"E. E. Doc Smith - Best of E. E. Doc Smith" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

the remotest regions, and led the way for "space opera," has been held against
him in recent years where once it was
deemed a vital spur to the development of the genre. Yet, despite their
undoubted limitations on the literary level,
the sweeping "epics" of "Skylark" Smith are still relished for their sheer
exuberance.

The pioneering Amazing Stories magazine was in its third year when it
serialized what it described as "one of the
outstanding scientifiction stories of the decade," predicting that it would be
"referred to by fans for years to come."
The prediction proved perfectly valid. Nearly twenty years later, when the
first of several enterprising specialist
book publishers began to resurrect "classic" tales from the magazines, the
much-vaunted Skylark was an obvious
choice and sold out so quickly that the firm had to be reorganized to cope
with the demand. Since 1946 it has seen
publication in several forms in many parts of the world, and it is still being
reprinted, like the other "Doe" Smith
serials that followed at intervals through the years. Yet, before Amazing
Stories accepted it, The Skylark had
gathered what the author cheerfully claimed was "probably the most complete
collection of rejection slips in
America." In a pleasant correspondence which we conducted in the late 1940s,
he told me bow be had begun to
write the story after starting out as a chemical engineer in 1914 and did not
complete it until 1920. For two years
Mrs. Lee Hawkins Garby, the wife of an old classmate, helped him with the
romantic interest that readers found so
treacly but which hardly interfered with the high-geared action. But she
didn't have the staying power of the
determined Smith, who by the time he was 25 had held down a dozen different
jobs from millband and stevedore to
street-car conductor. Born 1890 in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, E. E. Smith was
raised on a riverside homestead in
northern Idaho, where he worked as a lumberjack until his eldest brother and
sister helped him get to the university.
By 1915 he was earning enough as a food chemist with the U.S. Bureau of
Standards to marry a girl from Idaho and
settle down in Washington, D.C., where his wife went to work as a stenographer
to enable him to get his Ph.D. This
is why the book version of The Skylark of Space is dedicated "To Jeannie"
-though Mrs. Garby got her name in the
by-line-and her share of the 125 dollars he was paid for the magazine serial.

In spite of the college-boy dialogue and the melodramatic exchanges between
heroic Dick Seaton and his
scheming rival "Blackie" DuQuesne, Amazing Stories readers, whose ranks I had
recently joined, clamored for a
sequel. So, in Skylark Three, which followed in 1930, Smith took his