I want you to picture a scene. It's roughly 1919.
Okay, setting the stage. Yeah, and we're in the
back room of this massive industrial flour mill.
Oh, wow. The air is just thick with white dust.
It's loud. And there's a guy there, probably
covered head to toe in this fine powder. And
he is just obsessing over a chemical equation.
Right, and he's not just, you know. A random
line worker. No, not at all. He's a specialist.
He is literally trying to figure out the exact
tensile strength of dough. He's engineering the
perfect crust for a donut. Exactly. Right. And
this is his life. He is a food engineer, a guy
who spent his days genuinely worrying about the
viscosity of pastry mixes. And I think earlier
he was working on the bleaching standards of
oysters. Oysters, butter, yeah. Really glamorous
stuff. But here's the thing that I just can't
quite wrap my head around. When this man went
home, you know, washed the flour out of his hair
and sat down at his desk. He didn't write about
baking. No, he certainly didn't. He sat down
and essentially invented the concept of the Galactic
Empire. It's so wild to think about. He designed
starships that were miles long. He casually destroyed
entire planets. He created the absolute blueprint
for interstellar warfare that we are frankly.
Still using in fiction today. It's the ultimate
double life. I mean, we're talking, of course,
about Edward Elmer Smith. Yes. Better known to
history and to sci -fi fans everywhere as E .E.
Doc Smith. The man who specialized in donut mixes
by day and blew up solar systems by night. It
sounds like a joke, but it's actually the key
to understanding the entire genre of space opera.
I mean, if you've ever watched Star Wars. Right.
If you've played Mass Effect, if you've read
Dune or Foundation. You are walking through a
door that Doc Smith just kicked open while all
his colleagues were asleep. Exactly. So, the
mission for our deep dive today is pretty specific.
We've got a ton of historical sources, letters,
and literary analyses to pull from. But we aren't
just doing a dry biography. No, definitely not.
A guy grounded in the most mundane, practical,
literal science imaginable managed to dream bigger
than literally anyone else in his generation.
And we're going to look at the tangible impact
of those dreams because this isn't just about
literary history, right? We're actually going
to talk about how his wild fiction influenced
the design of U .S. Navy warships in World War
II. Yes. That is the connection I am most excited
to unpack today. It's huge. The idea that a pulp
sci -fi novel helped win a war in the Pacific.
It's a bold claim, but the evidence and the sources
is absolutely there. But before we get to the
warships and the galactic patrols, we really
have to understand the man himself. Because Doc
Smith is, well, he's a bit of a paradox. For
sure. So let's rewind. Let's go all the way back
to the beginning. Who was this guy before he
became the father of space opera? Well, he was
a Midwestern boy born in May of 1890 in Sheboygan,
Wisconsin. A very grounded place to start a galactic
journey. Very grounded. His parents were staunch
Presbyterians. His father was actually a sailor
who later transitioned to farming. Oh, interesting.
Yeah. And they moved around a lot from Wisconsin
to Spokane, Washington. And eventually they settled
in Idaho. And you have to remember, we're talking
about the turn of the century in the American
West here. Right. This wasn't a life of leisure.
Not at all. Looking at the notes we have here,
he wasn't exactly born with a silver spoon in
his mouth. He was working heavy manual labor,
right? Very heavy manual labor. He was working
with his hands, doing the kind of backbreaking
physical work that builds a really specific kind
of physical toughness. Yeah. But then when he
was 19, he had what we might call a sliding doors
moment. A moment that kind of changed everything.
Yeah. There was a fire. And Smith was fleeing
from it. And in the chaos of running away, he
tripped or fell and severely injured his wrist.
Oh, wow. Which is a career ending injury for
a manual laborer back then. Exactly. He physically
couldn't do the heavy lifting anymore. So he
had to pivot. And if that fire hadn't happened.
