kallis@pen.DEC (04/17/85)
I should preface this by noting that I had the honor to meet and become
friends with Doc Smith a few years before his untimely death (if he'd lived
to be 150, his death, when it came, would have been untimely).
On "future lensman" books:
Doc told me once that when he wrote _Skylark Three_ he killed
Blackie DuQuense as dead as he could, but the character was so popular
that he spent nearly a quarter of _Skylark of Valeron_ resurrecting him.
He pointed out that he'd try never to paint himself in such a corner
again (and the freeing of Duquense in _Skylark DuQuense_ was something
he'd deliberately worked out before he completed _Valeron_).
So with the Lensman epics. In both magazine and book version, he
had Christopher Kinnison preface the epic by preparing a record for a
new Stage Three entity. Logic indeed suggested that a new menace might
manifest itself, and "Mentor" even suggested the same.
But at the time of his death, he was busy with the Subspace series,
which was originally to be a three-parter: SUBSPACE EXPLORERS, SUBSPACE
SECOND, and SUBSPACE SAFARI. His incomplete manuscript was posthumously
converted into SUBSPACE ENCOUNTER by Lloyd Arthur Esbach. The work is
almost all Doc, though his original idea was to keep the "Operator" --
The Deston/Carlyle kids -- invisible throughout the whole series. He was
also fooling around with the Family D'Alembert series, working on enough
novelettes to make a collection.
There was always the _possibility_ of other lensman epics, but
the climactic scene ("The Power of Love") was conceived at the true begin-
ning (_Galactic Patrol_) of the series (_Triplanetary_ was a splice-on,
_First Lensman_ a requested linking novel), as Doc explained on _Of
Worlds Beyond_, which I recommend.
Steve Kallis, Jr.