First Lensman

Smith originally wrote the novella Triplanetary as a standalone story with no connection to the Lensman Universe. But when he brought it in he made use of a character in that novella, Virgil Samms, who was the head of the Triplanetary Service, and in the second book focused on Samms as the First Lensman and founder of the Galactic Patrol. This is an interesting story that sets up a number themes that will be explored as the series goes on.

The book opens with a meeting between Gharlane of Eddore and Drounli the Moulder of Arisia that serves as both a brief recap of the events in Triplanetary and as announcement that in effect the Arisian plan is now assured of success. And that with the arrival of Virgil Samms on the scene Arisia will now openly work against Eddore. The key fact about Samms is that he has tawny gold-flecked eyes and a red-bronze-auburn hair. So this is one branch of the breeding plan on Earth. And in the next chapter we learn that Samms chief associate is Roderick Kinnison. Rod Kinnison has a son Jack, and Virgil Samms has a daughter named Jill. Jill Samms, of course, has the eyes and hair of her father. And the two older men have been trying to do matchmaking between Jack and Jill, but to no effect. We learn that the two are like magnets of the same polarity, the more you try to push them together, the more they push back and fly apart. This is all a part of the Arisian plan to keep the two lines distinct until the right moment in the future whwen descendants of Samms and Kinnison will indeed join in marriage and produce offspring. All of that is in the future at this point.

We also know that the Galactic Patrol is a key part of the destruction of Eddore from what we heard in the first chapter. And we know that the result of the Arisian plans is that they will be replaced as the Guardians of Civilization. Of course, this book was written to fill in the backstory, since the rest of the series had already been written. So the readers who picked up this book when Fantasy Press published it in 1950 mostly already knew just how these things would work out. But for someone who has never read the series, I think reading it in the order we have it here makes more sense. It makes for a journey that is worth taking as you gradually see things unfold.

In the confrontation between Drounli and Gharlane, Drounli was energizing a form of flesh known as Dr. Bergenholm. Bergenholm was responsible for fixing a protoype drive that was killing people, which from here on in will be called the Bergenholm. It removes the inertia from a mass such as a spaceship, and this allows the ship to go faster than the speed of light. When the Bergenholm is turned off, the ship is said to be inert, and when it is turned on it is free. And if a ship goes free and travels somewhere, when the Bergenholm is turned off and the ship is inert again it resumes having the precise velocity vector it had before it went free. This all becomes part of the fabric of all of the series since the velocity vector is unlikely to be what you need in the new location when you go inert again. Bergenholm also shows up here by telling Samms and Kinnison that if they go to Arisia they will find what they need for the Galactic Patrol Samms wants to start. Of course, Bergenholm is merely a form of flesh energized by the Arisians so his suggestion is important.

They go to Arisia, and are welcomed even though up until now it has been off-limits to everyone including the bad guys. There they are each given a Lens. They then send others from the Solarian Patrol (soon to be the Galactic Patrol), and they also get lenses except for Jill Samms, who is turned down because the Lens is not compatible with women, though in foreshadowing she is told that there will be a woman who is given a lens in the future. And when they all compare notes they discover that the person they met with on Arisia was different for each of them, but the name was the same in all cases : Mentor. We will eventually learn that Mentor is not one entity, but a fusion of the four Moulders, one for each of the four key races

One of the next steps for Samms is to recruit “Lensmen” from other races, among them Rigel IV and Palain VII. For Rigel IV he has to travel to their planet, but he is successful. But for Palain VII, he can meet with members of that race on their research station on Pluto, which for Palainians is kind of like shirt-sleeve weather. The Palainians pose a problem at first because their value system is quite different. They are extremely logical, and consider altruism to be silly. They seem to avoid anything that would be uncomfortable, let alone dangerous, and Virgil Samms is initially taken aback, But he finally gets a lead on a couple of Palainians who might be insane enough to consider becoming Lensmen. Of course, had things gone differently the Palainians might have been the ones organizing the Galactic Patrol instead of the humans. And for the other races of the Solar System (Venus, Mars, Jupiter), they also have Lensmen. But the main point made in this book is that the people who measure up are extremely scarce. In fact the planet Nevia, which we met in Triplanetary, does not produce any and it looks like they never will.

The next thing is to determine how to proceed against the problems faced by the new Galactic Patrol. These appear to be corrupt politics, drugs, and pirates in space. In their planning they create code names, and two of them will become names that last throughout the series. The first is the code name for that anti-piracy operation, which is named Operation Boskone. Boskone will hereafter be the name for the sworn enemy of Civilization that we know is headed by Eddore, though they don’t know that yet. They think it is piracy, but will eventually come around to understand it is something much bigger than that. The other one is the code name for the anti-drug operation, which is named zwilnik. As the series proceeds the people who sell drugs will be known as zwilniks.

The next thing to mention that shows up in this book are the battle scenes. They involves large numbers of spaceships and formations become an important part of strategy. Of course, in space formations need to be three-dimensional which adds an element. These battles become progressively larger as the series goes on, to the point where entire planets are tossed around as weapons. There are a few big space battles in this book, and there will be more in the succeeding volumes. And it is the size of the enemy fleets that gradually gets the Galactic Patrol to realize these are not pirates, they come from an enemy civilization at least as large but completely inimical. And there is an arms race between the two sides, so while the Patrol generally pulls out a win, they have to continually be researching weapons and building newer and betteer ships. At this stage the problem is that the enemy fleet just appears, no one knows where they came from or who is building these ships. We know that ultimately it all traces back to Eddore, but the levels in between are a mystery, both to us and to the characters in the story. Figuring all of that out is what the rest of the series will be doing.

Initially they have no way to address corrupt politics except to gather information for use later. But tracing the drugs gives them the best results at this point. And to do that they need to infiltrate the drug organization. This is another interesting aspect of the series. In order to successfully infiltrate it is sometimes necessary to take the drugs, and some of them do. Samms goes undercover in this and takes a dose of thionite, the most exotic and addictive drug known, in a test as he joins. And we see how all of these things are integrated when he is infiltrating a drug organization, but goes through a Senator who is of course totally corrupt. This leads to an extended sideline about mining, which to me reads like Smith had some experience, though I am not aware of him ever doing anything of the sort.

Finally the corrupt politics are addressed by an election campaign between the incumbent corrupt politicians and the Patrol in the form of Rod Kinnison, who runs for President on the Cosmocrat ticket and wins. He is helped in this effort by the release of all of the evidence gathered by the Patrol which implicates the corrupt politicians. We do get a brief look at some of the higher-ups of the bad guys. The corrupt Senator Morgan, boss of the corrupt machine, has a meeting with Fernald of Kalonia, who we learn has bluish skin. And he in turn apparently reports to the Eich, and above them is Ploor. All three of these alien races and planets will come up again in the series.

In the Epilogue Kinnison and Samms return to Earth from a space battle, and Samms decides he needs a haircut and shave, which he gets in Spokane, Washington. While the barber is working on him, he gets a cut. And what makes this interesting is that Mentor has told him this would happen when Samms was on Arisia, which was long ago by this point. This is based on “his” Visualization of the Cosmic All, which is what Arisians do for study and amusement. This is not a form of precognition. It is based on a Newtonian view of cause and effect. I am not an expert on Quantum Mechanics, but I suspect it means this kind of thing is not really possible, even to very advanced minds.

If you want to check this book out, you can read it for free at Standard Ebooks, or you can listen to the audiobook from LibriVox.