E.E. "Doc" Smith and Lee Hawkins Garby, The Skylark of Space, 1928
Skylark of Space was first published as a serial in Amazing Stories edited by Hugo Gernsbeck, for whom the Hugo Award is named. The book is famous, not for any literary merit for it has very little of that, but for launching (ha!) the genre of the "space opera." Space opera is the branch of science fiction that explains very little of the science as heroic figures traverse interstellar or intergalactic space finding adventure. Villains are Bad Guys, our heroes are Good Guys and the Good Guys always win, despite facing daunting odds. Comic strip heroes Buck Rogers and Flash Gordon are classic examples but Doc Smith and the Skylark were there first.
No, not this kind of skylark.
Doc Smith actually did have a PhD in chemistry and specialized in the chemistry of commercial doughnut mixes, for which the world owes him much. In the nineteen-teens he was busy doing important doughnut research when he and some friends thought it would be a lark (get it? get it? ha!) to try writing some of these fantastic stories that were getting increasingly popular. Doc thought he'd have trouble writing romantic scenes and therefore Lee Hawkins Garby, the wife of a friend wrote what passes for romance in the book.
The public image of doughnuts in 1919 when Doc was writing Skyklark
The story sat in a drawer for over a decade before Doc submitted it to Gernsbeck's Amazing Stories and launched [Doc's long writing career}tab:https://www.bookseriesinorder.com/e-e-doc-smith/.
We know right away that we are not terribly concerned with scientific verisimilitude with the novel's opening paragraph:
Petrified with astonishment, Richard Seaton stared after the copper steam-bath upon which he had been electrolyzing his solution of "X," the unknown metal. For as soon as he had removed the beaker the heavy bath had jumped endwise from under his hand as though it were alive. It had flown with terrific speed over the table, smashing apparatus and bottles of chemicals on its way, and was even now disappearing through the open window. He seized his prism binoculars and focused them upon the flying vessel, a speck in the distance. Through the glass he saw that it did not fall to the ground, but continued on in a straight line, only its rapidly diminishing size showing the enormous velocity with which it was moving. It grew smaller and smaller, and in a few moments disappeared utterly.
What is X? Smith never explains, but it is the MaGuffin that, when combined with copper, unlocks the vast "intra-atomic" energy of copper. Think of it as something like cold fusion because it is just as real as that was.
Seaton is a brilliant chemist who also happens to be as ripped as Hercules. His only match in brilliance and physique is the dastardly Dr. Marc DuQuesne, a cold calculating villain who cares only for himself. DuQuesne manages to steal Seaton's research and an arms race of sorts begins between the two men to unleash intra-atomic energy. Intrigue! Drama! Science-like technobabble!
No, not that kind of Skylark either.
Both men race to build a spaceship, which they delightfully refer to as a "space-car." Seaton builds a bigger and better space-car (natch!) which his best girl, Dottie, names the Skylark. What follows are space adventures of the first order. The ships get caught in a gravity of a "dead star" (neutron star? black hole?) and barely escape. They land on a planet of giant monsters worthy of Edgar Rice Burroughs.
The Skylark beset by monsters.
It is all good, clean fun until the last third of the book wherein things take a very nasty turn. They land on a planet named Osnome on which two factions, Mardonale and Kondal, have been at war for centuries. Our heroes first meet the Mardonlians but soon discover that the evil Mordolians plan to kill them and steal the Skylark. Eek, Bad Guys! Fortunately the Kondalians help them escape! Whew, Good Guys!
The Kondalians have a device that not only teaches our heroes the Kondalian language, but gives Seaton knowledge of all Kondalian customs and law. There are two romantic couples that are our heroes decide to get married since, as Dottie explains, "Don't you know that a marriage that is legal where it is performed is legal anywhere, and that no law says that the marriage must be performed upon the Earth?" Everyone agrees that this is obviously the case and decide to get married. Say, someone asks, Seaton, since you know all the laws and customs of Kondal, where we are planning to marry, what is the marriage ceremony like here? Here's his answer, and I want you to remember that this is a description of Smith's Good Guy civilization:
"Well, as nearly as I can explain it, it's a funny kind of a mixture—partly theology, partly Darwinism, or at least, making a fetish of evolution, and partly pure economic determinism. They believe in a Supreme Being, whom they call the First Cause—that is the nearest English equivalent—and they recognize the existence of an immortal and unknowable life-principle, or soul. They believe that the First Cause has decreed the survival of the fittest as the fundamental law, which belief accounts for their perfect physiques...."
