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Edward Elmer Smith PhD (also E. E. Smith, E. E. "Doc" Smith, Doc Smith, "Skylark" Smith, or—to his family—Ted) (May 2, 1890 – August 31, 1965) was an American food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes) and early science fiction author, best known for the Lensman and Skylark series. He is sometimes called the father of space opera.
Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin on May 2, 1890 to Fred Jay Smith and Caroline Mills Smith, both staunch Presbyterians of British ancestry. His mother was a teacher born in Michigan in February 1855; his father was a sailor, born in Maine in January 1855 to an English father. They moved to Spokane, Washington the winter after Edward Elmer was born, where Mr. Smith was working as a contractor in 1900. In 1902 the family moved to Seneaquoteen, near the Pend Oreille River, in Kootenai County, Idaho. He had four siblings, Rachel M. born September 1882, Daniel M. born January 1884, Mary Elizabeth born February 1886 (all of whom were born in Michigan), and Walter E. born July 1891 in Washington. In 1910, Fred and Caroline Smith and their son Walter were living in the Markham Precinct of Bonner County, Idaho; Fred is listed in census records as a farmer.
Smith worked primarily as a manual laborer until he injured his wrist, at the age of 19, while escaping from a fire. He attended the University of Idaho. (Many years later he would be installed in the 1984 Class of the University of Idaho Alumni Hall of Fame.) He entered its prep school in 1907, and graduated with two degrees in Chemical Engineering in 1914. He was president of the Chemistry Club, the Chess Club, and the Mandolin and Guitar Club, and captain of the Drill and Rifle Team; he also sang the bass lead in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His undergraduate thesis was Some Clays of Idaho, co-written with classmate Chester Fowler Smith, who died in California of tuberculosis the following year, after taking a teaching fellowship at Berkeley. It is not known whether the two were related.
On October 5, 1915, in Boise, Idaho he married Jeanne Craig MacDougall, the sister of his college roommate, Allen Scott (Scotty) MacDougall. (Her sister was named Clarissa MacLean MacDougall; the heroine of the Lensman novels would later be named Clarissa MacDougall.) Jeanne MacDougall was born in Glasgow, Scotland; her parents were Donald Scott MacDougall, a violinist, and Jessica Craig MacLean. Her father had moved to Boise, Idaho when the children were young, and later sent for his family; he died while they were en route in 1905. Jeanne's mother, who remarried businessman and retired politician John F. Kessler in 1914 worked at, and later owned, a boarding house on Ridenbaugh Street.
After college, Smith was a junior chemist for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., developing standards for butter and for oysters. He may have served as a lieutenant in the U.S. Army during World War I, but details are unknown. His draft card, partly illegible, seems to show that Smith requested exemption from military service, based on his wife's dependence and on his contribution to the war effort as a civilian chemist.
One evening in 1915, the Smiths were visiting a former classmate from the University of Idaho, Dr. Carl Garby, who had also moved to Washington, D.C. He lived nearby in the Seaton Place Apartments with his wife, Lee Hawkins Garby. A long discussion about journeys into outer space ensued and it was suggested that Smith should write down his ideas and speculations as a story about interstellar travel. Although he was interested, Smith believed that some thought that some romantic elements would be required and he was uncomfortable with that.
Mrs. Garby offered to take care of the love interest and the romantic dialogue, and Smith decided to give it a try. The sources of inspirations for the main characters in the novel were themselves; the "Seatons" and "Cranes" were based on the Smiths and Garbys respectively. About one-third of The Skylark of Space was completed by the end of 1916, when Smith and Garby gradually abandoned work on it.
Smith earned his master's degree in chemistry from the George Washington University in 1917, studying under Dr. Charles E. Munroe. Smith completed his PhD in chemical engineering in 1918, with a food engineering focus; his dissertation, The effect of bleaching with oxides of nitrogen upon the baking quality and commercial value of wheat flour, was published in 1919. (Warner and Fleischer give the title The Effect of the Oxides of Nitrogen upon the Carotin Molecule – C40H56, which is difficult to explain. Sam Moskowitz gives the degree date 1919, perhaps reflecting different dates for thesis submission, thesis defense, and degree certification.)
