I felt like it was time for a return to the good old pulp adventures of E.E. "Doc" Smith, so I gave Skylark of Valeron a read!
This book starts with a somewhat hasty rewrite of a scene from the last book: Remember when DuQuesne appeared to... die? Well, as you may have expected (and as you definitely expected if you've read enough Smith), it was a ruse! DuQuesne is alive and well and is hatching a dastardly plot, as is his wont.
Skylark of Valeron is very different from earlier books because we actually spend a lot of time with characters other than Seaton and company. We get multiple chapters with DuQuesne, as well as some significant chunks taking place from the PoV of alien beings! The spacing is a little irregular, and the transitions a bit abrupt, but it works reasonably well.
The writing is pretty typical "Doc" Smith. Larger-than-life characters doing amazing feats, a strong, consistent adventurous tone, and a fanciful sci-fi setting with a few real details and references to keep things grounded, albeit tenuously. There's less Smith-Slang in this book, and no massive montages of building new tech, so thankfully this book should be a little less niche than Skylark Three was.
The essential plot is that DuQuesne is building up military power for a plot against the Earth, Seaton and company get roped into a crazy fight against the "Intellectuals," the sort of proto-Eddorians they met briefly in the first book, and the universe expands as they explore the "fourth" dimension and find that not only is it its own separate place, but also entering it tends to fling you out trillions of light-years when you come back to regular space.
As usual, there are some neat ideas peppered throughout the book. For instance, Smith posits a sort of "fractal" structure for the universe: solar systems around stars, stars around galaxy centers, and galaxies around larger centers of mass, and on upward in scale. He talks a bit about stellar evolution, and again about getting neutronium from the core of a white dwarf star.
(I actually looked this up a bit and I'm pretty well convinced this is a dated understanding of the structure of the white dwarf star's structure, but not necessarily so in Smith's time. Long story short, from a physics perspective, if there was any neutronium at the center of a white dwarf, I think it would cause the rest of the dwarf to explode, and what's left to also collapse into neutronium.)
We get a reference to the classic book Flatland, which I assume Smith knew well, when they go to "Hyperland," the fourth dimension.
We also get some interesting philosophy, including a clever reversal of the swords-into-plowshares adage: "Many of our peace-time tools are readily transformed into powerful engines of destruction," one alien noted.
The green aliens of Osnome are described again, and now that I've read A Princess of Mars, the fact that Smith was directly referencing Burroughs is abundantly clear. The resemblance is too detailed.
Watch the "Spoiler Section" chapter of the embedded videos for some more detailed plot synopsis and thoughts!
Long story short, this was a fun read, less strenuous than other Skylark books, due to less slang and more consistent pacing. It has more of a "general audience" feel than a lot of Smith books.
We get more perspectives, including "evil" perspectives, but Smith never pretends to be sympathetic to them. The overall message is positive: good triumphs over evil.
Side characters get a bit more to do in this book, which is a welcome switch-up.
There's still a bit of Smith's tendency toward iterative development (first-order waves, second-order waves...) in this book, which makes things feel a little repetitive at times, but it's not a huge problem in this book.
If you got through Skylark Three or if you couldn't handle the extended tech montage in it, you might find this book more palatable. If you're an avid Smith reader, you won't want to miss this.
Grab a copy here (Gutenberg)
https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/68609
...or here (Amazon):
https://a.co/d/5scThHv
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