Or if he hadn't tripped. Right. If he hadn't
hurt his wrist, he might have spent his entire
life as a farmer or a lumberjack in Idaho. We
might never have had the Lensman series. That
is just wild to think about. A broken wrist gives
us the galactic patrol. Yep. So because of the
wrist, he pivots to academia. He does. He goes
to the University of Idaho, graduating in the
class of 1914. And this is where we really start
to see that Smith wasn't just a grinder. He was,
well, energetic is an understatement. Yeah, I
was looking at his list of extracurriculars in
college. It reads like he was trying to win some
kind of main character of the universe contest.
It really does. I mean, he was predictably. The
president of the chemistry club. Sure, makes
sense. But he was also president of the chess
club. Okay, smart guy stuff, check. But then
he was also the president of the guitar club.
The guitar club? Yes. And the captain of the
drill and rifle team. So wait, he's a chemist
who plays chess, plays guitar, and is a crack
shot with a rifle. And just to round it out completely,
he sang the bass lead in the university's Gilbert
and Sullivan operettas. Okay, stop. That is just
too much. I know. You have this rifle toting,
guitar strumming, opera singing chemist. You
can kind of see the DNA of his future heroes
right here, can't you? Absolutely. These characters
are always these hyper -competent people who
can just do everything. Exactly. He was living
that life. He valued competence above almost
anything else. It wasn't enough to just be smart.
You had to be capable. You had to be able to
handle a rifle and a complex chemical equation
at the same time. So he finishes his undergrad.
Writing a thesis, by the way, called Some Clays
of Idaho. Oh, yeah. Which I'm sure was just an
absolute page turner. Thrilling stuff. And then
he heads to George Washington University for
his Ph .D. Correct. He gets his Ph .D. in chemical
engineering in 1918. This is where the Doc nickname
actually comes from. He earned it. He put in
the work. He really did. And his dissertation
title is worth reading in full because it tells
you exactly how his brain worked. Lay it on me.
It was titled, The Effect of Bleaching with Oxides
of Nitrogen Upon the Baking Quality and Commercial
Value of Wheat Flour. That is wow. That is incredibly
specific. It is. But think about what that means.
He was studying how to use dangerous chemicals,
oxides of nitrogen, to improve something as wholesome
and everyday as bread. Huh. He was looking at
the actual molecular structure of food to engineer
a better, more commercially viable result. So
when he eventually starts writing about space
drives and energy weapons, he's approaching it
with that exact same mindset. Precisely. He wasn't
a fantasy writer who just waved a magic wand
to make a ship go fast. He was an engineer. Even
when he was completely making things up, he was
trying to engineer them to make sense. He wanted
to know the baking quality of the universe, so
to speak. That's a great way to put it. It grounds
the wilder ideas, I think. If you know the guy
writing about a faster -than -light inertialist
drive also knows exactly how nitrogen affects
flour down to the molecule, just trust him a
bit more as a reader. Exactly. You buy into his
reality. And we can't skip over his personal
life here because it actually becomes the template
for his fiction. Right. 1915, he married Jean
Craig McDougall. The classic roommate -sister
romance, if I recall. It was. She was the sister
of his college roommate. She was Scottish. And
the sources describe her as remarkably beautiful
and highly intelligent. And for Smith, she became
the absolute archetype. The mold for his characters.
Yes. If you look at the Lensman series, the ultimate
heroine in that universe, Clarissa McDougall,
is explicitly based on Jean. even sharing the
maiden name. So he was basically writing a love
letter to his wife into the history of the galaxy.
In a way, yeah. They had three kids, Roderick,
Verna, and Clarissa. It was a very stable, traditional
family unit. And I really think that stability
is what allowed him to have such a wild imagination.
That makes sense. He had a solid anchor at home
so his mind could safely wander to the edge of
the cosmos. Let's talk about the day job again.
Because we mentioned the donuts at the very beginning,
but that wasn't the only thing he did. No, not
at all. He started out as a junior chemist at
the Bureau of Standards in D .C., working on
those butter and oyster standards we joked about.
