Customer Reviews

E.E. "Doc" Smith (Starmont Reader's Guide)

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This is a remarkably unscholarly work, especially since it was written by an English professor on sabbatical (p. 6). His biography of Smith starts out coherently, but in the middle, veers off into a discussion of the well-rounded life (p. 9), and never really recovers. Instead of providing useful facts, Sanders wastes much of the book on plot summaries (p. 5). He deliberately avoids commenting on the inaccuracy of his sources (p. 14), which would have helped later researchers to evaluate them. (In my experience, the printed sources all need to be treated with great skepticism.) Finally, he seems to have missed the most interesting question in Smith scholarship, the (in my opinion, clumsy) ret-conning of the Lensman series to accommodate _Triplanetary_ (p. 5, 35, 40).