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.Each produced –extruded – members whenever it needed them … filaments or cables; fingers or feet; needles or mauls.(Smith, Triplanetary (1997): 2–4)the history of sf55These dubious shape-shifting aliens operate behind the scenes of the galaxy, hidden but manipulating it towards its doom.The Arisians, on the other hand, have been breeding human beings to the stage that, with the series protagonist Kim Kinnison, they can take on the minions of the Eddorians and defeat them.The Eddorians, in addition to being physically repulsive and morally evil, are utterly single-minded.In place of the diversity that is central to Smith’s notion of ‘Civilisation’, ‘each and every Eddorian’ had only one goal: ‘power.Power! P-O-W-E-R!!’(p.5).This does not represent a particularly high level of analysis.Where Smith’s novels manage to overcome these limitations is in the sheer size and scope of his imaginative conception.It is hard to think of any SF novels as enamoured of enormity as the Lensman books, or Smith’s other major sequence of novels, the Skylark series.Spaceships are enormous and become more and more vast as Smith’s career progresses.There may be a certain quaintness about the description in earlier novels: the Fearless, for instance, ‘the British super-dread-nought, which was to be the flagship of the fleet – the mightiest and heaviest spaceship which had yet lifted her stupendous mass into the ether’ ( Triplanetary, p.171).But when reading through Smith’s novels in sequence, the proliferation of superlatives of size – ‘enormous’, ‘vast’,‘awful’, ‘colossal’, ‘mighty’, ‘stupendous’, ‘immense’ and so on – does batter one’s reading sensibilities into a sort of apprehension of awe.Smith’s imaginative conception crosses huge stretches of time and space and deploys monumental artefacts.He originally conceived the Lensman books as one suitably titanic single novel, 400,000 words in length.Only in the immensity of space, it could be argued, would Smith be able to find a proper correlative for the ambition of his imaginative conception.Behind this commitment to an aesthetic of scale is a form of elitism that justifies the fan in the belief that SF is a superior genre to conventional literatures precisely because it encompasses grander and more significant vistas.Smith himself, in 1940, asserted that: The casual reader does not understand science fiction, does not have sufficient imagination or depth or breadth of vision to grasp it, and hence does not like it … We science [fiction fans] are imaginative, with a tempered, analytical imaginativeness which fairy tales will notthe history of sf56satisfy.We are critical.We are fastidious.We have a mental grasp and scope.(Smith, quoted in Huntington 1989: 48)This amounts to a definition of SF similar to that of Darko Suvin or Robert Scholes, as blending ‘imaginative fabulation’ and ‘cognitive rigour’; but the unashamed rhetoric of superiority makes clear that the novum of cosmic scale does nothing less than map on to a belief in the cognate scale and range of the SF fan’s mental faculties.THE GOLDEN AGE: ASIMOVThere was, then, a great deal of limited SF produced in America before the Second World War, but at the same time there were occasional successes and, more importantly, a framework was laid in which the representation of a radical alterity could be explored.As American fortunes grew, this especially American mode of literature took on some of the energy and ebullience of its national outlook.Fans talk unironically of ‘the Golden Age’ in SF, and they usually mean something quite specific: stories published in the late 1930s and 1940s or sometimes, even more specifically, American Pulp publishing in the period 1938–46.This is a short period of time, but it includes a striking wealth and diversity of writing talents: Isaac Asimov, Clifford Simak, Jack Williamson, L.Sprague De Camp, Theodore Sturgeon, Robert Heinlein and A.E.Van Vogt, to name only the shortest list that might be drawn up.The energy and self-confidence of practitioners and fans of SF during this period were extraordinary.In 1948 John W.Campbell, the enormously influential editor of the SF magazine Astounding, could talk about SF as something larger than literature.That group of writings which is usually referred to as ‘mainstream literature’ is actually a special subgroup of the field of science fiction –for science fiction deals with all places in the Universe, and all times in Eternity, so the literature of the here-and-now is, truly, a subset of science fiction
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