After Smith retired, he and his wife lived in Clearwater, Florida, in the fall and winter, driving the smaller of their two trailers to Seaside, Oregon, each April, often stopping at science fiction conventions on the way. (Smith did not like to fly.) In 1963, he was presented the inaugural First Fandom Hall of Fame award at the 21st World Science Fiction Convention in Washington, D.C. Some of his biography is captured in an essay by Robert A. Heinlein, which was reprinted in the collection Expanded Universe in 1980. There is a more detailed, although allegedly error-ridden, biography in Sam Moskowitz's Seekers of Tomorrow.
Robert A. Heinlein and Smith were friends. (Heinlein dedicated his 1958 novel Methuselah's Children "To Edward E. Smith, PhD" Heinlein reported that E. E. Smith perhaps took his "unrealistic" heroes from life, citing as an example the extreme competence of the hero of Spacehounds of IPC. He reported that E. E. Smith was a large, blond, athletic, very intelligent, very gallant man, married to a remarkably beautiful, intelligent red-haired woman named MacDougal (thus perhaps the prototypes of 'Kimball Kinnison' and 'Clarissa MacDougal'). In Heinlein's essay, he reports that he began to suspect Smith might be a sort of "superman" when he asked Smith for help in purchasing a car. Smith tested the car by driving it on a back road at illegally high speeds with their heads pressed tightly against the roof columns to listen for chassis squeaks by bone conduction—a process apparently improvised on the spot.
In his non-series novels written after his professional retirement, Galaxy Primes, Subspace Explorers, and Subspace Encounter, E. E. Smith explores themes of telepathy and other mental abilities collectively called "psionics", and of the conflict between libertarian and socialistic/communistic influences in the colonization of other planets. Galaxy Primes was written after critics like Groff Conklin and P. Schuyler Miller in the early 50s accused his fiction for being passé, and he made an attempt to do something more in line with the concepts Astounding editor John W. Campbell encouraged his writers to make stories about. Despite this, it was rejected by Campbell, and it was eventually published by Amazing Stories in 1959. His late story "The Imperial Stars" (1964), featuring a troupe of circus performers involved in sabotage in a galactic empire, recaptured some of the atmosphere from his earlier works and was intended as the first in a new series, with outlines of later parts rumored to still exist.
The fourth Skylark novel, Skylark DuQuesne, ran in the June to October 1965 issues of If, beginning once again as the cover story. Editor Frederik Pohl introduced it with a one-page summary of the previous stories, which were all at least 30 years old.
Smith's novels are generally considered to be the classic space operas, and he is sometimes called the "first nova" of twentieth century science fiction.
Smith expressed a preference for inventing fictional technologies that were not strictly impossible (so far as the science of the day was aware) but highly unlikely: "the more highly improbable a concept is—short of being contrary to mathematics whose fundamental operations involve no neglect of infinitesimals—the better I like it" was his phrase.
Lensman was one of five finalists when the 1966 World Science Fiction Convention judged the Isaac Asimov's Foundation the Best All-Time Series.
The Science Fiction and Fantasy Hall of Fame inducted Smith in 2004.
Smith was widely read by scientists and engineers from the 1930s into the 1970s. Literary precursors of ideas which arguably entered the military-scientific complex include SDI (Triplanetary), stealth (Gray Lensman), the OODA Loop, C3-based warfare, and the AWACS (Gray Lensman).
An influence that is inarguable was described in a June 11, 1947 letter[76] to Doc from John W. Campbell (the editor of Astounding magazine, where much of the Lensman series was originally published). In it, Campbell relayed Captain Cal Laning's acknowledgment that he had used Smith's ideas for displaying the battlespace situation (called the "tank" in the stories) in the design of the United States Navy's ships' Combat Information Centers. "The entire set-up was taken specifically, directly, and consciously from the Directrix. In your story, you reached the situation the Navy was in—more communication channels than integration techniques to handle it. You proposed such an integrating technique and proved how advantageous it could be. You, sir, were 100% right. As the Japanese Navy—not the hypothetical Boskonian fleet—learned at an appalling cost."
