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E. E. Smith, also Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D., E.E. "Doc" Smith, Doc Smith, "Skylark" Smith, and (to family) Ted (May 2, 1890 - August 31, 1965) was a science fiction author who wrote the Lensman series and the Skylark series, among others. Family & education 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; his father was a sailor, born in England; they moved to Spokane, Washington that winter. In 1902 the family moved to Seneaquoteen, near the Pend d'Oreille River, in northern Idaho. He had four siblings, three of whom were named Daniel, Rachel, and Mary Elizabeth. He 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, where he is installed in the 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 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. Her mother worked at, and later owned, a boarding house on Ridenbaugh Street. The Smiths had three children, Roderick N., born June 3 1918 (a design engineer at Lockheed Aircraft); Verna Jean (later Verna Smith Trestrail), born August 25 1920, his literary executor until her death in 1994 (her son Kim Trestrail is now the executor); and Clarissa M.(later Clarissa Wilcox), born December 13 1921. Early chemical career After graduating from college, he worked as a junior civil service chemist for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D.C., working on standards for butter and oysters. He apparently served as a Lieutenant in the U.S. Cavalry in World War I, but in what capacity is not known. One evening in 1915, while the Smiths were visiting their neighbors in the Seaton Place Apartments, Dr. Carl and Lee Hawkins Garby, Mrs. Garby suggested that Dr. Smith write a story set in outer space. Smith said that he would do so if Mrs. Garby would handle the love interest. The two had completed about a third of The Skylark of Space by the end of 1916, when they gradually abandoned work on it. The Smiths were the basis for the Seatons in the novel, and the Cranes were drawn from the Garbys. Smith received a master's degree in Chemistry from George Washington University in 1917, studying under Charles E. Munroe. He earned a doctorate in Chemical Engineering in 1918, with a thesis entitled The effect of bleaching with oxides of nitrogen upon the baking quality and commercial value of wheat flour, which was published in 1919. Warner and Fleischer instead give the thesis title as The Effect of the Oxides of Nitrogen upon the Carotin Molecule --- C40H56, which is difficult to explain. Moskowitz instead gives the date of the degree as 1919, which may result from confusion with the publication date. Writing Skylark In 1919 Dr. Smith took a job as chief chemist for F.W. Stock & Sons of Hillsdale, Michigan, working on doughnut mixes. Late in the year, when baby-sitting (presumably for Roderick) while his wife attended a movie, he resumed work on The Skylark of Space, finishing it in the spring of 1920. He submitted it to many book publishers and magazines, spending more in postage than he would eventually receive for its publication. He received an encouraging rejection letter from Bob Davis, editor of Argosy, in 1922, saying that he liked the novel personally, but that it was too far out for his readers. (According to Warner, but no other source, Dr. Smith began work on the sequel, Skylark III, before the first book was accepted.) Finally, upon seeing the April 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, he submitted it to the magazine; it was accepted, initially for $75, later raised to $125. It was published in the August – October 1928 issues. It was such a success that managing editor T. O'Conor Sloane requested a sequel before the second installment had been published. Mrs. Garby wasn't interested in collaborating further, so Dr. Smith began work on Skylark Three on his own. It was published in the August through October 1930 issues of Amazing. This was as far as he had planned to take the Skylark series; it was praised in Amazing's letter column, and he was paid 3/4¢ per word, surpassing Amazing's previous record of half a cent. Miscellaneous writing Dr. Smith then began work on what he intended as a new series, starting with Spacehounds of IPC, which he finished in the autumn of 1930. In this novel he took pains to avoid the scientific impossibilities which had bothered some readers of the Skylark novels. Even in 1938, after he had written Galactic Patrol, Dr. Smith considered it his finest work; he later said of it, "This was really scientific fiction; not, like the Skylarks, pseudo-science"; and even at the end of his career he considered it his only work of true science fiction. It was published in the July through September 1931 issues of Amazing, but with unauthorized changes by Sloane. Fan