 I've been planning on talking about tri-planetary since I started this mess. I've just been wondering what would be a good time to bring it up. And since everyone in the world has been talking endlessly for the last couple months now about a certain space opera we all know, this is as good a time as any to talk about the original space opera. The tri-planetary story was first published in Astounding Stories in 1934. I believe in three parts. It was written by E. E. Doc Smith, one of the most popular early science fiction authors. Paraphrasing Mark F. Smith here. E. E. Doc Smith pretty much invented space opera. Physics, time, and politics never stand in the way of a plot that gallops ahead without let up. The heroes of Smith stories are all scientists. He didn't want to be constrained by the limits of known science, however so. In his hands, the electromagnetic spectrum becomes raw material to be molded into ever more amazing and lethal forms, and the speed of light is no bar to travel through the void. Enjoy this story of yesteryear, set in tomorrow, where real women ignite love at a glance, real men achieve in days what governments take decades, and aliens are an ever-present threat to life as we know it, exclamation point. Conway Costigan, burly young first officer of the liner. Cleo Marsden, radiant belle of the voyage. I read this book, I think, about ten years ago, and I laughed all the way through it. It was so fun. It was so much more than I expected. When Doc Smith wrote the triplanetary stories, he invented atomic-powered space battleships engaging in laser firefights. He invented warp drive. He invented deflector shields. He invented tractor beams. The villain of the story, or the human villain anyway, the pirate Gray Roberts, cruises around the solar system in a battle station shaped like a planet. This book never lets up. This book is non-stop. It is a riot. It really is like a well-written Flash Gordon serial, or Commando Cody, with good writing. And I haven't even talked about the aliens yet. The Nevians are like nothing that I've ever read about before, which amazes me because they are so strange and so non-human, and yet I've never seen or read anyone imitating them, like they imitate so many other things from this book. I couldn't even find any drawings of them. On the entire internet, I couldn't find any drawings or sketches of the Nevians. Can you believe that? I can't. So I reread their description of them from the book, and here's my little sketch. If anything, my art here is tame compared to how they're described. They are weird when the Nevians appear out of nowhere during the big tri-planetary space battle with the pirate Gray Roberts. Everything goes to hell. Everybody in every space fleet on both sides of the battle dies. Because the Nevians are looking for iron. They use solid iron to power their spacecraft, and they have an iron-sucking ray that pulls all iron out of everything in its path, so all the spacecraft just disintegrate and everybody dies. Now, this is another thing. On top of everything else, this is another thing. The idea of using solid iron for power, I laugh every time I think about it. I laugh out loud every time I read it in the book because E. E. Doc Smith was a physicist. He had to know that iron is the most stable element in the universe. It's the most stable element possible. You don't get energy from iron. You can't. Even stars can't fuse iron. After our sun fuses all of its hydrogen and all of its helium and then all the oxygen, nitrogen and everything else, that fuses everything into iron, it'll just die. So I really do think that E. E. Smith was making a science joke when he did this and I got the joke. Kostigin and his Intrepid Sidekick and the Danzel Cleo are captured by the Nevians and basically put in a zoo on display and when they find a way to escape, they need a distraction so they do something that destroys an entire city. You should read this book. It's a real treat. I have links below to the free text at Project Gutenberg as well as the free audiobook at LibriVox.com and you should read those because the novel version was different. When Smith put the stories together for a novel, Triplanetary itself is only part three of a three-part novel. The first two parts are a prequel story where he tries to shoehorn Triplanetary into his Linsman series. It doesn't work. If you're anything like me, you'll have much more fun reading the original and all the way through it you'll be wondering why you've never read this before and why there aren't comic books and TV shows and movies. Okay, next week I'm going to talk about another space opera. Wait to see. And visit the 30-second sci-fi tumbler. That's my headquarters. In addition to my videos, I publish links and updates there every day.