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

atom-powered voyagers out again to the
rescue of the people of the Green System who faced annihilation by the
marauding Fenachrone. This "tale of the
galactic cruise which ushered in universal civilization" presented a
stupendous panorama of alien life-forms, mile-

long spaceships, traveling faster than light, devastating ray weapons, and
frightful battles in the void ending in
inevitable triumph for the visiting Earthmen.

To keep him in tow, Amazing paid Smith more generously for this three-part
serial, to which he wrote an epilogue
suggesting that his readers had heard the last of the all-conquering Dick and
his musical sweetheart. By way of a
change. in 1931 be came up with another story, Spacehounds of IPC, which
confined his new heroes of the
Inter-Planetary Corporation to the solar system. This, he insisted, was true
scientific fiction, not pseudo-science,
and he planned to make it the first of a series-but it wasn't what his fans
wanted. "We want Smith to write stories of
scope and range. We want more Skylarks?" was the cry. And Amazing's
80-year-old editor Dr. T. O'Conor Sloane,
who still had seven years to go before he retired, pointed a lean finger out
towards the Milky Way.

But whatever the critics said about the results of his labors, Smith was never
a "hack" writer. He planned his stories
with care, and took his time writing them. Invariably he would plot a graph to
help him in developing his plot, the
reactions of his characters to the situations they encountered and the
background atmosphere he weaved into the
story. "Not that I ever managed to stick to one of them all the way," he
confessed. "Somehow my characters always
break loose and take the yarn out of my hands which is a good thing, I guess."
As science fiction advanced into the 1930s there were other editors, too, who
wanted to get hold of his stories.
Competition had set in-but so had the Depression, and if it had not suffered a
temporary setback in 1933, Astound-

ing Stories would have featured Triplanetary, the story which gave rise to the
"Lensman" series. In any event, it
went to enliven four issues of Amazing in 1934. It was this story that
introduced the concept of the "inertialess
drive" by which, it was assumed-since it could neither be proved nor
disproved-spaceships might traverse the
impossible gulfs of Smith's literary cosmos. When asked about the scientific
probability of such a device, Smith
responded: "It is not probable at all, at least in any extrapolation of
present-day science. But as far as I can
determine, it cannot be proved absolutely impossible and that is enough for