Subspace Explorers. E.E. "Doc" Smith

Subspace Explorers is a science fiction novel by American writer E. E. “Doc” Smith. It was first published in 1965 by Canaveral Press in an edition of 1,460 copies. The novel is an expansion of Smith’s story “Subspace Survivors” which first appeared in the July 1960 issue of the magazine Astounding Science Fiction.

Smith—Edward Elmer Smith, Ph.D. (May 2, 1890 – August 31, 1965) was an American food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes) and science-fiction author, best known for the Lensman and Skylark series. He is sometimes called the father of space opera.

Robert A. Heinlein and Smith were friends. (Heinlein dedicated his 1958 novel Methuselah's Children “To Edward E. Smith, PhD”.) In an essay by Heinlein, reprinted in the collection Expanded Universe in 1980, he gives a more detailed biography of Smith. He reported that E. E. Smith was a large, blond, athletic, very intelligent, very gallant man, married to a remarkably beautiful, intelligent, red-haired woman named MacDougal (thus perhaps the prototypes of the characters “Kimball Kinnison” and “Clarissa MacDougal”). Further, he wrote that Smith perhaps took his “unrealistic” heroes from life, citing as an example the extreme competence of the hero of Spacehounds of IPC.

In Smith’s three non-series novels written after his professional retirement, Galaxy Primes, Subspace Explorers, and Subspace Encounter, Smith explores themes of telepathy and other mental abilities collectively called “psionics,” and of the conflict between libertarian and socialistic/communistic influences in the colonization of other planets. Galaxy Primes was written after critics such as Groff Conklin and P. Schuyler Miller in the early ’50s accused his fiction of being passé, and he made an attempt to do something more in line with the concepts about which Astounding editor John W. Campbell encouraged his writers to make stories. Despite this, it was rejected by Campbell, and it was eventually published by Amazing Stories in 1959.

His late story “The Imperial Stars” (1964), featuring a troupe of circus performers involved in sabotage in a galactic empire, recaptured some of the atmosphere from his earlier works and was intended as the first in a new series, with outlines of later parts rumored to still exist. In fact, the Imperial Stars characters and concepts were continued by author Stephen Goldin as the “Family D’Alembert” series. While the book covers indicate the series was written by Smith and Goldin together, Goldin only ever had Smith's original novella to expand upon. Goldin has since rewritten them to remove Smith’s characters and republished them as solo material.

—Karl Wurf

Rockville, Maryland

CHAPTER I

CATASTROPHE

At time zero minus nine minutes First Officer Carlyle Deston, Chief Electronicist of the starliner Procyon, sat attentively at his board. He was five feet eight inches tall and weighed one hundred sixty two pounds. Just a little guy, as spacemen go. Although narrow-waisted and, for his heft, broad-shouldered, he was built for speed and maneuverability, not to handle freight.

Watching a hundred lights and half that many instruments; listening to four telephone circuits, two with each ear; hands flashing to toggles and buttons and knobs; he was completely informed as to the instant-by-instant condition of everything in his department during count-down. Everything had been and still was in condition GO.

Nevertheless, he was bothered; bothered as he had never been bothered before in all his three years of subspacing. He had always had hunches and they had always been right, but this one was utterly ridiculous. It wasn’t the ship or the trip—nothing was yelling “DANGER!” into his mind—it was something down in the Middle that was pulling at him like a cat tractor and it didn’t make sense. He never went down into passenger territory. He had no business there and flirting with vac-skulled girls was not his dish.

So he fought his hunch down and concentrated on his job. Lift-off was uneventful; so was the climb out to a safe distance from Earth. At time zero minus two seconds Deston poised a fingertip over the red button, but everything stayed in condition GO and immergence into subspace was perfectly normal. All the green lights except one went out; all the needles dropped to zero; all four phones went dead; all signals stopped. He plugged a jack into the socket under the remaining green light and said:

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