Welcome to Show #30… again.
Summer, David and special guest Tim Callender (host of The Babylon Podcast) gather ’round to discuss “Galactic Patrol”, the original first novel of E. E. “Doc” Smith’s “Lensman” space opera series.
The audio quality is still popping in places, but it’s the best Mike can do.
Feature Discussion: Tim and David give an overview of the book and the plot summaries, while Summer saves most of her commentary for the later dissection of the storytelling style. It’s an engaging space-faring adventure, although it’s easy to see how the writing style could make it harder for those more sophisticated reading tastes to easily become lost in the story if they’re reading them for the first time. It’s very easy to see how the non-stop action and occassionally sparse descriptions would appeal to the intended scifi demographic, the 14-year-old male.
It’s also very easy to step back and see how themes and plot devices from this series influenced later stories, from Star Wars to Babylon 5 to Green Lantern and many more.
Consumer warning: avoid the anime interpretation. Seriously.
Books mentioned:
Promo: The Babylon Podcast: Our Last, Best Hope for Babylon 5 Discussion
Wikipedia: Galactic Patrol, Lensman
Link: Old Earth Books
Not dead. Resting? I’ve...
I had tried to read Triplanetary in the past, and bounced off it. But the description of Galactic Patrol sounds pretty fun! BTW, some of E.E. “Doc” Smith’s books are in the public domain, and are available at manybooks.net (not, alas, Galactic Patrol though.)
And Summer, while I don’t remember “Space Dog”, some of the Space Cat books have really stuck in my memory. I especially remember “Space Cat and the Kittens.”
Not “Space Dog”. “Stardog” by A.M. Lightner. And I have no memory of the Space Cat books save for the colorful library covers of some of them.
Come to think of it, I think “Dogsbody” by Diana Wynne Jones should be on our list of books to cover. And maybe “Star Ka’at”… who did that, Andre Norton? Ha! Yes, Google confirms my memory on that is correct!