Skylark of Valeron

Skylark Series #3

By: E. E. "Doc" Smith

Narrated by: Reed McColm

Length: 9 hrs and 17 mins

Publisher's summary

Our hero families are in deep space when they are attacked by the intellectuals. In order to survive the attack they rotate into the 4th dimension and are captured. They must make it back to 3space and find their way home. Unfortunately they find themselves hopelessly lost but are able to save another race and make their way home!

Hi-fi sci-fi: don't miss the rest of the Skylark series.

©1949 E. E. "Doc" Smith (P)2007 Books in Motion

Great

Good story and very good narration.The skylark and the lensman series are my favorites and have been for a long time.

Loved the Skylark Series

What made the experience of listening to Skylark of Valeron the most enjoyable?

Enjoying all over again a series of books I had read in my youth. My Dad passed his E. E. Doc Smith on to my brother and me and we read them and just ate them up. Smith introduced me to Sci-Fi and the love has lasted a lifetime. I loved the Skylark series because it fired my imagination and dreams. Yes, man would some day venture into space as the explorers man is.

Who was your favorite character and why?

Seaton was amazing, but managed to stay down to earth. Duquesne grew enormously through the books, but then stayed true to his character in the end. Do tigers really change their stripes?

Which scene was your favorite?

I loved seeing the softer side of Duquesne come out. His scenes with the aliens for "DNA" preservation was very interesting.

Was there a moment in the book that particularly moved you?

The enemy became the friend/ally to overcome adversity.

Any additional comments?

Loved the reader and the books. I think Doc Smith was really a romantic at heart.

Skylark of Valeron

Reed McColm regularly gets a bollocking for his readings of E.E. Smith. I regret to say that it's well deserved. His reading of Skylark Three was slovenly and camp. Skylark of Valeron starts off in a more promising way, crisp and with some momentum, but decays as the novel goes on.

The voice characterizations are very odd. Seaton's voice is what you'd get if you listened to a now elderly man of the period and projected back to what you'd think he'd sound like without the quaver. The Valeronians are humanoid, so you'd expect them to sound, well, human, but they're a mixture -- one of the adult males sounds like an effete 14 year old boy, while one of the leaders sounds as if he's using Stephen Hawking's voice generator. The Chlorans are sort of Fifties creaky voiced monsters, and the Osnomians are, well, it's hard to say what they're meant to be. The Norlaminians sound too depressed to stand up.

As for the book itself, Smith has learned something about writing since Skylark Three, and the writing is more focused. He's still likely to refer to someone as a "luckless wight," so that needs to be taken in context, but there's a reason these books are still around. He's amazingly inventive and he tells a story.

Sooo…

Soo… on the downside, we have a scientifically not up-to-date take on space (even at the time, ether was already discredited)… a strangely hierarchical approach to waves, fields - there’s always a higher level discovered and put into practice immediately without any engineering issues level once the heroes beed it. And yes, the heroes and the villains - there’s no grey area here, it’s either blindingly white or super-vanta black. And let’s not forget about the not really cavalier, cringe treatment of women - starting slowly, with a strange urge of every girl to get married to every boy… working it’s way up to putting gently formulated, but incredibly self-demeaning statements into the mouths of women themselves.

Soo… why is this still pretty readable (listenable)? I’m thinking it’s because of the steady high-speed clip of the ever-expanding action. Which in turn is the product of the serialized writing and publication.

The other aspect is the pure science fiction of it all, how far advanced this was in its genre at the time. Star Trek? 40yrs earlier, this had mind-controlled (!) food replicators, force shields, cloaking devices - you name it!

I first read this in translated version almost 50 years ago, and authors comparable in background (engineering) and of around the same time (eg German author Hans Dominik) used some similar ideas… but they simply didn’t put together a universe-spanning story - they held back. EE Doc Smith didn’t hold back. He fantasized on a romp!