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Yesterday, I finished Children of the Lens (1954), the last in E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Lensmen series.

By rights, it’s a book I should have started and finished over fifty years ago. The works of Smith as well as Edgar Rice Burroughs and others were hugely popular in paperback in the late 1960s. All of my male friends in Junior High were devouring them.

But when everyone else was reading the Lensmen, I was reading The Skylark series, so I missed my opportunity the first time around.

Today, if I have anything to complain about the Lensmen series (or Skylark for that matter), it’s that they’ve aged. With each passing novel, the powers, technology, and scope of the books became larger and grander. I can’t read these stories without also imagining them taking place between the 1930s and 1950s.

Even back in the day, “Children” was criticized for two-dimensional characters and juvenile storyline, but at the same time, it was highly popular with young (and not so young) men and boys as a source of adventures and heroics.

13 and 14 year old boys in the 1960s were eating these books up with a proverbial spoon. They (and I) couldn’t get enough. This was the era where my love of science fiction was cemented. I suppose it’s where part of me is “stuck” as a writer, unable to produce whatever the 21st century pundits consider “relevant” and “progressive.”

This story is set after Kim and Clarissa have had children, a son and four daughters. They all possess vast powers with the lens as teenagers and are destined, according to “Mentor” to greatness and immortality.

The family along with other Lensmen, set off on yet another adventure, investigating unexplained events throughout space. One of them is the existence of “Dark Lensmen.” I have no proof of this, but there are parallels between Star Wars’ Jedi Knights and the Sith, the light and dark sides of the Force. I wouldn’t blame George Lucas from borrowing from this source. After all, he’s mined so many others.

The story is framed between recorded narrations of Kim’s son Kit. After the end of this book, he says his generation faced yet another great challenge. He is addressing a generation in his future who may have to confront the same thing. The story is a lesson and to help that future generation prepare for what came next.

What came next never happened.

In his Expanded Universe, Robert Heinlein wrote:

The Lensman [series] was left unfinished. There was to have been at least a seventh volume. As always, Doc had worked it out in great detail, but never (so far as I know) wrote it down because it was unpublishable then. But he told me the ending orally and in private. I shan’t repeat it, it is not my story. Possibly somewhere there is a manuscript, I hope so! All I will say is that the ending develops by inescapable logic from clues in Children of the Lens.

There are other books set in the same universe in the Vortex Blaster collection.

David Kyle wrote a series of Lensmen books that take place between “Second Stage Lensmen” and “Children.”

But that’s it.

Instead of the ride ending, I like to think of the Lensmen legacy as just the beginning. Some say they created the “Space Opera” and inspired generations of other books, movies, and TV shows. They also inspired generations of boys and girls to continue reading science fiction looking adventure, excitement, and most of all, fun.

I know the “old stuff” is often viewed with disdain by the modern “true” science fiction fans. Anything created before about 2000 is considered “bad” for lots and lots of reasons.

But whatever they consider SciFi today wouldn’t exist without everything and everyone that came before them, including “old, stale, pale males” like “Doc.”

I can read “Skylark of Space” or “A Princess of Mars” out of a sense of nostalgia, having first read them over half a century ago. I don’t have that same relationship with “Lensmen.” But only the foolish would believe that if there weren’t these much older works, there would never be something like Star Wars.

Science fiction has a history. I read and honor it even if younger people are forgetting where it all came from.

Like I said, it should be fun.