E. E. Smith (1) (1890–1965)

Reading the original Buck Rogers novels helped kindle within me a fondness for pulp sci-fi. And Doc Smith is a legend of that period. So I was really prepared to enjoy this book. But ultimately I couldn't even finish it. The style is so overwrought, I could practically hear the voice of a Radio Drama Announcer reading the descriptions. ("...through raging beam, through blasting ray, through crushing force; through storm of explosive and through rain of metal the Dresden remained apparently unscathed. Her screens were radiating high into the violet, but they showed no signs of weakening or of going down...Since she was...being fought by inhumanly intelligent monstrosities, she was invulnerable to any one ship of the Fleet as long as her generators could be fed.") The opening story ("The Galaxy Primes") is so badly plotted and the characters so broadly drawn, I had to just thumb through the last half of it. If these stories are examples of good science fiction from the Pulps era, it is no wonder that sci-fi had a bad reputation for decades.… (meer)

Indeholder "Philip Harborde: Preface", "Walter Gillings: Foreword", "To the Far Reaches of Space", "Robot Nemesis", "Pirates of Space", "The Vortex Blaster", "Tedric", "Lord Tedric", "Subspace Survivors", "The Imperial Stars", "E. E. 'Doc' Smith: Afterword: The Epic of Space", "Bibliography".

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Not so much a 'best of', this colllection brought together some previously unreprinted short stories and some examples of first magazine publications of stories later reworked into novels. Sadly, it also brought to general attention some material such as Smith's late (1964) story 'The Imperial stars' which had been intended as the beginning of a new series before the author's comparatively early death. Other hands seized on this and sharecropped the story out of all recognition as the 'Family d'Alembert' series of novels, which could only really be said to have been based on a few notes EES sketched on the back of an envelope somewhere.

This anthology also includes an essay by Walter Gillings, a contemporary one by Smith himself, and a bibliography.

Smith's writing was of its time; his dialogue seems excruciating nowadays, but the story-telling and plotting itself stands up well. Smith does not deserve the cultural sneers directed against him by later generations of fans, as long as his work isn't held up as an exemplar of the best the genre can produce. The popularity of space opera as a sub-genre now, when re-invigorated by modern writers such as Iain Banks, Colin Greenland or Alastair Reynolds, bears out the appeal of mile-long spaceships, daring heroes and weird worlds. All together now: "Gosh wow oh boy oh boy oh boy..."… (meer)