"Perfect physiques? Why, they're as weak as children," interrupted Dorothy.
"Yes, but that is because of the smallness of the planet," returned Seaton. "You see, a man of my size weighs only eighty-six pounds here, on a spring balance, so he would need only the muscular development of a boy of twelve or so. In a contest of strength, either of you girls could easily handle two of the strongest men upon Osnome. In fact, the average Osnomian could stand up on our Earth only with the greatest difficulty. But that isn't the fault of the people; they are magnificently developed for their surroundings. They have attained this condition by centuries of weeding out the unfit. They have no hospitals for the feeble-minded or feeble-bodied—abnormal persons are not allowed to live. The same reasoning accounts for their perfect cleanliness, moral and physical. Vice is practically unknown. They believe that clean living and clean thinking are rewarded by the production of a better physical and mental type...."
"Yes, especially as they correct wrong living by those terrible punishments the Kofedix [The Kondal King ]told us about," interrupted Margaret.
"That probably helps some. They also believe that the higher the type is, the faster will evolution proceed, and the sooner will mankind reach what they call the Ultimate Goal, and know all things. Believing as they do that the fittest must survive, and thinking themselves, of course, the superior type, it is ordained that Mardonale must be destroyed utterly, root and branch. They believe that the slaves are so low in the scale, millions of years behind in evolution, that they do not count. Slaves are simply intelligent and docile animals, little more than horses or oxen. Mardonalians and savages are unfit to survive and must be exterminated.
"Their ministers are chosen from the very fittest. They are the strongest, cleanest-living, and most vigorous men of this clean and vigorous nation, and are usually high army officers as well as ministers."
Rather than responding with "Are you effing serious???" everyone thinks that this system is scientific and sensible.
Oh, did you notice the mention of slaves? Yes, the Kondalians keep slaves:
"You are the light race, Mardonale the dark," continued Crane. "What are the servants, who seem half-way between?"
"They are slaves...."
"Captured savages?" interrupted Dorothy.
"No. They are a separate race. They are a race so low in intelligence that they cannot exist except as slaves, but they can be trained to understand language and to do certain kinds of work. They are harmless and mild, making excellent servants, otherwise they would have perished ages ago. All menial work and most of the manual labor is done by the slave race. Formerly criminals were sterilized and reduced to unwilling slavery, but there have been no unwilling slaves in Kondal for hundreds of karkamo [ie: years]."
The marriage is performed by the Kondal King, called the Karfidix. At the end of the ceremony, the Karfidix mentions that their honored guests have agreed to share their "X-plosives" (nuclear weapons) with the rightous Kondalians:
"All Kondal is with us here in spirit, trying to aid us in our poor attempts to convey our welcome to these our guests, of whose friendship no greater warrant could be given than their willingness to grant us the privilege of their marriage. Not only have they given us a boon that will make their names revered throughout the nation as long as Kondal shall exist, but they have also been the means of showing us plainly that the First Cause is upon our side, that our age-old institution of honor is in truth the only foundation upon which can be built a race fitted to survive. At the same time they have been the means of showing us that our hated foe, entirely without honor, building his race upon a foundation of bloodthirsty savagery alone, is building wrongly and must perish utterly from the face of Osnome."
The Earthlings are just thrilled with the ceremony, ""Dick, sweetheart, wasn't that the most wonderful thing that anybody ever heard of?" Dottie asks and everyone agrees that it was. As our heroes leave the planet, the Kondalians fly off to wipe out a civilization.
I realize that reading books from a century or more ago, especially by American authors, there will almost always be portrayals of the racism and sexism which was so common of the white people of the time. Black people will almost always be servants and happy in their servitude. Women will almost always be weak and scatterbrained. Not always, of course, many people, even some white people and even back then could look beyond the social evils of racism and sexism. But Smith's book is an open celebration of genocide. This is something else.
I've known about this book for decades and it is always presented as ridiculous fun. No one ever mentions that the Good Guys are eugenic terrorists who want to destroy the people they see as nothing but dark-skinned vermin. No one ever mentions the docile and happy racially-inferior slaves. No one ever mentions the infanticide of those who it was believed that this baby's life was not worth living.
The most successful space opera of our time is the Star Wars franchise. Doc Smith is the unrepentant Emperor celebrating every time the Death Star destroys a planet. Or, he is Hitler.
I don't recommend that you read it, but if you must: https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/20869
Reading Gutenberg by John Jackson is licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0
