The Galaxy Primes
By Edward Elmer Smith
Garlock’s attention flashed back to the fighters. The yellow thing’s neck had been stretched twice its natural length, and the guardian had eaten almost through it. There was a terrific crunch, smacking, gobbling swallows, and head parted from body. However, the orange beak still clashed open and shut, and the body thrashed violently.
Shifting his grips, the guardian proceeded to tear a hole into his victim’s body, just below its breastbone. Thrusting two arms into the opening, he yanked out two organs—one of which, Garlock thought, could have been the heart—and ate them both, if not with extreme gusto, at least in a workmanlike and thoroughly competent fashion. He then picked up the head in one hand, grabbed the tip of a wing with another, and marched up the street for half a block, dragging the body behind him.
He lifted a manhole cover with his two unoccupied hands, dropped the remains down the hole thus exposed, and let the cover slam back into place. He then squatted down, licked himself meticulously clean with a long, black, extremely agile tongue, and went on about his enigmatic business quite as though nothing had happened.
Garlock strolled around a few minutes longer but could not recapture any interest in the doings of the human beings around him. He had filed away every detail of what had just happened, and it had so many bizarre aspects that he could not think of anything else. Therefore, he flagged down a “taxi” and was taken to the Pleiades. Belle and Lola were in the Main.
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Edward Elmer Smith
Edward Elmer Smith (May 2, 1890 – August 31, 1965) was an American food engineer (specializing in doughnuts and pastry mixes) and science fiction author best known for the Lensman and Skylark series. He is sometimes called the father of space opera.
Biography
Family and Education
Edward Elmer Smith was born in Sheboygan, Wisconsin, on May 2, 1890, to Fred Jay Smith and Caroline Mills Smith, staunch Presbyterians of British ancestry. His mother was a teacher born in Michigan in February 1855; his father was a sailor, born in Maine in January 1855 to an English father. They moved to Spokane, Washington, the winter after Edward Elmer was born, where Mr. Smith worked as a contractor in 1900. In 1902, the family moved to Seneaquoteen, near the Pend Oreille River, in Kootenai County, Idaho. He had four siblings, Rachel M. born September 1882, Daniel M. born January 1884, Mary Elizabeth born February 1886 (all of whom were born in Michigan), and Walter E. born July 1891 in Washington. In 1910, Fred, Caroline Smith, and their son Walter lived in the Markham Precinct of Bonner County, Idaho; Fred is listed in census records as a farmer.
The early 1930s
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. In this novel, he took pains to avoid the scientific impossibilities that had bothered some Skylark readers. Even in 1938, after he had written Galactic Patrol, Smith considered it his finest work. He later said, “This was scientific fiction, not, like the Skylarks, pseudo-science”. 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.
This book would be Triplanetary, “in which scientific detail would not be bothered about, and in which his imagination would run riot.” Indeed, characters within the story point out its psychological and scientific implausibilities and sometimes even seem to suggest self-parody. 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. Still, Astounding’s 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.
Retirement and late writing
After Smith retired, he and his wife lived in Clearwater, Florida, in the fall and winter. Each April, they drove the smaller of their two trailers to Seaside, Oregon, often stopping at science fiction conventions. In 1963, he was presented the inaugural First Fandom Hall of Fame award at the 21st World Science Fiction Convention in Washington, D.C. Some of his biography is captured in an essay by Robert A. Heinlein, which was reprinted in the collection Expanded Universe in 1980. A more detailed, although allegedly error-ridden, biography is in Sam Moskowitz’s Seekers of Tomorrow.
Edward Elmer Smith
