Walk In The Open Wind

Dec 5, 2020 | Covid-19 Diary, Dead Water

Smith and Foss

Just a quick post this evening as the most exciting thing that’s happened was a short power cut to our side of the street. Otherwise today would be a rain blog to match what Clive James used to call the ‘Dan Maskell rain commentary’ at Wimbledon, or, indeed, Wmbldn.

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It has come to something when I nip up to the attic and retrieve a couple of old EE ‘Doc’ Smith SF novels to ‘read’.

Long ago, in the distant time before the internet, before even mobile phones, one of the great attractions of SF paperbacks was Chris Foss’s covers for the Panther imprint, his imagination, draughtsmanship and airbrushed execution in acrylics. It is almost, though not quite, axiomatic that Foss’s covers were an order of magnitude better than the stories they contained, which were frequently by male authors from the age of the pulps. Smith started publishing in 1927 and continued to be published until his death in 1965, with posthumous works to follow.

His first novel, The Skylark of Space was initially rejected as being too far out for contemporary readers, although it doesn’t look like that now. His work embodies the assumptions and fantasies of a white scientist with a PhD in chemical engineering, working to perfect doughnut recipes. The stories he built his career on have variously been described as implausible and often self-parodic, and he has a fetishistic eye for detail with regard to his female characters (he does, though, have female co-leads, whose characterisation extends beyond their inevitably tight-fitting attire and who don’t always define themselves by reference to their man, himself, inevitably, a ‘superb physical specimen’). Smith also had a regrettable propensity to condone genocide with respect to unpleasant alien races.

For all that, he is someone to whom I sometimes turn to when my brain isn’t functioning sufficiently well to read anything more complex or, indeed, ethical. It’s not that I’m unwell, just that we’ve had relentless rain for a while and not enough sunlight.

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Music: I still think of this as being quite new, even though it’s from 1983 🙁  The Eurythmics: Here Comes The Rain Again