Then he actually worked for the Commission for
Relief in Belgium during World War I. And here
is a detail from the sources that I think is
absolutely crucial. Smith desperately wanted
to go to war. Wanted to fight. He wanted to fly.
He tried to enlist as a pilot. He wanted to get
into one of those canvas and wood Jenny biplanes
and dogfight over Europe. Wow. But they wouldn't
let him. No, chemists were way too valuable to
the war effort. Or, as he later joked about it,
the planes were too expensive for the military
to trust him with one. That's funny. But that
frustration, that deep desire to be up in the
air, controlling a powerful machine, dogfighting
that never left him. You can see that channeling
directly into his writing. If the army wouldn't
let him fly a biplane over France, he was going
to fly a miles -long dreadnought over the galactic
core. Exactly. It's pure wish fulfillment. So
after the war, he goes into the private sector.
He becomes the chief chemist for F .W. Stock
& Sons and later the production manager at the
Don Donut Company. That was around 1936. And
this wasn't some cushy desk job where he just
signed papers and went golfing. Far from it.
The records show he was working 18 -hour days,
seven days a week. That is brutal. He was physically
in the factory developing new mixes, troubleshooting
the production lines. This was grueling, high
-pressure industrial work. It's just incredible
to visualize. He's standing there, smelling frying
dough, completely exhausted, probably covered
in flour, like we said. And meanwhile, in the
back of his head, he's plotting the trajectory
of a starship. Yeah. How did he actually make
that leap? Like, how does a tired donut engineer
actually sit down and start writing The Skylark
of Space? It all traces back to one specific
night in 1915. The Smiths were living in Washington,
D .C., and they were visiting an old classmate
of his, Dr. Carl Garvey, and his wife, Lee. Ah,
the Big Bang of space opera. It really was. They
were sitting around after dinner, and the conversation
just naturally turned to space travel. Just pure
speculation. You know, could we ever go to the
stars? What would we find out there? And amidst
this excitement, someone told Smith, you have
these incredible ideas. You should write them
down. Right. But Smith hesitated. He didn't really
think of himself as a writer. Why not? He clearly
had the imagination. He had a very specific insecurity.
He said he could handle the science, the action,
the exploration, no problem. But he felt a novel
needed romantic elements. Human drama. Exactly.
It needed human drama. The rigorous, serious
scientist felt super uncomfortable writing about
love and emotions and, you know, flirting. Which
is funny, considering he was happily married
to a woman he clearly adored. True. But experiencing
love and writing it for an audience are two very
different things. So they came up with a solution.
A collaboration. Yes. Lee Garby, his friend's
wife, offered to write the love interest parts
and the dialogue. That's amazing. And Smith would
handle the physics, the battles, and the aliens.
It's like a split -brain novel. One hemisphere
is doing feelings and dialogue. The other hemisphere
is doing orbital mechanics and explosions. And
it worked. The main characters in the Skylark
of Space are basically just them. The heroes,
the Setons, were clearly modeled on the Smiths.
The wealthy, cultured friends who come along,
the Cranes, were the Garbys. They just wrote
themselves into their own space adventure. They
really did. So they finished the book around
1920. Do they just pop champagne and become instant
bestsellers? Absolutely not. They hit a massive
wall. You have to remember, in 1920, science
fiction wasn't really a category on the bookshelf.
It was barely a concept. Right. Publishers were
completely baffled by it. Smith sent the manuscript
out again and again. He actually later calculated
that he spent more money on postage stamps sending
the manuscript to publishers than he eventually
received as his first paycheck for it. Oh, man,
that is depressing. It is. But the rejection
letters are fascinating historical documents.
There was one from Bob Davis, who was the editor
of Argosy magazine. And Argosy was a big deal
back then. Huge deal. Davis actually liked the
story. He wrote that he thought it was exciting.
But he still rejected it. Why? He said it was,
quote, too far out. Too far out. He genuinely
thought the readers in 1922 just wouldn't be
able to suspend their disbelief. A story about
traveling to other stars, it was too wild. It
was too imaginative for the market. I mean, in
hindsight, that is a badge of honor. Your book
is literally too creative for our audience to
comprehend. Seriously. So what finally changed?