letters in the magazine complained about the novel's containment within the solar system, and Sloane sided with the readers. So when Harry Bates, editor of Astounding Stories, offered Smith 2¢/word—payable on publication—for his next story, he agreed; this meant that it could not be a sequel to Spacehounds. This book would be Triplanetary, "in which scientific detail would not be bothered about, and in which his imagination would run riot." Indeed, characters within the story point out its psychological and scientific implausibilities, and sometimes even seem to suggest self-parody. At other times they are conspicuously silent about obvious implausibilities. The January 1933 issue of Astounding announced that Triplanetary would appear in the March issue, and that issue's cover illustrated a scene from the story, but Astoundings financial difficulties prevented the story from appearing. Dr. Smith then submitted the manuscript to Wonder Stories, whose editor, Charles D. Hornig, rejected it, later boasting about the rejection in a fanzine. He finally submitted it to Amazing, which published it beginning in January 1934, but for only half a cent a word. Shortly after it was accepted, F. Orlin Tremaine, the new editor of the revived Astounding, offered one cent a word for Triplanetary; when he learned that he was too late, he suggested a third Skylark novel instead. In the winter of 1933-4 Dr. Smith worked on The Skylark of Valeron, but he felt that the story was getting out of control; he sent his first draft to Tremaine, with a distraught note asking for suggestions. Tremaine accepted the rough draft for $850, and announced it in the June 1934 issue, with a full-page editorial and a three-quarter page advertisement. The novel was published in the August 1934 through February 1935 issues. Astoundings circulation rose by 10,000 for the first issue, and its two main competitors, Amazing and Wonder Stories fell into financial difficulties, both skipping issues within a year. Lensman series In January 1936 Dr. Smith took a job, for salary plus profit-sharing, as a food technologist (a cereal chemist) at the Dawn Doughnut Company of Jackson, Michigan. This initially entailed almost a year's worth of eighteen-hour days and seven-day workweeks. Persistent but unconfirmable accounts maintain that Dr. Smith developed the first process for sticking powdered sugar on doughnuts. Dr. Smith had been contemplating writing a "space-police novel" since early 1927; once he had "the Lensmen's universe fairly well set up," he reviewed his science fiction collection for "cops-and-robbers" stories. He cites Constantinescue's "War of the Universe" as a negative example, and Starzl and Williamson as positive ones. Tremaine responded extremely positively to a brief description of the idea. Once the new doughnut firm became profitable in late 1936, Dr. Smith wrote an eighty-five page outline for what became the four core Lensman novels; in early 1937 Tremaine committed to buying them. Segmenting the story into four novels required considerable effort to avoid dangling loose ends; Dr. Smith cites Edgar Rice Burroughs as a negative example. After the outline was complete, he wrote a more detailed outline of Galactic Patrol, plus a detailed graph of its structure, with "peaks of emotional intensity and the valleys of characterization and background material." He notes, however, that he was never able to follow any of his outlines at all closely, as his "characters get away from me and do exactly as they damn please." After completing the rough draft of Galactic Patrol, he wrote the concluding chapter of the last book in the series, Children of the Lens. Galactic Patrol was published in the September 1937 through February 1938 issues of Astounding; unlike the revised book edition, it was not set in the same universe as Triplanetary. Gray Lensman, the second book in the series, appeared in Astounding's October 1939 through January 1940 issues. Note that the frequent British spelling “grey” is simply a recurrent mistake, starting with the cover of the first installment; Moskowitz's usage, “The Grey Lensman,” is even harder to justify. Dr. Smith worked for the US Army between 1941 and 1945. An extended segment in the novel version of Triplanetary, set during World War II, suggests intimate familiarity with explosives and munitions manufacturing. Retirement and late writing After Dr. 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. (Dr. Smith did not like to fly.) 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 Dr. Smith were friends. 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 one of Heinlein's books, he reports that he began to suspect Smith might be a sort of "superman" when he asked Dr. 