 1964, most all of his writing career. Smith did not publish a lot of short fiction, so this may be considered a fairly representative volumn. There are a multitude of graphically violent scenes throughout these stories-- in which villains are gunned down, blown up, chopped to pieces, or beaten to a pulp-- that collectively remind me of that Master of another genre, Mickey Spillane. There are also Smith's familiar cardboard characters, simple-minded plots, awesomely bad dialogue and silly romance scenes.

The stories are: "To the Far Reaches of Space" (_Amazing_, 1928), "Robot Nemesis" (_Thrilling Wonder Stories_, 1939), "Pirates of Space" (_Amazing_, 1934), "The Vortex Blaster" (_Comet_, 1941), "Tedric" (_Other Worlds_, 1953), "Lord Tedric" (_Universe_, 1954), "Subspace Survivors" (_Astounding_, 1960), and "The Imperial Stars" (_If_, 1964). Two of the stories are excerpts from novels. "To the Far Reaches of Space" is an excerpt from _The Skylark of Space_, and "Pirates of Space" is an excerpt from _Triplanetary_. "The Vortex Blaster" and "Subspace Survivors" are not excerpts, but they provided the basis for two novels. Of the six "non-excerpt" stories, "The Vortex Blaster" has been the most oft-reprinted, with "Robot Nemesis" a distant second.

Let us take the excerpts first. "To the Far Reaches of Space" involves the pursuit of Dick Seaton and Mart Crane after the villainous Blackie DuQuesne, who has absconded with their spaceship and their girlfriends. It was hot stuff for readers of _Amazing_ in 1928, but it shows its age today. "Pirates of Space" is also pure space opera, but it wears a little better. We are shown how a band of pirates manage to pull off the imposssible crime of hijacking a liner in hyperspace, we get a glimpse of their hideout, and we see how they might be defeated. It is the best entry in the collection.

"Subspace Survivors" and "The Imperial Stars" are, I believe, the last two science fiction short stories that Smith published. The first is an attempt to blend sex, psionics, gangsters, and super-science. It doesn't quite jell. The second is a thrill-a-minute spy novella with the circus Family d'Alemberts. It is set against the background of an Empire, which, we are told, was originally established to stamp out Communism. The Empire doesn't seem to me to be much superior to Communism in morals, efficiency, or general welfare towards people.

"Tedric" and "Lord Tedric" are a pair of swashbucklers featuring swords, time travel, and a meteorite. They have a hero who is rugged and a heroine who is "STACKED!" (152). "Robot Nemesis" is about a robot-hating scientist who foils a cybernetic plot to wipe out humanity. The "computer" in this story is not a robotic machine but a human astrogator. The story has a bit of old-fashioned zip.

"The Vortex Blaster" is about another scientist who cooks up a way to destroy vortexes. Smith is not really too clear in telling us what vortexes are. But they seem to be by-products of atomic energy plants, sort of atomic tornadoes that cause no end of trouble. The notion of "worm-holes" was unknown to scientists at the time that Smith wrote this story, but the comparison would be apt. Next to "Pirates of Space," this is the best story in the collection. There is also an essay by Smith, "The Epic of Space," from a 1947 symposium that gives a very revealing picture of how he wrote the Lensman novels.

If you were to look at some Best Of collections by Jack Williamson or Edmond Hamilton or Murray Leinster or John W. Campbell, Jr., you would see evidence of stories that changed-- matured--over time. Smith's stories changed very little from the twenties to the sixties. That was his tragedy.