How did it get published? The world finally caught
up to Doc Smith. Specifically, a magazine called
Amazing Stories launched. This was the first
magazine ever dedicated solely to what they called
science fiction. Okay. And in 1928, the editor,
T. O 'Connor Sloan, finally bought Skylark. And
what was that massive paycheck? A whopping $75.
Ouch. Which was eventually raised to $125. Still
not exactly quits your donut job money? No, definitely
not. But the reaction from the readers was explosive.
It ran. as a serial in the magazine and people
completely lost their minds they had never seen
scale like this before because before smith if
you had a space story it was usually what a dream
sequence or maybe a trip to the moon or mars
exactly wells or verne very localized smith gave
them the entire galaxy he gave them infinite
speeds he gave them godlike power and weapons
that could crack planets it was the very first
time readers actually felt the true size of the
universe in fiction it was but here's the kicker
smith himself later looked back on skylark and
was actually pretty critical of it really Why?
It launched his career. He made a strict distinction
between scientific fiction and pseudoscience.
He felt that in Skylark, he had cheated way too
much. He played too fast and loose with the rules
of physics. Ah, the engineer's guilt. Exactly.
He considered Skylark to be pseudoscience. He
wanted to do something tighter, something that
felt more real, more like a police procedural
set in space. And that desire for structure is
what leads us to his absolute masterpiece, the
Lensman series. Yes. This is where Smith stops
just writing Sun's story. and starts building
a cohesive universe. By 1927, he was already
thinking about a space police novel. Which is
such a staple trope for us now. I mean, you've
got the Green Lantern Corps, you've got the Jedi
Order, the Spectres and Mass Effect. But back
then, Cops in Space was a totally fresh idea.
Completely fresh. And he approached it like a
literal research project. He read other sci -fi
stories specifically to analyze cops and robbers'
troops. He was studying the genre. He cited writers
like Starzl and Williamson as positive examples.
He wanted to know what worked and what didn't
mechanically in a story. And when he finally
sat down to plan the Lensman series, he didn't
just scribble some notes on a napkin. I read
about this. The outline. was massive wasn't it
it was an engineering document she wrote an 85
page outline for the core novels before he wrote
a single line of the actual text 85 pages that's
not an outline that's a whole novella and he
didn't just write text in this outline he created
graphs graphs like literally an x and y axis
literally graphs he graphed the peaks of emotional
intensity you're kidding No, he wanted to visually
map out the reader's heart rate over the course
of the book. He also graphed what he called valleys
of characterization, creating a visual representation
of when the action needed to slow down so that
characters could breathe and develop. That is
the most chemical engineer thing I have ever
heard in my life. It's like, if I add 15 % more
emotional intensity here, the reaction will be
stable. It really is. But he was also self -aware
enough as a writer to know that plans change.
He actually noted in his letters that his characters
would often get away from him and, quote, do
exactly as they damn please. Which is the mark
of good writer, honestly. If the characters feel
real enough in your head to disobey your 85 page
outline. You're doing something right. Definitely.
But to keep the universe consistent, because
he hated loose ends, he did something very clever.
He actually wrote the very end of the entire
series, the conclusion of the final book, Children
of the Lens, immediately after finishing the
rough draft of the first book, Galactic Patrol.
Wow. He built the exit before he even built the
maze. He had to. He wanted to make absolute sure
that every single plot thread, every alien race
he introduced in book one, would tie up perfectly
in book six. It was a massive... architectural
feat. And clearly the readers responded to that
level of detail. They devoured it. When Grey
Lensman was published in 1939 in Astounding Stories,
the reader polls showed it was the best story,
quote, by a light year. He was the undisputed
king of the genre at that point. But he did have
some friction with the editors, specifically
John W. Campbell, right? Right. Campbell is a
massive titan in sci -fi history. He was the
editor of Astounding. Now, Campbell respected
Smith's popularity. He knew Smith sold magazines
like crazy. But they had fundamentally different
philosophies on what sci -fi should be. How so?
