Э.Э. Смит: Ғалым, жазушы және өмірінің тарихы

Food engineer and science fiction author (1890–1965)

the educator and diplomat sometimes referred to as "E. E. Smith"

Smith worked mainly as a manual laborer until he injured his wrist while fleeing from a fire at the age of 19. He attended the University of Idaho. (Many years later he would be installed in the 1984 Class of the University of Idaho Alumni Hall of Fame.) He entered its prep school in 1907, and graduated with two degrees in chemical engineering in 1914. He was president of the Chemistry Club, the Chess Club, and the Mandolin and Guitar Club, and captain of the Drill and Rifle Team; he also sang the bass lead in Gilbert and Sullivan operettas. His undergraduate thesis was Some Clays of Idaho, co written with classmate Chester Fowler Smith, who died in California of tuberculosis the following year, after taking a teaching fellowship at Berkeley. Whether the two were related is not known. On October 5, 1915, in Boise, Idaho he married Jeanne Craig MacDougall, the sister of his college roommate, Allen Scott (Scotty) MacDougall. (Her sister was named Clarissa MacLean MacDougall; the heroine of the Lensman novels would later be named Clarissa MacDougall.) Jeanne MacDougall was born in Glasgow, Scotland; her parents were Donald Scott MacDougall, a violinist, and Jessica Craig MacLean. Her father had moved to Boise when the children were young, and later sent for his family; he died while they were en route in 1905. Jeanne's mother, who remarried businessman and retired politician John F. Kessler in 1914 worked at, and later owned, a boarding house on Ridenbaugh Street. The Smiths had three children:
Roderick N., born June 3, 1918, in the District of Columbia, was employed as a design engineer at Lockheed Aircraft. Verna Jean (later Verna Smith Trestrail), born August 25, 1920, in Michigan, was his literary executor until her death in 1994. (Her son Kim Trestrail is now the executor.) Robert A. Heinlein in part dedicated his 1982 novel Friday to Verna. Clarissa M. (later Clarissa Wilcox), was born December 13, 1921, in Michigan.

After college, Smith was a junior chemist for the National Bureau of Standards in Washington, D. C., developing standards for butter and for oysters, while studying food chemistry at George Washington University. He ended up being sent to the Commission for Relief in Belgium headed by Herbert Hoover. One evening in 1915, the Smiths were visiting a former classmate from the University of Idaho, Dr. Carl Garby (1890–1928) who had also moved to Washington, D. C. He lived nearby in the Seaton Place Apartments with his wife, Lee Hawkins Garby. A long discussion about journeys into outer space ensued, and it was suggested that Smith should write down his ideas and speculations as a story about interstellar travel. Although he was interested, Smith believed after some thought that some romantic elements would be required and he was uncomfortable with that. Lee Garby offered to take care of the love interest and the romantic dialogue, and Smith decided to give it a try. The sources of inspirations for the main characters in the novel were themselves; the "Seatons" and "Cranes" were based on the Smiths and Garbys, respectively. About one third of The Skylark of Space was completed by the end of 1916, when Smith and Garby gradually abandoned work on it. Smith earned his master's degree in chemistry from the George Washington University in 1917, studying under Dr. Charles E. Munroe, whom Smith called "probably the greatest high explosives man yet to live". His dissertation, The effect of bleaching with oxides of nitrogen upon the baking quality and commercial value of wheat flour, was published in 1919.

In 1919, Smith was hired as chief chemist for F. W. Stock & Sons of Hillsdale, Michigan, at one time the largest family owned mill east of the Mississippi, working on doughnut mixes. He submitted it to many book publishers and magazines, spending more in postage than he would eventually receive for its publication. Bob Davis, editor of Argosy, sent an encouraging rejection letter in 1922, saying that he liked the novel personally, but that it was too far out for his readers. Finally, upon seeing the April 1927 issue of Amazing Stories, he submitted it to that magazine. It was accepted, initially for $75, later raised to $125. It was published as a three part serial in the August to October 1928 issues (According to Warner, but no other source, Smith began work on the sequel, Skylark Three, before the first book was accepted.) Garby, whose husband died in 1928, was not interested in further collaboration, so Smith began work on Skylark Three alone. It was published as another three part serial, in the August to October 1930 issues of Amazing, introduced as the cover story for August. and he was paid ¾¢ per word, surpassing Amazings previous record of half a cent.

