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It has been almost a year-and-a-half since I reviewed E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Gray Lensman the fourth book in the “Lensman series” following Triplanetary, First Lensman, and Galactic Patrol.

Today, I’m reviewing Second Stage Lensman. While the Lensman series of books was first published in mass market paperback in the mid to late 1960s when I was in Junior High (and when every boy I knew was reading them), as a hardback book, it first came out in 1953. It had been published serially in “Astounding Science Fiction” from Nov 1941-to-Feb 1942.

Keep that in mind for the entire series since it is not only absolute classic science fiction and the emergence of the “space opera” but it really old.

That part is important, especially if you are used to more contemporary works “updated for modern audiences.” The 21st century progressive SciFi industry has little tolerance for it’s own past.

In this case, as with the others in the series, I can sort of see it, at least a bit.

For instance, slang. After all, from the 1940’s perspective, this is the future, but how would “future people” express themselves, especially when excited and agitated? How about:

“I’ll say they can’t!” Kinnison flared. “by Klono’s tungsten teeth, I won’t do it! We have a right to happiness, you and I, and we’ll…

This may not have been the first time in science fiction that manufactured future slang was expressed and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. As a kid in the early 1960s, I watched the Gerry and Sylvia Anderson marionette television show Fireball XL5 (great opening theme song, by the way). They used the word “Tootie” to mean something like “mixed up” or “crazy.”

Original Star Trek had its fair share. In the episode The Man Trap, Sulu (George Takei) thanked Janice (Grace Lee Whitney) for bringing him lunch in the botany lab by saying “May the Great Bird of the Galaxy bless your planet.”

In other episodes, various characters referenced fictional alien creatures used as analogy. In The Trouble With Tribbles the Klingon Korax (Michael Pataki), when trying to pick a fight with Enterprise officers in the bar on a space station, compared humans with “Regulan blood worms.”

And so it goes. But how about relationships, sex, and gender?

In the aforementioned novel, Kinnison says:

“Just a minute. I am a person of a race having two equal sexes. Equal in every way.”

He was addressing the leader of a matriarchal planet who believed only females were actual people and males (or anything else) was an inferior life form.

However, a few sentences later, Kinnison said:

“But true,” he assured her. “And now are you going to lay off me and behave yourself, like a good little girl, or am I going to have to do a it of massaging on your brain? Or wind that beautiful body of yours a couple of times around a tree? I’m asking this for your own good, kid, believe me.”

I wouldn’t call that “equal” and as “not progressive” as I can be, this seems pretty archaic. The language is more fit for a 1940s “hard-boiled detective” novel, and it’s unlikely that people of that era reading these works actually talked like this.

The book picks up where the previous novel left off. While the Gray Lensman has his challenges, it’s a foregone conclusion that he will always win in the end. In searching for the ultimate intelligence behind the criminal organization the Galactic Patrol has been fighting all this time, he again goes undercover, this time in several different guises. He almost blows his cover on several occasions (to build tension) but it still works out okay.

One unanticipated event is that he recruits his bride-to-be Clarissa MacDougall to be a Lensman, the very first female Lensman. In a previous novel, it was stated that among humans, only males could be Lensman. I forget the reason, but that rule seems to have gone out the window. Even though “Mac” feels unworthy of a lens, she gets one anyway and has her own adventures.

They’re pretty minor actually and don’t consume much of the story. If this story had been written today, Mac would have taken over, conquered everyone, and made Kim and the rest of the male Galactic Patrol seem like inept buffoons because, like the matriarchal society believed, man aren’t “real people.”

In this story, finally, Kinnison does find and battle the ultimate intelligent evil causing all the trouble. It’s a “mentor” creature like the one who originally gave humanity the lens. A rogue, of course, and Ken almost perishes defeating the beast.

I thought it was funny that, when he woke up exhausted, his strategy for revitalizing himself was to cook up a rare, juicy steak and make a pot of black coffee. I’m surprised it wasn’t bacon.

The Lensman series is a romp into the past, or rather how the past saw the future. It was a hit among the boys of my generation when we were around twelve to fourteen because that seems to be the target audience for these tales. Boys in that age group today, would probably be bored to tears, and reviewers would tear it to shreds. This is definitely adventure for a bygone era.

As much fun as I make of these stories, I can’t ignore their obvious impact on the genre in general. I mentioned “Star Trek” before, but it’s likely Roddenberry read a few of these tales and that they had an influence on how he created Kirk and company.

Kirk, like Kinnison, is a larger-than-life hero in command of vast power and who charges through the galaxy chasing down and beating up bad guys. Unlike Ken, Kirk never finds THE girl, but rather several of them as he travels from planet to planet.

Smith, both in this and the Skylark series (which I spent my youth reading instead of “Lensman”) valued marriage and a hero’s fidelity to one woman for life. This is where “Second State Lensman” ends, with Kim and Mac getting married.

Smith spends a bit too much time on this anti-climactic conclusion after the tremendous build up of battle after battle to the ultimate conflict, but I think it reflected his value system as much as the all out pummeling the Patrol gives their enemies.

Only one more book in the original series to go. I’m sure I would have enjoyed the experience more when I was fourteen, but it’s nice to be able to reach into my past and connect with that sense of wide-eyed wonder I had way back in the day. Science fiction was so much fun back then.