Campbell wanted psychological stories. He wanted
nuance, moral ambiguity, characters wrestling
with internal demons. Smith dealt in absolutes.
Good versus evil, black versus white, civilization
versus chaos. So by the 1950s? By the 50s, Campbell
started to view Smith's style as a bit of a dinosaur,
a relic of the pulp era. He bought... very little
from him later on. It's the classic old guard
versus the new wave. Exactly. But even if Campbell
thought the literary style was old fashioned,
he could never deny that Smith's technological
ideas were revolutionary. And this brings us
to what I think is the most important part of
our discussion today. The science. and the real
-world impact. Yes, because we teased this in
the intro, the connection between Doc Smith's
fiction and the U .S. Navy. This is a story that
still completely blows my mind. Walk us through
it. Okay, so in the Lensman series, Smith describes
a specific room aboard a command ship called
the Directrix. What exactly is the Directrix?
Imagine a massive darkened room. It's referred
to as a tank. Inside this room, fleet commanders
can see a real -time, three -dimensional visualization
of the entire battle space. They aren't looking
out a glass window at the stars. They are looking
at screens, lighted displays showing the position
of every single ship, friend and foe, in the
fleet. They can communicate instantly with any
unit. It is a central nerve center for gathering
and processing tactical information. Right. Now,
to a modern listener, that just sounds like a
normal war room or, honestly, a video game mini
-map. Exactly. We take it for granted. Yeah.
But you have to contextualize this. In the 1930s,
when he was conceiving this, naval battles were
incredibly chaotic. Right. How did they work
back then? The captain was usually standing on
the bridge, physically looking out, shouting
orders. Information came in haphazardly via signal
flags, flashing lights, or crackly radio, but
it was fragmented. There was no single... dedicated
place deep inside the ship where all the radar,
sonar, and visual information was integrated
into one cohesive picture. So Doc Smith basically
invented the concept of an integrated information
center. He did. And the U .S. Navy was apparently
paying attention. Fast forward to 1947. John
W. Campbell, the editor we just talked about,
writes a letter to Smith. And in this letter,
Campbell relays a message he received from a
U .S. Navy officer named Captain Cal Lanning.
And what did Captain Lanning say? Lehning confirmed
that he had read Smith's books, and he acknowledged
openly that the design of the U .S. Navy's Combat
Information Centers, the CICs that they developed
during World War II, was, and I quote, taken
specifically, directly, and consciously from
the directrix. Wait, Plaz, I just want to make
sure I and everyone listening fully understand
this. You were telling me that during World War
II, while fighting this massive... desperate
naval war against the Japanese in the Pacific,
the United States Navy reorganized its entire
command structure based on a pulp sci -fi novel
written by a donut chemist. That is exactly what
happened. Campbell told Smith in that letter,
you, sir, were 100 % right, as the Japanese Navy
learned at an appalling cost. That is insane.
The Japanese had excellent ships. They had brave
sailors, but they lacked that central nervous
system on their vessels. The U .S. Navy adopted
Smith's directrix concept, creating the CIC.
and it gave them a decisive, overwhelming tactical
advantage. That is absolutely wild. I mean, it's
one thing for a sci -fi writer to predict a gadget,
right? Like a flip phone or an iPad. It's another
thing entirely to fundamentally redesign the
architecture of modern warfare. It really shows
that Smith understood the core problem of command.
He understood that as battles got bigger, faster,
and involved more units, the human brain simply
couldn't keep up without a dedicated interface
to process the data. So he designed the interface.
