What do You think about Triplanetary (1997)?
I'll start this review with an advice for who is interested in these books:Don't start with Triplanetary, because Triplanetary is just a prequel to the main series,which starts with Galactic Patrol, it gives away the whole story and the writing is alot more cheesy than the rest of the books.Despite being a major Trope Codifier for the Space Opera genre, Lensman is often victim of some criticism along with snarky and witty comments around the internet and i think this is a little unfair. Now, i understand where all the criticism and snark comes from, the Lensman books didn't aged very well unlike other stories from the early 20th century like Jonh Carter From Mars by Burroughs, The Cthulhu Mythos by Lovecraft or Conan the Barbarian by Robert E. Howard.Smith's writing tends to be clunky, most of the characters are cardboards, the Black and White Morality and the Arisian breeding program thing may seem racist and Nazi-ish to some people and that Kimball Kinnison guy may appear as a full blown Gary Stu due to being very good in many things and receiving one upgrade after another throughout the series.But keep in mind that these were stories written in the 1930's by a man born in 1890 and published on pulp magazines, so you couldn't really expect something like The Foundation series by Asimov.Where the series succeeds is in the huge scope, universe building and entertainment. Smith's starships and weapons were huge and highly imaginative, the aliens weren't just humanoids and had a very peculiar anatomy, the scale of the space battles was really impressive for its time and the series itself was a really entertaining and enjoyable ride for me, there was some cheesy Techno Babble but all the action around it was usually gripping and, as a big Green Lantern fan, i couldn't dislike the concept of the Lens and the Galactic Patrol.It is interesting to know that J.Michael Strackzinsky the creator of Babylon 5 and former writer of Spiderman is a big fan of Lensman and he tried to make a Lensman movie, but unfortunatly the project was dropped after several years of development hell.Bottom line, don't pay much attention to the flaws and enjoy this space adventure.PS: hey Manny, up yours.
—Capmarvell92
Difficult to rate this, really, since early 20th century science fiction is more about the past -- our real world past -- than about any given future.Triplanetary brings together some short stories and a novella set before the events of E. E. "Doc" Smith's "Lensmen" series. Fairly little is needed to know about the other books, though this sets up the heroes whose bloodlines will become important in the later stories.Manly men with steely rocket gazes able to invent any needed thing instantly, and the blonde haired supermodels, themselves hypercompetent, who love them. But why dwell on that?Two races that have existed from the dawn of time and no longer need bodies -- Arisians and Eddorians, or angels and demons -- are guiding humanity to salvation or oblivion, respectively. The Arisians have managed to hide their existence from the Eddorians for eons, but humanity has progressed to a point civilized enough to battle the Eddorians, who must take bodies to do their evil deeds, thus allowing them to be stopped, though not destroyed.The Arisians could take bodies, but choose instead to evolve two human bloodlines so that they can eventually take up the Lens and become Watchmen, safeguarding the twin galaxies and allowing the Arisians to peacefully withdraw and find their own destinies, having spent eons protecting the only four planets in the two galaxies that contain Civilization from the Eddorians.Triplanetary with a prologue dealing with the history of the universe, the Arisians and the Eddorians prior to human civilization.The human part opens with the Sinking of Atlantis, where the world has developed a high tech, nuclear civilization, but the mutually-assured destruction credo is called and Atlantean civilization ends. Next is the Fall of Rome, when Nero, a secret Eddorian, defeats an Arisian-inspired slave revolt and kills that nascent Civilization. It picks up again in WW1, where, once again, Eddorian-led German forces are destroying the new European Civilization.Since "Doc" Smith didn't know at the time about Nazis and WW2, the next episode picks up at an unnamed war where the protagonist of the previous story has retired from a successful postwar career as a munitions maker. He (naturally) wants to volunteer for this new war, but at 51, is too old. So he goes to work for a civilian munitions manufacturer and quickly rises to leadership before Eddorians at the top kick him out.Lastly, in the future, Mankind has met its distant cousins on Mars and Venus and formed the Triplanetary Council, and its intelligence arm, the Triplanetary Service, an organization filled exclusively with incorruptible steely-eyed rocket men. Will they be enough to fight off Eddorian-led pirates, a hostile first contact with an alien race, and the most destructive weapons in the twin galaxies?If you yearn for Golden Age SF, this is the stuff. And, being out of copyright, it's free lots of places. I got it on Amazon. For free.As is common with old SF, their distant future looks much like our distant past. But that's really part of its charm. Plus, it's one of the inspirations for Star Wars. Moon-sized planet killers -- check. (And the good guys eventually make one, too!) Families with a special destiny and unusual powers -- check. Planets with a single biome -- check. Y'know, aside from Tellus. Er, Earth.
—Brenda
I've read this book one and a half times. I read it all the way through a couple of years ago, and made it only half way through a few years before that.This is a book of an earlier, ostensibly less-complicated era. The good guys are ruggedly competent man's-men with hearts of gold and their innocent, supportive wives and girlfriends. The bad guys are pure dastardly bastards. Smith sets up this stark contrast between good and evil in the first chapters as he sets up this universe's iconic mythos, as the kind, godlike Arisians work in secret to defeat the tyrannical, megalomaniacal Eddoreans. So, the characterization and morality of this book is simplistic, and the dialog equally so. However, this book isn't trying to be a nuanced and thought-provoking tale; it is simply striving to be entertaining escapism. And, it more or less succeeds, with each action-packed pulpy misadventure trying its darnedest to be more thrilling than the last.Therein, for me, lies the problem. The action escalates so highly and so quickly that the reader becomes desensitized. In one scene, you have a pair of warrior-astronauts karate chopping their way through dozens of minions. In the next, you have a mysterious alien power melting an entire fleet. Not long later, you have submarine explosions so large that they expose the dry bedrock. This is the first book in a series; how long can this go on? I haven't read any of the others, and I probably won't, because they'd likely just be further sequences of scenes trying to top each other and make me ever more thoroughly impressed. Exaggerated spectacle is a thing that has to be conserved for it to have an impact, but here Doc Smith lavishes it across his pages like it's going out of style.You know, writing this review makes me wonder what effect the movies had in changing the nature of written science-fiction. Most science fiction I read is from the last couple of decades, and none of it is even remotely as action-packed as Triplanetary. Could that partly be because audiences who would have sought out that kind of entertainment from written stories are now getting it from movies?In short, this book is the essence cheesy, simplistic, action-packed science fiction that you'd expect from the pulp age. That provides plenty of charm, but don't go into this expecting Gene Wolfe.
—Corytregoart