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. Critical opinion His novels are generally considered to be the original space operas and offer almost non-stop action. However they are, to a fair extent, still "true" science fiction, in that they use the extrapolation of known science and, often, the extrapolation of existing and historic social and political patterns of the early to mid-twentieth century. Smith himself 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 unlikely the better" was his phrase. The Lensman novels were particularly interesting for their imaginative use of extra-terrestrial, non-human characters as major heroes, another science fiction "first." Literary influences In his essay "The Epic of Space," Dr. Smith listed (by last name only) authors he enjoyed reading: John W. Campbell, L. Sprague de Camp, Robert A. Heinlein, Murray Leinster, H.P. Lovecraft, A. Merritt (specifically The Ship of Ishtar, The Moon Pool, The Snake Mother, and Dwellers in the Mirage, as well as the character John Kenton), C.L. Moore (specifically Jirel of Joiry), Roman Frederick Starzl, John Taine, A.E. van Vogt, Stanley G. Weinbaum (specifically Trweel), and Jack Williamson. In a passage on his preparation for writing the Lensman novels, he notes that Constantinescu's "War of the Universe" was not a masterpiece, but says that Starzl and Williamson were masters; this suggests that Starzl's Interplanetary Flying Patrol may have been an influence on Dr. Smith's Triplanetary Patrol, later the Galactic Patrol. The feeding of the Overlords of Delgon upon the life-force of their victims at the end of chapter five of Galactic Patrol seems a clear allusion to chapter twenty-nine of The Moon Pool; Merritt's account of the Taithu and the power of love in chapters twenty-nine and thirty-four also bear some resemblance to the end of Children of the Lens. Dr. Smith also mentions Edgar Rice Burroughs, complaining about loose ends at the end of one of his novels. Dr. Smith acknowledges the help of the Galactic Roamers writers' workshop, plus E. Everett Evans, Ed Counts, an unnamed aeronautical engineer, Dr. James Enright, and Dr. Richard W. Dodson. Dr. Smith's daughter, Verna, lists the following authors as visitors to the Smith household in her youth: Lloyd Eshbach, Robert A. Heinlein, Dave Kyle, Bob Tucker, Jack Williamson, Fred Pohl, A. Merritt, and the Galactic Roamers. Dr. Smith cites Bigelow's Theoretical Chemistry–Fundamentals as a justification for the possibility of the inertialess drive. There is also an extended reference to Rudyard Kipling's "Ballad of Boh Da Thon" in Gray Lensman. Sam Moskowitz's biographical essay on Dr. Smith in Seekers of Tomorrow states that he regularly read Argosy magazine, and everything by H.G. Wells, Jules Verne, H. Rider Haggard, Edgar Allan Poe, and Edgar Rice Burroughs. Moskowitz also notes that Dr. Smith's "reading enthusiasms included poetry, philosophy, ancient and medieval history, and all of English literature." (Dr. Smith's grandson notes that he spoke, and sang, German.) The influence of these is not readily apparent, except in the Roman section of Triplanetary, and in the impeccable but convoluted grammar of Dr. Smith's narration. Some influence of nineteenth century philosophy of language may be detectable in the account in Galactic Patrol of the Lens of Arisia as a universal translator, which is reminiscent of Frege's strong realism about Sinn, that is, thought or sense. Both Moskowitz and Smith's daughter Verna Smith Trestrail report that Dr. Smith had a troubled relationship with John Campbell, the editor of Astounding. It is noteworthy that Dr. Smith's most successful works were published under Campbell, but the degree of influence is uncertain. The original outline for the Lensman series had been accepted by F. Orlin Tremaine, and Dr. Smith angered Campbell by showing loyalty to Tremaine at his new magazine, Comet, when he sold him "The Vortex Blaster" in 1941. Campbell's announcement of Children of the Lens, in 1947, was less than enthusiastic. Campbell later said that he published it only reluctantly, though he praised it privately, and bought little from Smith thereafter. Fictional appearances Doc himself appears as a character in the 2006 novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont. The novel describes friendship and rivalry among pulp writers of the 1930s; it also includes Walter Gibson, creator of The Shadow, and Lester Dent, creator of Doc Savage. He also appears as "Lensman Ted Smith" in the 1980 novel "The Number Of The Beast" by Robert A. Heinlein. Series Lensman Skylark Subspace Family d'Alembert (with Stephen Goldin - in fact only parts of the first book are by Smith, the rest is by Goldin based on Smith's novella) Lord Tedric (with Gordon Eklund) Novels Non-fiction Secondary sources | |||||||
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