First Lensman
I finished First Lensman a while back or should I say I finished with it because I didn’t actually read to the end, I got bored and skimmed.
The thing is that these books were written for teenage boys fifty years ago and they have dated rather fatally in terms of entertainment value. The main thing that got to me was that the bad guys were really really evil and the good guys were incorruptibly morally pure and the books just fail to build up any tension around how the characters will be changed or challenged as people. The books are pure plot and idea, the feeble attempts at portraying human relationships fall into either manly men slapping each other on the back and admiring each other’s abilities and moral fibre, men admiring young women’s pluckiness, women insisting on having adventures and then being grateful to men for being rescued when they inevitably end up tied up in the bad guy’s lair and women winking at each other as they are approached by a man. There is the occasional narrative discussion of a man grappling with being torn between going out and shooting guns with the boys or staying back and commanding the battleship.
Having said that, the scale of the writing reminds me of reading Larry Niven’s Ringworld and even Iain Bank’s Culture novels where you are required to get your head around a couple of alien cultures and their peculiar sociology, psychology and history.
[tags]first lensman, books, scifi, e e doc smith[/tags]
