Cover art for “Children of the Lens” by E.E. “Doc” Smith
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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.
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