And the military actually built it. Yep. And
he didn't stop there either. He was making predictions
all over the place in his books. Oh, yes. The
man was a prophet of technology. In Skylark,
which he wrote right after World War I, he describes
energy processes that look suspiciously like
cold fumes. Wow. He talks about releasing the
energy of the atom with negligible waste decades
before the atomic bomb or nuclear reactors were
a reality. And he was way into IT before IT even
existed as a field. Oh, heavily. He invented
something called the mechanical educator, which
is basically direct brainwave learning. Think
of the Matrix, right? I know Kung Fu. Yeah, uploading
knowledge directly. Smith wrote about that in
the 1930s. He also wrote about the electronic
brain, which was a machine that could compute
using all energy bands, tachyonic, gravity, electromagnetic.
He was basically envisioning supercomputing and
quantum computing long before the transistor
was even invented. He also tackled military concepts
like stealth, AYCS, the ODA loop. And I love
this one. He highlighted the difficulty of maintaining
technological secrecy. Right. The idea that once
a weapon is used on the battlefield, the enemy
will inevitably reverse engineer and duplicate
it. Which is exactly how the arms race works.
Exactly. But as much as he got right, we have
to talk about the one major thing he got wrong.
Or rather, the thing he intentionally broke for
the sake of the story. Ah, the inertialist drive.
The Bergeron drive. This is a brilliant example
of Smith the Engineer battling Smith the... Explain
the physics problem he was trying to solve here.
The problem is Albert Einstein. Special relativity
dictates that nothing can travel faster than
the speed of light. And worse, as an object with
mass accelerates and gets closer to the speed
of light, its mass effectively becomes infinite.
So if you try to punch it to light speed, your
ship becomes infinitely heavy, which means it
requires infinite energy to push it. Exactly.
It's a cosmic speed limit. You cannot break it.
Smith wanted a galactic empire. You can't have
a galactic empire if it takes 100 ,000 years
just to send a radio message across the galaxy,
let alone a fleet. He needed a way for his ships
to travel impossibly fast. So did he just wave
his hands and ignore Einstein? No, he respected
Einstein way too much for that. Instead, he looked
for a loophole. He postulated a fictional device
that could completely negate inertia. If a ship
has zero inertia, no mass resistance to acceleration,
then the relativistic rule about infinite mass
doesn't apply to it. You can accelerate instantly
to any speed you want, millions of times the
speed of light, using barely any thrust. It's
a cheat code. It is a total cheat code. But he
tried so hard to justify it. He actually cited
Bigelow's theoretical chemistry in the text of
the novel to give the drive a veneer of academic
plausibility. He knew it was impossible by the
physics of his day, but he called it his one
big lie. The one big lie rule. I've heard writers
talk about this. You get one major impossibility,
and then everything else that follows has to
be completely logical. Exactly. Once you ask
the reader to accept that the inertialist drive
works, everything else, how the ships navigate,
how they fight, what happens if the drive fails
mid -flight, is treated with rigorous, unbending
logic. Like what? What's an example? Well, for
example, if you are moving at a million miles
an hour without inertia and you suddenly turn
off the drive. You instantly stop. No, your intrinsic
inertia returns instantly. You would revert exactly
to your original velocity relative to your surroundings
before you turn the drive on. Oh, that's weird.
Right. And because you have zero inertia while
moving under the drive, you don't splat against
the wall of the ship when you turn it off and
suddenly stop. Because there's no momentum to
carry you forward into the bulkhead. Precisely.
It creates a very unique, logically consistent
tactical environment for his space battles. It's
fascinating that he put that much thought into
the actual mechanics of his own cheat. It's what
makes him the father of space opera. He wasn't
just writing an adventure story. He was writing
complex systems. Let's talk about that title,
the father of space opera. The sources list him
as one of the three novas of 20th century sci
-fi. Yes, along with Stanley G. Weinbaum and,
of course, Robert A. Heinlein. And his relationship
with Heinlein is something I really want to dig
into because Heinlein is an absolute giant in
the field. But he looked up to Smith. He revered
him. They were actually very close friends in
real life. Heinlein dedicated his book Methuselah's
Children to Smith. And Heinlein famously admitted
that he learned more about writing from Doc Smith
than from all other writers put together. Wow.
And there is a story in the sources about them
buying a car together that I absolutely love.
