In the last week, I read through E.E. "Doc" Smith's book Triplanetary, which is a very weird book in a lot of ways. Most of it was written in 1934, but Smith added a bunch in 1947-1948 to link it up with his Lensman series.
Today, we have to read it with a healthy, thick grain of suspension of disbelief, but it's a pretty cool book with some fun ideas, especially considering it was written nearly a hundred years ago.
Check the video for full details!
If you want to check it out, go here:
https://a.co/d/2Oqaic3
I also found an open-access review paper that talks about why gravitational waves move at the speed of light: https://iopscience.iop.org/article/10.1088/1367-2630/7/1/204/pdf
(Update, 2024-09-29) I also wrote a text version of the review (not a transcript) that you might prefer instead of a video:
I was so confused when I read the first few chapters of Triplanetary. The edition I had said that the book had been published in four parts in 1934, so when I started reading about atomic bombs and World War 2, I wondered what kind of visionary "Doc" Smith was.
Well, it turns out that most of the book was serialized in 1934, but significant chunks of it were written around 1948, something completely absent from the front matter of the edition I read.
So, "Doc" Smith may not be the sublime visionary of my first confused impression, but he is a solid science fiction author with an interesting style.
Triplanetary was turned into a prequel of the other Lensman stories that Smith wrote between 1934 and 1948. The other prequel is First Lensman, by the way, written in 1950, I believe.
Anyway, getting to the story itself...
Triplanetary begins Smith's six book epic science fiction series by setting up the two great enemy alien races and explaining their motivations and methods. One group, the Arisians, seeks to build humanity up and cultivate heroes that can fight the Eddorians. The main part of the story details an exciting space adventure starring one of the people in the lineage of these heroes as he proves to be a pivotal actor in mankind's first interstellar war--and peace process--as well as taking down an intelligent and powerful human space pirate with a connection to the Eddorians.
It is old-school pulpy space action/sci-fi to a T.
Smith's tone is earthy, his pace quick, and his action frantic. His dialogue is definitely a product of its time. Although I considered much of it to sound very cliche, at the same time Amazing Stories touted it as realistic and relatable in 1934! I suppose nearly a hundred years of space science fiction have made certain constructions old hat, but I can't blame Doc too much for writing this way when it wasn't!
It was interesting to see how language has changed since Smith was writing. For instance, displays (as in computer monitors) are called "plates" instead of "screens." The word "screen" didn't adopt that use until later, apparently. (I vaguely recall the word "plate" being used in Orwell's 1984 in the same fashion!) In this book, "screen" is used in the sense that "shields" is used all over sci-fi today.
Doc's Ph.D. was in chemical engineering, so some of his details about relativistic travel are not correct, but it was not widely believed at the time that the speed of light was an "overall" speed limit, so we can forgive him his invention of "ultra-rays" and other faster-than-light forms of travel and communication. Also worth noting that the word "Laser" didn't yet exist!
There are several massive space battles in the book, and while Doc has a good sense for describing tactics and strategy, he seems to falter in actually describing the details of individual ships. Whereas authors today would spend a little time describing the shapes and functions of their ships, in Triplanetary, the impression I got was closer to a blobby sphere with an indefinite number of guns, beam projectors, launchers, etc.
Technobabble was still in its infancy, so many of the descriptions of functions and actions by various futuristic gadgets have very little build-up and often feel quite ad hoc.
Characters have some fine banter, and a few tactical plans and methods are described in dialogue rather than paragraphs of prose, but I did find a prevalence of "Tell" over "Show" in the book. There are a few bits of melodramatic dialogue, as well, that seem a bit out of character.
All in all, I would recommend this to people who are particularly interested in old sci-fi, especially pulp. Doc Smith sits on the far end of the table from, say, Lovecraft--earthy, flashy, and brash where Lovecraft was dreamy, incisive, and subdued. Like Flash Gordon, but wider and more epic, perhaps. However, Smith also writes with a great respect and affection for men of intelligence and vision, as well as men of action and honor.
Check it out if you want to see what classic sci-fi was like in the pulp magazines of the 1930s, or if you're interested in the heritage of the Lensman story (it was adapted into a Japanese animation long ago, too).
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