Holy Klono’s Tungsten Teeth And Curving Carballoy Claws!

Galactic Patrol (Lensman, volume 3 Lensman, volume 2)

By E. E. "Doc" Smith

23 Oct, 2022

**Because My Tears Are Delicious To You**

26 comments

Support me with a Patreon monthly subscription! — 23 Oct, 2022

**Because My Tears Are Delicious To You**

26 comments

1950’s¹ Galactic Patrol is either the third (if you count Triplanetary) volume in E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensman series, or the second (if you don’t count Triplanetary).

Inertialess flight made interstellar travel as convenient as a trip down the road to the chemist’s. The result is a golden age of exploration, contact, and trade. It’s also a golden age of criminality, as space criminals can flee out of jurisdiction as easily as a 20^thcentury American gangster could flee across state lines. For Civilization to prevail, lawlessness must be punished. To that end, the Patrol was founded!

Kimball Kinnison is not merely among the one in ten thousand who made it through the grueling Patrol training course. He is his class’s top graduate. He will need all of his ability to deal with … Boskone!

As previously mentioned, the galaxy is filled with ambitious criminals. For the most part, their vexatiousness is due to quantity, not quality. Although it takes some time for the Patrol to twig to the truth, Boskone is no mere convenient alliance of petty criminals. Boskone is vast, well-armed, and very organized. Boskone fancies itself a rival to Civilization. It is right to do so!

At the moment Boskone enjoys not merely an edge in intelligence — they understand Civilization’s scale, while Civilization has yet to fully understand Boskone’s — but a technological edge as well. Powered by cosmic radiation, Boskone’s ships easily outpace those of Civilization. If Boskone maintains its monopoly, Civilization is doomed!

Kinnison is dispatched in command of Brittania, a ship that compensates for its lack of Boskonian technological secrets with cunning advances of its own. Kinnison’s mission: to disable a Boskonian ship so that its secrets can be recovered for Civilization. There can only be one of two outcomes of this mission: success or death!

As Kinnison discovers, there is a third alternative: success and death. Helmuth of Boskone is determined to keep Boskonian technology for Boskone. Kinnison and his men may have gotten their hands on Boskonian cosmic energy converters. That will mean nothing if everyone on Brittania dies before they can reach Patrol HQ with the information. Since Boskone is, as previously mentioned, vast, well-armed, and very organized, the odds favour Helmuth!

Even should Kinnison and chums elude Boskone, other dangers wait, some of a nature even more unknown to the Patrol and even more malevolent than Helmuth and the pirates of Boskone!

~oOo~

Yes, that’s a lot of exclamation points. Be happy it was not all caps. The Lensmen stories eschew the lower-case narratives of other space operas. Characters already on the run from unfathomable danger routinely discover they have fled into the lair of dangers even less fathomed. If the series were a British actor, it would be Brian Blessed on amphetamines. Lensman’s amplifier goes exponentially past 11! And it does all this in the fewer than 240 pages of the Pyramid mass-market paperback I own.

Of course, to cram all that excitement into the space available, certain sacrifices were made. Font size, especially font size. There is prose, of a bargain-basement sort². Characters are unburdened by depth beyond simple quirks: Helmuth is tyrannical! Kinnison is smart and brave! Clarissa MacDougall also smart, also brave, and beautiful to boot. Doctor Lacy is weirdly obsessed with other people’s skeletons. Port Admiral Haynes doesn’t understand boundaries when it comes to orchestrating other people’s romances³.

Readers throughout the generations have been amused by the opening of Galactic Patrol, which the new officers of a police force (one of whose main objectives is preventing the sale of addictive drugs) are greeted by

Sit down, men, and smoke up. We have an hour in which to talk things over, and now I can tell you what it is all about. Each of you will find his favourite refreshment in the arm of his chair.

“No, there’s no catch to it,” he continued, in answer to amazedly doubtful stares, and lighted a huge black cigar of Venus-grown tobacco as he spoke. “You are Lensmen now, and henceforth each of you is accountable only to himself and to GHQ. Of course, you have yet to go through the formalities of commencement, but they don’t count. Each of you really graduated when the Lens was welded around his arm.

“We know your individual preferences, and each of you has his favourite weed, from Tillotson’s Pittsburgh stogies up to Snowden’s Alsakanite cigarettes — even though Alsakan is just about as far away from here as a planet can be and still lie within the galaxy.”

“We also know that you are all immune to the lure of noxious drugs. If you were not, you would not be here to-day. So smoke up and speak up.

I have questions, such as “if the cream of the crop is a collection of tobacco fiends, what the heck were the failures smoking?” The Patrol seems a little inconsistent in its views of what constitutes a noxious drug, although in their defense, Thionite, about which they are most concerned, isn’t just addictive but quickly fatal⁴, a detail Kinnison weaponizes late in the novel.