It paints such a vivid, hilarious picture of
their friendship. Oh, the Superman car test.
It is legendary. So Heinlein is looking to buy
a used car. He asks Smith, the brilliant engineer,
to come along and help him inspect it to make
sure it's a good deal. Two absolute geniuses
kicking the tires on a used Chevy. Right. So
Smith gets in the driver's seat. He takes the
car out to a quiet country back road and he starts
driving. Fast. Okay. Like highly illegal speeds.
He is just tearing down this dirt road. Testing
the engine output. Testing the chassis. But here's
the visual you have to picture. While Smith is
driving like an absolute maniac, both he and
Heinlein have their heads pressed firmly up against
the roof of the car. Why? Why would they do that?
Bone conduction. You're kidding. Nope. Smith
claimed that by pressing their skulls directly
against the metal frame of the roof, they could
hear subtle vibrations and squeaks in the chassis
that the human ear alone would miss over the
sound of the engine. That is the most absurd,
wonderful image. Two of the greatest minds in
the history of science fiction speeding down
a dirt road. Heads just mashed against the ceiling,
listening for squeaks. It sums them up perfectly,
doesn't it? They weren't just dreamers. They
were mechanics at heart. They wanted to know
exactly how the machine worked. Whether it was
a used car or a fictional galactic government,
they wanted to look under the hood. And that
influenced the mechanical world building. It
ripples out to people who maybe never even read
Smith directly. I mean, we have talked about
Star Wars. You cannot have Star Wars without
Lensman, period. George Lucas has cited the Lensman
series as a major influence on his youth. Smith
is the unacknowledged progenitor of so much of
that universe. Give us the specifics. What's
the DNA match here? Okay, look at the lens itself.
In the books, it is a device given only to a
select group of incorruptible, highly trained
officers, the lensmen. Right. It gives them telepathic
powers, it acts as a universal translator, and
it identifies them universally as the elite guardians
of civilization. I mean, that sounds a whole
lot like a lightsaber and the force wrapped into
one. It is the Jedi order. The galactic patrol
is the direct model for the Jedi. And then you
have the. broader background conflict in lensman
there are two ancient super powerful races the
arisians who are good and the adorians who are
evil okay and these ancient races are secretly
manipulating all the younger races humans aliens
guiding them toward a massive final confrontation
which sounds exactly like the light and dark
sides of the force or even um the vorlons and
the shadows in babylon 5 exactly J. Michael Straczynski,
the creator of Babylon 5, openly acknowledged
his debt to Smith. That specific trope, the idea
of elder races guiding the younger races, is
pure Doc Smith. And Jerry Siegel, the creator
of Superman, was hugely impressed by the optimistic
future Smith laid out in Skylark. It's everywhere.
And we even see it in early video games, right?
Space War. Yes, Space War, the great -grandfather
of all computer games. It was developed at MIT
in the early 60s. Steve Slug Russell, the primary
programmer, said explicitly that he was trying
to recreate the space battles from the Lensman
series on a computer screen. So when he was coding
the physics of the ships, he was trying to code
Doc Smith's physics. The way the ships drifted.
the way they fired torpedoes, the tactical maneuvering.
So honestly, if you're playing Halo or EVE Online
today, there is a direct line of code, metaphorically
speaking, leading all the way back to Doc Smith's
donut factory. The multi -billion dollar gaming
industry owes a debt to the donut guy. I absolutely
love it. It's incredible. And we should probably
touch on his later life because he actually lived
to see the world change in ways he predicted.
He finally retired from the donut business in
1957. The end of an era. No more 18 -hour shifts.
Right. He retired to Florida and later moved
to Oregon. By this time, he was a massive celebrity
in the sci -fi world. He was the guest of honor
at conventions, and he genuinely loved the fans.
There's a great photo of him at Shikanai in 1940,
actually masquerading as Northwest Smith, a character
created by another writer, C .L. Moore. Oh, that's
cool. He wasn't a snob about it. He was a fan
himself. He was a huge fan of the genre he helped
build. But ironically, for a guy who literally
invented the concept of the inertialist drive
to travel the stars, I read he didn't like flying.
