Edward Elmer Smith, better known to the SF community as E.E.’Doc’ Smith is regarded by many as the father of ‘Space Opera’. Smith wrote his first SF novel , ‘The Skylark of Space’ in 1920. After many attempts to find a publisher it was eventually serialised in 1927 by ‘Amazing Stories’ magazine, which had only existed for a year at the time. To help put that into context, the first story to feature ‘Buck Rogers’ was written by Phillip F Nolan in 1928, and the movie reels were made in 1939.

The first ‘Skylark’ story was so popular that Smith was commissioned to write a sequel. Smith would go on write four ‘Skylark’ books, seven ‘Lensman’ books and a variety of other single novels that have become iconic in the SF genre.

These books offer a fascinating window in the origins of Space Opera, but be warned, this is the raw unpolished face of early SF. Smith and others like him were figuring out this new genre even as they wrote it. The science in it is not what we would expect to see in a modern SF novel and there are things that seem fairly absurd given what we now know about the universe.

It is worth mentioning that these are ‘Adventure’ stories as much as anything else and that the science we take for granted was unknown or very new at the time (Einstein published his Theory of General Relativity in 1916 and Hubble proved conclusively that some Nebulae were in fact, vastly distant Galaxies in 1928).

Gollancz have recently released a Gateway Omnibus edition compiling all four the ‘Skaylark’ books, so if you’re in the mood for a bit of retro adventure grab your spacesuit and helmet and head for the stars!