The book is very loud and veryexciting, yet I never warmed to the series of which it is a part, or this book in particular. Perhaps I was too old when I first encountered Galactic Patrol. Perhaps not. I am reasonably certain that I was all of twelve when I read Galactic Patrol. Perhaps the issue was that the book, and the series, were dated. It’s a long long time between 1950 and 1973. Even a twelve-year-old SF fan could tell that this book was as fusty as a great-aunt’s antimacassar.

Your mileage may differ. After all, someone has to be buying all those terrible David Weber books. Such readers will be happy to know that Galactic Patrol is available here (Amazon US), here (Amazon Canada), here (Amazon UK), here (Barnes & Noble), here (Book Depository), here (Chapters-Indigo), and here (Gutenberg).

1: It’s more complicated than that but I don’t feel like going into the publication history of the series.

2: In fact, the wretched but energetic prose reminds me a lot of David Weber, especially the wearisome technological explanations and the blow-by-blow battle narratives.

3: In Haynes’ defense, Kinnison’s genes are precious and they aren’t going to propagate themselves. Not if they depend on Kinnison, whose fields of expertise do not include romance.

4: How do thionite pushers make money if their clients have very short lifespans?

Comments

Mcannon

Regarding Footnote 4 - Bear in Mind that Boskone and its proxies were EVIL! Surely EVIL! is not subject to such puny forces as the laws of supply and demand.

I encountered the Lensman books at around the same time as you (though I’m a couple of years older) and also found them a bit dull, particularly after having heard how gosh-wow they were. I don’t think I ever managed to finish the final volume, “Children of the Lens”. Oddly, I found the “Skylark of Space” series, which I read around the same time, a lot more fun; perhaps the sheer crude energy and enthusiasm of those earlier books just carried me along.

I read both series via British Panther Books editions. The amazing tech-porn Chris Foss covers rather complemented the lack of any real human characteristics amongst the cast.

I had forgotten the frequent glowing descriptions of tobacco - John W Campbell must have nodded in approval. I do recall that after particularly fraught adventures Kinnison often relied on the restorative properties of pots of a mega-strong variety of black coffee. I imagine that stronger stimulants never crossed a Lensman’s lips (or their non-human equivalent).

Mike SchillingMcannon

The really bad stuff is thiontimolite, which kills you before you use it.

Alexx KayMcannon

I came here to say similarly. If Boskone has a major goal of weakening Civilization, subsidizing drug pushers would be a rational way to further that goal.

Ken Burnside

I read them around 1983, and blithely swallowed the all Anglo-Saxon names... and then had my junior high class on Mendelian genetics.

And went "waitaminute."

And then my class covered Nazi eugenics.

The series was ruined forevermore for me.

Larry LennhoffKen Burnside

I found the specisism of the Skylark series much more problematic. Surely some editor from the 1950s onward could have deleted Seaton's rally crying of "Humanity Uber Alles" from the text before proceeding to the genocide of the Chlorans.

Someone made the interesting point that the key breakpoint between Civilization and Boskone seems to be along the lines of sexual equality. (Lensmen excepted.) Boskonian allied societies are all either patriarchal or matriarchal, as far as we can tell. There are Reasons for this, of course.

Adina Adler

Randall Garrett wrote a Lensman parody, "Backstage Lensman", which is funny by itself, but is even funnier if you have just read Galactic Lensman . So now would be the perfect time for you to read it!

Joachim Boaz

This is the definition of SF I can't stomach. I attempted to read Triplanetary at some point before ditching the rest of the series...

James NicollJoachim Boaz

My ability to power through shit is Herculian.

JReynoldsJames Nicoll

The Augean stables have entered the conversation...

DpJoachim Boaz

I enjoy some of the Lensmen books, but Smith was not firing on full jets for Triplanetary. Recycled stuff from 1934 -ish that grafted onto the Lensmen series after the fact just to make up a multi-book series. Probably turned more people off the series than anything else.

Hc68

Thionite is not instantly lethal in tiny quantities, addiction is essentially assured in microgram doses, which is what most addicts start out with. It's possible to be an addict for some time before the increasing bodily tolerance rises to the point that you end up overdosing. Add in that fact that the dealing, once the addict is hooked, can essentially charge anything and the addict will pay it if they have access to it, and it becomes fantastically profitable.

As for tobacco? So what? It's addictive, and it damages health, but it's not all that mind-altering and you rarely hear of someone killing someone else for access to nicotine. Booze is legal in Civilization, too, and alcohol is damaging, too. Our modern society has taken a reasonable recognition of the damage nicotine does, and turned it into a fetish of sorts. We often treat nicotine as if it's somehow worse than cocaine or methampthetamines.