No. It's so funny. The man who desperately wanted
to be a World War I fighter pilot eventually
developed a strong dislike for commercial airplanes.
He insisted on driving everywhere. Probably with
his head pressed against the roof of the car
the whole way. Probably. Listening for squeaks
all the way from Florida to Oregon. I do want
to take a second to clear up one specific point
of confusion that always comes up with Smith.
There are some books on the shelves credited
to E .E. Doc Smith called Lord Tedrick. Ah, yes.
And people often point to those books and say,
look, he invented the Death Star. Right. This
is a very common misconception in the fandom.
Let's clear it up. Smith wrote a short story
called Tedrick. It was about a blacksmith. It
was a very small -scale contained story. Decades
later, a writer named Gordon Eklund was hired
to expand that single short story into a full
series of novels. So Eklund wrote the books,
but they slapped Smith's name on the cover to
sell copies. Effectively, yes. And in those later
books written by Eklund, there is a weapon called
the Iron Sphere that destroys planets. It looks
and acts exactly like the Death Star from Star
Wars. But that was entirely Eklund's invention,
not Smith's original idea. Okay, so we can't
give Smith credit for the Death Star specifically.
No. But to be fair, in his actual books, he did
invent something called the sunbeam, which could
literally turn a sun into a directed weapon.
So he really wasn't far off in terms of destructive
scale. Planet killer, sun killer, close enough.
He worked... right up until the very end, didn't
he? He did. He died on August 31st, 1965. And
in a really poetic twist, the final Skylark novel,
Skylark Duquesne, was published that exact same
year. Wow. So he started the series in 1915 with
Lee Garby and finished it in 1965. A 50 -year
span. Just think about the technological progress
in that specific window. When he started writing
Skylark, people were still driving horse -drawn
buggies in the streets. When he finished it,
the Gemini space program was flying and we were
only four years away from... Literally walking
on the moon. He didn't just watch the future
happen. He wrote the brochure for it. He really
did. So as we bring this deep dive in for a landing
today, we've gone from the dusty flour mill in
1919 to the center of the galaxy. We've seen
how a working class chemist used his rigorous
engineering brain to build an entire universe.
What is the big takeaway here for you? For me,
looking at all these sources, it's about the
sheer power of competence and optimism. Smith's
world is a world where science actually works,
where human reason and engineering work. Yeah.
His heroes aren't angsty or conflicted about
whether they should save the day. They see a
massive problem, they engineer a logical solution,
and they execute it perfectly. It's an incredibly
optimistic view of humanity. It basically says
that if we are smart enough and if we work hard
enough, we can solve literally anything, even
interstellar war. Exactly. And the fact that
the U .S. Navy actually used his ideas to build
the CIC proves that he wasn't just daydreaming.
He was engaged in high level problem solving
through the medium of fiction. That loop from
imagination to reality is what really sticks
with me. He imagined the directrix, the Navy
built the CIC based on it, and now modern sci
-fi writers grow up in a world completely defined
by that technology, which they then put into
their own books. It's a perfect circle of influence.
It makes you wonder what fiction being written
today is secretly going to be the blueprint for
the next century of human advancement. That is
the question. Doc Smith was working exhausting
18 -hour days in a donut factory. And in the
tiny slivers of time he had left over, he changed
the world. He undeniably did. So here's my final
provocative thought for you to chew on today.
If a donut engineer in 1920 could dream up the
template for modern naval warfare in the multi
-billion dollar video game industry in his spare
time, what visionary world -changing ideas are
currently hiding in the notebooks of the person
sitting in the cubicle next to you right now?
Or perhaps what ideas are hiding in your own
notebooks. Exactly. Don't throw those ideas away
just because they seem too far out. Thanks for
joining us for this deep dive into the massive
universe of E .E. Doc Smith. Keep looking up.
And keep reading.