Galactic Patrol

There was a time before science fiction became embarrassed by scale, when a respectable story could begin with a problem and solve it by inventing a space police force, several new rays, a better spaceship, and possibly a moral universe with fins.

E. E. “Doc” Smith’s Galactic Patrol belongs gloriously to that earlier age: pure, roaring, brass-plated space opera, full of Lensmen, super-science, cosmic criminals, impossible velocities, planetary danger, heroic certainty and sentences that sound as though they should be accompanied by a trumpet blast from orbit. It is not here to murmur subtle psychological ambiguities into a cup of herbal tea. It is here to patrol the galaxy, and frankly the galaxy had better stand up straight.

This is the Lensman universe, in which civilisation does not merely have law enforcement; it has law enforcement with telepathic jewellery, incorruptible willpower and enough technological confidence to make modern risk assessments burst into flames. Kimball Kinnison and the Galactic Patrol face enemies of suitably enormous wickedness, because small-scale villainy would be a waste of everyone’s thrusters. These are not people committing mild accounting irregularities on a moon somewhere. These are villains with fleets, secret bases, hideous plans and the sort of ambition that requires maps with several spirals on them.

The pleasure of Galactic Patrol is its magnificent lack of apology. It understands that if you are going to write interstellar adventure, you may as well make it interstellar. Ships cross gulfs of space. Weapons crackle. Minds strain. Civilisation itself is at stake, because apparently local council disputes were unavailable. The prose has the forward motion of a rocket sled being chased by another rocket sled. Concepts arrive, salute, explode, and are replaced by larger concepts.

Of course it is absurd. Beautifully absurd. Heroically absurd. But it is absurd in the foundational way, the way a cathedral is absurd if you describe it as “a large stone hat for worship.” Smith helped build the vocabulary of space opera: the grand conflict, the galactic scale, the superhuman hero, the science so advanced it has become a kind of muscular optimism. Later SF would complicate all this, interrogate it, parody it, become anxious about it, and occasionally pretend it had not enjoyed it. But Galactic Patrol is the source material striding about with its cape caught slightly in the airlock.

There is also something oddly refreshing about its moral architecture. Good is good, evil is evil, and if there are doubts, they can probably be settled with a beam weapon of unprecedented magnitude. We may be more sophisticated now, which is to say more tired, but there is a certain joy in returning to a universe where integrity can be issued as equipment and the right person, properly trained, can look at cosmic corruption and decide to hit it extremely hard.

This Panther paperback is in Good condition, which means it has survived several decades of ordinary terrestrial handling without requiring intervention from the Patrol. Crappy Old Books offers it for vintage SF readers, Lensman completists, space-opera archaeologists, and anyone who wants to remember the days when the future was vast, shiny, morally confident and armed to an extent that would worry a responsible committee.

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