Smith then began work on what he intended as a new series, starting with Spacehounds of IPC, which he finished in the autumn of 1930. Even in 1938, after he had written Galactic Patrol, Smith considered it his finest work. Even at the end of his career, he considered it his only work of true science fiction. It was published in the July through September 1931 issues of Amazing, with Sloane making unauthorized changes. Fan letters in the magazine complained about the novel's containment within the Solar System, and Sloane sided with the readers. So when Harry Bates, editor of Astounding Stories, offered Smith 2¢/word—payable on publication—for his next story, he agreed. This meant that it could not be a sequel to Spacehounds. Indeed, characters within the story point out its psychological and scientific implausibilities, and sometimes even seem to suggest self parody. At other times, they are conspicuously silent about obvious implausibilities. The January 1933 issue of Astounding announced that Triplanetary would appear in the March issue, and that issue's cover illustrated a scene from the story, but Astoundings financial difficulties prevented the story from appearing. Smith then submitted the manuscript to Wonder Stories, whose new editor, 17 year old Charles D. Hornig, rejected it, later boasting about the rejection in a fanzine. He finally submitted it to Amazing, which published it beginning in January 1934, but for only half a cent a word. Shortly after it was accepted, F. Orlin Tremaine, the new editor of the revived Astounding, offered one cent a word for Triplanetary. When he learned that he was too late, he suggested a third Skylark novel instead. In the winter of 1933–34, Smith worked on The Skylark of Valeron, but he felt that the story was getting out of control. He sent his first draft to Tremaine, with a distraught note asking for suggestions. Tremaine accepted the rough draft for $850, and announced it in the June 1934 issue, with a full page editorial and a three quarter page advertisement. The novel was published in the August 1934 through February 1935 issues.

Vortex Blasters (also known as Masters of the Vortex) is set in the same universe as the Lensman novels. It is an extension to the main storyline which takes place between Galactic Patrol and Children of the Lens, and introduces a different type of psionics from that used by the Lensmen. Spacehounds of IPC is not a part of the series, despite occasional erroneous statements to the contrary. (It is listed as a novel in the series in some paperback editions of the 1970s.)