I would also note that Helmuth is an exception to most of Smith's villains, and indeed to many villains in many stories, in that he is genuinely, definitely competent. He's actually portrayed as being more competent than many of the higher-ranking Boskonians Kinnison will meet in later stories. He's a nasty, murderous piece of work, but he's also personally courageous, intelligent, and self-disciplined.

Elizabeth Buchan-KimmerlyHc68

So Thionite = Fentanyl? A useful drug used medically in tiny doses, then sold on the black market by incompetents who don't know how to measure a dose that is active but not lethal.

Hc68Elizabeth Buchan-Kimmerly

No, because thionite doesn't have any medical uses at any dosage level.

Thionite is the most psychologically-seductive drug in fiction, because it has the effect of producing a full-sensory hallucination of every conscious and subconscious desire being totally satisfied. It doesn't appear to be physically addicting, but it's instantaneously psychologically addictive. Once hooked, the addict will do anything for that next fix. It's worse than heroin or crack cocaine, and usually the addict keeps going back for more until they take that last dose and it kills them. But their dealer makes a crap-load of money off them first.

Mike Schilling

I was hearing great things about the series on rec.arts.sf.written during the period that it was out of print, and finally found a complete version for sale used. It wasn't cheap, but for a classic like that ...

Oh well.

Matt McIrvin

I read these books as a teenager and found them awful, disturbingly problematic in many many ways... but also weirdly addictive. I was kind of ashamed at how they grabbed me. The imagery is certainly vivid. I was already familiar enough with the history of SF to find them strangely retrograde even for the 1950s, but much later learned that the series was a fix-up, Doc Smith himself was a writer of an earlier generation and he really started writing it in the 1930s. That made it make a lot more sense (and also gave me more appreciation for the places where he was innovating).

Hc68Matt McIrvin

Yes, 'Doc' usually did it first. Half the standard tropes and ideas of SF originate in Smith's fiction, one way or another. Later writers draw on his legacy often without even realizing it.

Matt McIrvin

Also, there's an additional defensible position that it's actually the first book in the series.

Steve WrightMatt McIrvin

Yes, my opinion is that "Galactic Patrol" is book 1, "First Lensman" is an intentional prequel novel, and "Triplanetary" is a fix-up bolted together with a largely unrelated space-opera adventure that's been attached to the start of the series by brute force.

Jeffronicus

Rods, cylinders, and cones of destructive energy, oh, my!

I read them when I was 15, starting on a high school bus trip around the various small hamlets and villages near Kingston, Ontario for an Urban Geography field trip on "urban and rural decline" and a second field trip to the local psychiatric institute. They were a useful distraction during this period, although reading HP Lovecraft would have been more appropriate.

Galactic Lensmen did not appeal to me much for some reason, but I really enjoyed Grey Lensmen, perhaps because of the great "Kinnison goes undercover as an asteroid miner and really makes full use of his powers in a smart way" sequence.

It's surprising how few RPGs (GURPS Lensmen aside) have really mined the material here, as the lensmen and their gear follow a clear leveling-up sequence, have a load of "magic" powers, etc. I think only FGU's Space Opera really made a big effort to properly steal from the Lensmen books -- everything else just rips off Star Wars, etc.

I blame the sad state of modern education, which needs more trips to study urban decline and mental health.

Hc68Dp

Well, when you rip off Star Wars you're automatically drawing on Smith's legacy, because huge swaths of SW are rooted int the space opera traditions of Smith and Williamson. It's actually kind of hard not to draw on Smith's legacy when doing space opera (or indeed much SF generally).

NelC

Thionite is like fentanyl, capable of laying low a peace office in microgram quantities through skin contact alone, while transforming the addict into the kind of kill-crazy monster depicted in Reefer Madness (which is really about thionite).

As a 12yo reader, I loved the series, btw, and it took me a few years to see the flaws. Clearly, fascism is also thionite.

Hc68NelC

That's a surprisingly common criticism of the books, but there's actually little in the way of fascistic thinking or ideas among the heroes (actual fascism, I mean, rather than just people throwing the word around to mean 'authoritarian'). The Boskonians, now, they are definitely fascistic (and several other bad things too).

Caroline Mullan

The golden age of SF is 12, which is when (in 1970) I encountered these and swallowed them whole. I still remember the exhiliaration! I now have all seven here in a uniform UK hardback edition so rare that the guy who had all the editions of all Smith's books out for display at the Boston Worldcon in 2004 had not seen them. I have not dared to reread them since.

James Nicoll

One detail I wish modern authors would copy: Smith's galaxy is big enough that despite the scale of Civilization, a lot of it is still uncharted.

Rich Horton

I was also too old when I first read Doc Smith -- in my case it was FIRST LENSMAN, which of course, I assumed, must be the first in the series! I did not like it (though I thought some of the alien species were cool) and so that will remain the only Doc Smith I ever read, alas.

I'm glad other folks found it at the right age and loved it, though.