I'm finally getting around to finishing the Skylark series! Even though Skylark of Valeron had a pretty definitive ending back in 1934, apparently lots of readers, including Frederik Pohl, wanted more Skylark, and in 1965, Doc Smith agreed. He serialized the new book, Skylark DuQuesne, in IF Worlds of Science Fiction and collected into a book in 1966.
It was Smith's last book before he passed away.
Like a lot of Smith's stuff, the book starts with a crazy revelation--the method Seaton and company used to keep DuQuesne and the bodiless intelligences out of trouble turns out to have a fatal flaw, and probably won't last very long. This kind of reframing or even retconning is a pretty common element in Smith's sequels, so it wasn't too jarring. In fact, the reason given and the logic behind it is subtle but surprisingly sound.
Style-wise, the book is a bit more sedate than Smith's usual fare. This makes it a bit less unique but also helps it feel a bit more timeless. There's much less dialogue that sounds like it belongs in a 1940s radio show, but there's still a decent amount of the trademark Smith slang and expressions, including some that are quite funny. At one point a character says he "didn't stand the proverbial chance of the nitrocellulose dog chasing the asbestos cat in hell," ignoring the fact that there is no such proverb, and even if there were, the asbestos-ness of the cat would be largely irrelevant.
And we still get a heaping helping of Smith's usual gigantic battles and gun-slinging.
In earlier books, Smith has had trouble with frequent PoV changes but he actually manages to pull it off quite well here. The transitions are not jarring or abrupt, and feel quite natural. However, the sense of distance and location is a little wonky; every place we visit in this book is supposedly almost infinitely far away from every other, yet for all the time we spend thinking about travel, they may as well be on the same sound stage.
The tone is a little darker than usual, and a little less optimistic. We get lots of subterfuge and we see a lot of corruption. There are quite a few major enemies, and the ways Seaton and company deal with them vary significantly.
Smith manages to work in a few bits of good humor here and there, though. One funny scene involved Seaton, in disguise, having to come up with names for his wife, Crane, and Crane's wife on the fly. He comes up with "Hi-Fi," "Hi-Test," and "Lo-Test." Worth a good chuckle.
Since the book is titled Skylark DuQuesne, it's no surprise or spoiler that DuQuesne comes back. I'll leave the details to the spoiler section of the embedded video, starting at 17:44, but what I will say here is that we spend a lot of time in his PoV and Smith handles it consistently, seriously, and effectively.
Since most of the characters are familiar at this point, there's not a whole lot of deep development, but everyone is solidly written.
In Smith's worlds, the good guys are the good guys and the bad guys are the bad guys, but we actually get a surprising amount of gray in this book. Some enemies are logical but have their own sense of logic, others must be brow-beaten quite a bit to turn them around, and some are simply irredeemable.
Another point in this book's favor is the lack of the somewhat boring "levelling up" that often happens in Smith's stories. Where we get some levelling up it's more complicated than simply increasing a number, and it's justified pretty well and in interesting ways.
Most of the big battles are still pretty simplistic but there are a few scenes of conflict that actually have some pretty deep planning behind them and play out in ways that are detailed, not entirely one-sided, and fun to read.
One thing I noticed is that this book's feel is actually a lot closer to Star Trek (The Original Series), which was going to come out soon after. Previous books have felt a lot more like radio dramas. I wonder if this book had an influence on the writers of Star Trek?
All in all, I think this is one of Smith's better works, especially from a writing and plotting perspective. Sometimes Smith can make your eyes roll, but there's not much like that in this book. It's a little less energetic, but still has a lot of imagination. It's deeper and more satisfying than some of the earlier Skylark books.
Give it a read if you like Skylark or classic sci-fi. If you read some Doc Smith but found him a little too over-the-top, you might give this book a try, too. If you've been putting off finishing the Skylark series for whatever reason, don't wait any longer.
One point of warning: the 1966 Pyramid edition seems to have at least three major printing errors, where a line on the page was duplicated elsewhere on the page and overwrote some other line. I found them while I was reading but only bookmarked one of them. The other two editions, later, from Jove and Panther, fixed the one error I bookmarked.
Read the books free! Here's a link to the Jove edition, and one to the Panther edition. Maybe other errors got introduced in the later editions, but the one big error I saw in the Pyramid edition was fixed in both of these.
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