The Windkey and the Lamplighter

This was a really really fun series of pulp space-adventure novels. I
started with Galactic Patrol, per the recommendation of some very
opinionated people in MITSFS. (According to wikipedia Smith wrote
Galactic Patrol, Gray Lensman, Second Stage Lensman and
Children of the Lens as one story, and then carefully separated them
so that they could be published in Astounding magazine in
1937-1948.) Triplanetary, which he published in 1934 in
Astounding, was not originally in the same universe, and First
Lensman was written after the rest.

I have not actually gone back and read Triplanetary and First
Lensman yet, but they were spoiled in the introduction to Gray
Lensman and again in the intro to Second Stage Lensman.

Galactic Patrol is a bright, flashy space opera. If I didn’t
realize that it was the original space opera, I’d say it was
cliche. Kim Kinnison is better, faster, stronger, smarter, and more
handsome that anyone in the whole universe. The Galactic Patrol is a
universe-spanning police force with almost no corruption in the higher
ranks—an entirely benevolent police state. And all the varied and
diverse worlds of Civilization are willing to band together to fight
Boskone, the (other-galaxy) spanning entity. And it all makes
sense! There is a reason, explained in-universe, Kinnison is the
epitome of human evolution, and a reason that the Lensmen are
benevolent dictators. By Children of the Lens, which is about
Kinnison’s kids, you’d think that the premise would have gotten old,
but Smith ties the series together with an agreeable conclusion and
confrontation with the Big Evil Guys.

Even so, I think the idealism required to create such a world, and to
believe that it could thrive, is something that has died in our
culture. Apparently, Smith was a superman himself—"a large, blond,
athletic, very intelligent, very gallant man, married to a remarkably
beautiful, intelligent red-haired woman named MacDougal (thus perhaps
the prototypes of ‘Kimball Kinnison’ and ‘Clarissa MacDougal’)." (says
wikipedia) so perhaps Smith himself never saw a reason to doubt
that the world could really work as it did in his Lensman stories. I
find myself less optimistic—wishing such a place could exist, and
knowing that it probably can not.

*Books in 2006: 29