Just finished Triplanetary and am... ambivalent. I really wanted to love it, but it hasn't sold me. I'm wishing I had started with Galactic Patrol or at least First Lensman, since my understanding is that Triplanetary was only added to the Lensman canon years later, and in fact doesn't have a single goddamn thing to do with anything.
I can appreciate Doc's exuberant writing style as he breathlessly describes the blinding megasplosions of unimaginably cataclysmic particle beams and scintillating force fields, but it moves much too quickly to build any sort of real drama. A titanic space battle of epic proportions will start and end within a single page, and the story as a whole is disjointed and ultimately goes nowhere. It's obvious that each chapter was originally published serially in magazines; there's an episode where a major villain previously thought dead is brought back and summarily killed off for absolutely no reason, all within the space of a single chapter, like bad anime filler. Maybe the novel format just doesn't do justice to the saga.
The characters don't help matters, as they are all ridiculously bland comic book caricatures and the dialogue is actually laugh-out-loud B-movie atrocious. They are impossible to care about except for their constant outbursts of hilariously out-dated 1930s slang. Between the one-dimensional characters, the excessive yet pointless spectacle, and the awesomely embarrassing sexism, it's like reading a Michael Bay film.
And yet! I am really digging the universe Smith is portraying here, and the sheer boyish glee with which he describes the catastrophic battles and ludicrously turbocharged space engines really is endearing. I feel like I am not approaching the work from the right frame of mind; if it were a movie or a comic I would probably love it, but for some reason as a book it is not meeting my expectations. I should love it, it's basically got all the ingredients. I'm told they eventually get space axes.
I want to take another crack at this. I will probably try to track down a copy of First Lensman and see if it clicks with me. I guess my question is: does it get better? Is it worth sticking it out to the bitter end, like a good Triplanetary officer would? Have any of you jerks even read this stuff?
FUN FACT: About a third of the pages in my edition of Triplanetary are actually taken up with a story Smith co-wrote with another guy with too many Es in his name, called The Masters of Space, which is utter retarded bullshit. It does not instill confidence.
P.S. I god damn never want to hear anyone call the animated Lensman movie a "travesty" ever again after this.
P.P.S. While reading up on the series it occurred to me that Samus Aran's name might have been originally intended to be a nod to Virgil Samms. She's certainly got the space armour, even right down to the "lens" on the back of her hand in Metroid 2, and she does hang out with space dragons. Someone get Gunpei Yokoi Yoshio Sakamoto on the phone right now, I need this confirmed! It's for science!