Smith was widely read by scientists and engineers from the 1930s into the 1970s. Literary precursors of ideas which arguably entered the military scientific complex include SDI (Triplanetary), stealth (Gray Lensman), the OODA loop, C3 based warfare, and the AWACS (Gray Lensman). An inarguable influence was described in a June 11, 1947, letter to Smith from John W. Campbell (the editor of Astounding, where much of the Lensman series was originally published). In it, Campbell relayed Captain Cal Laning's acknowledgment that he had used Smith's ideas for displaying the battlespace situation (called the "tank" in the stories) in the design of the United States Navy's ships' Combat Information Centers. "The entire set up was taken specifically, directly, and consciously from the Directrix. In your story, you reached the situation the Navy was in—more communication channels than integration techniques to handle it. You proposed such an integrating technique and proved how advantageous it could be. You, sir, were 100% right. As the Japanese Navy—not the hypothetical Boskonian fleet—learned at an appalling cost." One underlying theme of the later Lensman novels was the difficulty in maintaining military secrecy—as advanced capabilities are revealed, the opposing side can often duplicate them. This point was also discussed extensively by John Campbell in his letter to Smith. Also in the later Lensman novels, and particular after the "Battle of Klovia" broke the Boskonian's power base at the end of Second Stage Lensmen, the Boskonian forces and particularly Kandron of Onlo reverted to terroristic tactics to attempt to demoralize Civilization, thus providing an early literary glimpse into this modern problem of both law enforcement and military response. The use of "Vee two" gas by the pirates attacking the Hyperion in Triplanetary (in both magazine and book appearances) also suggests anticipation of the terrorist uses of poison gases. However, Smith lived through WWI, when the use of poison gas on troops was well known to the populace; extending the assumption that pirates might use it if they could obtain it was no great extension of the present day knowledge. The beginning of the story Skylark of Space describes in relative detail the protagonist's research into separation of platinum group residues, subsequent experiments involving electrolysis, and the discovery of a process evocative of cold fusion (over 50 years before Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann). He describes a nuclear process yielding large amounts of energy and producing only negligible radioactive waste—which then goes on to form the basis of the adventures in the Skylark books. Smith's general description of the process of discovery is highly evocative of Röntgen's descriptions of his discovery of the X ray. Another theme of the Skylark novels involves precursors of modern information technology. The humanoid aliens encountered in the first novel have developed a primitive technology called the "mechanical educator", which allows direct conversion of brain waves into intelligible thought for transmission to others or for electrical storage. By the third novel in the series, Skylark of Valeron, this technology has grown into an "Electronic Brain" which is capable of computation on all "bands" of energy—electromagnetism, gravity, and "tachyonic" energy and radiation bands included. This is itself derived from a discussion of reductionist atomic theory in the second novel, Skylark Three, which brings to mind modern quark and sub quark theories of elementary particle physics.

Randall Garrett wrote a parody entitled Backstage Lensman which Smith reportedly enjoyed. Harry Harrison also parodied Smith's work in the novel Star Smashers of the Galaxy Rangers and the short story Space Rats of the CCC. Sir Arthur C. Clarke's space battle in Earthlight was based on the attack on the Mardonalian fortress in chapter seven of Skylark Three. Steve 'Slug' Russell wrote one of the first computer games, Spacewar!, with inspiration from the space battles from the Lensman series. The Japanese Lensman anime is more an imitation of Star Wars than a translation of the Lensman novels. Efforts to print translations of the associated manga in the United States in the early 1990s without payment of royalties to the Smith family were successfully blocked in court by Verna Smith Trestrail with the help of several California science fiction authors and fans. In his biography, George Lucas reveals that the Lensman novels were a major influence on his youth. J. Michael Straczynski, creator of the science fiction television series Babylon 5, also has acknowledged the influence of the Lensman books. Superman creator Jerry Siegel was impressed, at an early age, with the optimistic vision of the future presented in Skylark of Space. An attempt to create a feature film based on the Lensman series by Ron Howard's Imagine Entertainment and Universal Studios began in 2008 with J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of Babylon 5, as writer, but in 2014 the project was scrapped because of budget limitations. In her short "Pliocene Companion" book, author Julian May explained that a major character in her Exile series written in the early 1980s, Marc Remillard, was strongly influenced by Smith's villain character from Skylark DuQuesne, Marc DuQuesne. This was somewhat of a tribute to Smith. May had written an early SF work called Dune Roller in 1950, and had attended several Science Fiction Conventions in the early '50's, where she met and came to know Smith personally. The 2019 album All Aboard the Skylark by Hawkwind is named after the stories.

Smith himself appears as a character in the 2006 novel The Chinatown Death Cloud Peril by Paul Malmont. The novel describes friendship and rivalry among pulp writers of the 1930s. He also appears as "Lensman Ted Smith" in the 1980 novel The Number of the Beast and as "Commander Ted Smith" in the 1985 novel The Cat Who Walks Through Walls, both by Robert A. Heinlein. It is also suggested that he was one of the inspirations for Heinlein's character Lazarus Long. Christopher Nuttall incorporates a fictional quote from “Edward E. Smith, Professor of Sociology” in his military science fiction book, “No Worse Enemy”.