One underlying theme of the later Lensman novels was the difficulty in maintaining military secrecy—as advanced capabilities are revealed, the opposing side can often duplicate them. This point was also discussed extensively by John Campbell in his letter to Doc. Also in the later Lensman novels, and particular after the "Battle of Klovia" broke the Boskonian's power base at the end of Second Stage Lensmen, the Boskonian forces and particularly Kandron of Onlo reverted to terroristic tactics to attempt to demoralize Civilization, thus providing an early literary glimpse into this modern problem of both law enforcement and military response. The use of "Vee-two" gas by the pirates attacking the Hyperion in Triplanetary (in both magazine and book appearances) also suggests anticipation of the terrorist uses of poison gases. (But note that Smith lived through WW I, when the use of poison gas on troops was well known to the populace; extending the assumption that pirates might use it if they could obtain it was no great extension of the present-day knowledge.)
The beginning of the story the Skylark of Space describes in relative detail the protagonist's research into separation of platinum group residues, subsequent experiments involving electrolysis and the discovery of a process evocative of cold fusion (over 50 years before Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann). He describes a nuclear process yielding large amounts of energy and producing only negligible radioactive waste—which then goes on to form the basis of the adventures in the Skylark books. Smith's general description of the process of discovery is highly evocative of Röntgen's descriptions of his discovery of the X-ray.
Another theme of the Skylark novels involves precursors of modern information technology. The humanoid aliens encountered in the first novel have developed a primitive technology called the "mechanical educator", which allows direct conversion of brain waves into intelligible thought for transmission to others or for electrical storage. By the third novel in the series, Skylark of Valeron, this technology has grown into an "Electronic Brain" which is capable of computation on all "bands" of energy—electromagnetism, gravity, and "tachyonic" energy and radiation bands included. This is itself derived from a discussion of reductionist atomic theory in the second novel, Skylark Three, which brings to mind modern quark and sub-quark theories of elementary particle physics.
More information:
Code:
https://www.goodreads.com/author/show/4477395.E_E_Doc_Smith |
Lensman series
E.E. Doc Smith - Triplanetary (read by Reed McColm)
E.E. Doc Smith - First Lensman (read by Reed McColm)
E.E. Doc Smith - Galactic Patrol (read by Reed McColm)
E.E. Doc Smith - Gray Lensman (read by Reed McColm)
E.E. Doc Smith - Second Stage Lensmen (read by Reed McColm)
E.E. Doc Smith - The Vortex Blaster (read by Reed McColm)
E.E. Doc Smith - Children Of The Lens (read by Reed McColm)
Skylark series
E.E. Doc Smith - The Skylark Of Space (read by Reed McColm)
E.E. Doc Smith - Skylark Three (read by Reed McColm)
E.E. Doc Smith - Skylark Of Valeron (read by Reed McColm)
E.E. Doc Smith - Skylark DuQuesne (read by Reed McColm)
Other
E.E. Doc Smith - Spacehounds Of IPC (read by Harry Shaw)
Code:
Lensman series
http://rapidgator.net/file/4ecf6888e0e0f0460e2a861867cca4d2/Triplanetary.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/e22a5a981eb43e811909c01992fd32df/First_Lensman.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/c486bc00ec2daa86dfbdd2a8eb3b9cdc/Galactic_Patrol.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/33e7ad69c263474d24fbc8d2e601948f/Gray_Lensman.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/32e0f0dfd4669a3ca5b0dfc7fcc224d2/Second_Stage_Lensmen.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/56cab9c5ccec13eb45794dc5d7d0af45/The_Vortex_Blaster.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/f740bc793e97b37de67889d048068a42/Children_Of_The_Lens.rar.html
Skylark series
http://rapidgator.net/file/ba80dbdaa486ff8b06d25e31c5ea7142/The_Skylark_Of_Space.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/8e0609c7d7379584578300556a8445ea/Skylark_Three.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/85ab71feb0a6d09ae44f11dc945a59e2/Skylark_Of_Valeron.rar.html
http://rapidgator.net/file/96c2d277c1052bc923f82988dd507b13/Skylark_DuQuesne.rar.html
Other
http://rapidgator.net/file/a2cb784d8b4a0b315a0311f0e41a1b4d/Spacehounds_Of_IPC.rar.html |
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