Are you a fan of space opera?
Are you a fan of Star Wars?
Perhaps Star Trek?
What about other potential space opera titles?
We could begin, of course, with Frank Herbert's classic Dune.
We could talk about Isaac Asimov's Foundation series.
We could talk about the more feminist and intersectional writings of Ursula K. Le Guin in the Hainish Cycle with her Left Hand of Darkness.
We could look at more recent additions to the space opera genre, like This Long Way to a Small Angry Planet by Becky Chambers.
Of course, there's always the classic Hyperion by Dan Simmons.
Maybe you've heard of Samuel R. Delaney's Babel 17.
And, of course, there's the forgotten classic with Fifth Head of Cerberus by Gene Wolfe.
They all share something in common: The Lensman series by E.E. ‘Doc’ Smith. Smith invented the space opera and archetypes seen in so many popular franchises.
But there is a far less admirable side to Doc Smith’s writings. He embraces eugenicist logic, ideas around scientific racism, and the typical gender-sex hierarchies perceived by a white cis heterosexual male as normative at the beginning of the last century.
Also, his writing style is plain embarrassing.
This is the opening verbiage of Triplanetary, a particularly noteworthy volume. Smith had rewritten an earlier selection of stories to transform it into a prequel for his initial trilogy, Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, and Second Stage Lensman, meaning Triplanetary is the volume intended to most especially represent the mythos of the story and their tone.
ONE MAN DISCOVERED THE TRUTH
—The Fall of Rome, the Wars that racked the world, mass murder and horror....
Men thought they were historical accidents, "human nature."
But each one was a move in a Universe-wide battle—and the men who suffered and died were the big chessmen.
Finally, one man discovered the truth—and faced his strange destiny in the ultimate struggle for control of the Universe.
First of the Famous Lensman Series…
CHAPTER 1
ARISIA AND EDDORE
Two thousand million or so years ago two galaxies were colliding; or, rather, were passing through each other. A couple of hundreds of millions of years either way do not matter, since at least that much time was required for the inter-passage. At about that same time—within the same plus-or-minus ten percent margin of error, it is believed—practically all of the suns of both those galaxies became possessed of planets.
There is much evidence to support the belief that it was not merely a coincidence that so many planets came into being at about the same time as the galactic inter-passage. Another school of thought holds that it was pure coincidence; that all suns have planets as naturally and as inevitably as cats have kittens.
This sci-fi documentary, unlike any space opera you have ever seen.
