The best of E. E. Doc Smith Book

At times the writing approaches grandeur: two humans in a spaceship racing at inconceivable velocity reflect wordlessly on their own insignificance in the sight of star systems racing by. And then someone says something, and the illusion is shattered. Smith can't write dialog that doesn't sound like weirdly out of date slang, clunkily recited by robots.

Elements of Smith's stories repeat to the point were it all runs together: everything has energy projectors and force screens that radiate through the spectrum up to the ultraviolet before failing, the characters are either mighty-chinned hero types--super brainy--and the women equally sharp but undeniably feminine and 'one hot dish', and the settings have the same sort of blandness of white paint and chrome fittings.

The part of this collection that captured me was seeing the material that Smith started before he died, before Gordon Eklund and Stephen Goldin did such terrible violence to them. "Imperial Stars" is virtually unchanged--perhaps Goldin added bulk--but "Tedric" and "Lord Tedric" are unrecognizable from the horrifying drek that Eklund slopped onto the page.

Here, the Tedric series posits a take on time travel and alternate histories, where some meddling future scientist is averting the collapse of civilization by rewriting events of history. This happens, oddly, by giving an ambitious blacksmith named Tedric various metallurgical technologies: case-hardened steel, and later gold leaf. Each change to history pushes out the catastrophe by some hundred years. Like all his work it is propelled by a strange marriage of testosterone and an intellectual/engineering viewpoint, but hints at a complexity of setting completely absent from the earliest examples.

I keep using words like 'velocity' and 'propelled', which are descriptive of Smith's style, though a more correct term would be akin to 'trajectory' or 'ballistic solution'. These stories are going to a place at high speed and precise vector.

Of all the stories, the oddest is "Robot Nemesis", which reads like an excerpt--ripped away from background material and padding, as well as the formative aspects of its protagonist, Doctor Ferdinand Stone--but is actually complete.