Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
The 5 "Second Stage" Lensmen (and Lenswoman) at Work!, 22 Mar 1998
By A Customer
Possibly the best in the Series, though anyone would tell you, that is a difficult determination to make. The 5 most powerful "Second Stage" Lensmen do detective, spy and combat duty to ferret out and destroy the denizens of Boskone. The beams are hotter, the technology heavier, the battles bigger and the mental powers greater than ever before. See the sunbeam roast planets! This book is loaded with everything good about the Lensmen series. My favorite chapter is "Nadreck at Work", about a non oxygen breathing, Second Stage Lensman with a decidedly, uh, er, different moral outlook on things. Clarissa Kinnison, Kim's wife, comes into her own as a woman hero to make this series accessible to women also.
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1 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic book in a fantastic series, 28 Jan 2002
By A Customer
I was first introduced when I watched the Lensman anime (of which there are two, everything is the same except that they arent sequels and the stories contradict each other) on Sky Movies back when I was at school. In my fourth year I did a weeks work experience in Oxfam (better than building walls up Rivington) and in the book rack I found Triplanetary. I read the cover and realised it was part of the Lensman series and wondered if it was the same Lensman as the anime. Unfortunately, I didn't read the book until I was at college when I found out that one of my mates owned the entire series. Many conversations about "lets strip down this engine and improve it" and "I've just had an idea, if we connect this lead to that, and that lead to this, we have built a sun beam!" Anyway, back to this book. Thoroughly enjoyable read but not worth getting unless you have or are getting the entire series. I have just looked on imdb and there is a Japanese movie Lensman : Power of the Lens. Neeeeed!
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Read this third!, 28 Feb 2007
I (and many others) believe the best place to start with Doc Smith's "Lensman" series is Galactic Patrol; and as I've said why, at length, in my review of that opus, I won't repeat it here.
Furthermore, if you've already read "Patrol" and Gray Lensman with enjoyment, you'll hardly need my urging to continue.
This is nonetheless probably the weakest of the four main Lensman novels, mainly because of Smith's often-noted discomfort with female characters. It is a curious reflection on his powers as a writer that he can make a thoroughly convincing -- even likeable! -- character of a thirty-foot, crocodile-headed, winged python with eyes that come out on stalks, but can't manage the matriarch of a tribe of human Amazons (from the planet Lyrane II).
We cannot, to be sure, be surprised that Kinnison's skills at handling females are so deficient: after all, he's spent his formative years galumphing around the Galaxy in search of the arch-villain Helmuth, not hanging out like a normal teenager. Military genius he may be, but socially he's still an adolescent.
(Although... perhaps he's not *quite* as inexperienced as all that? Exactly what *were* his experiences as a Cadet with that "bedroom-eyed Aldebaranian hell-cat", the stunningly beautiful Dessa Desplaines? Whatever they were, they obviously left quite an impression: Kinnison -- normally unflappable even by outré developments like hyperspatial tubes materialising in the same room with him -- is reduced to a jelly at the mere thought of meeting her again.)
Still, be all that as it may, "Second Stage" has many compensating pleasures, not least the exploits of Nadreck, the cowardly four-dimensional Palainian lensman.
And it leads into one of the strongest finishes of any science fiction series, as Kim and Clarissa's offspring carry the struggle to its climax in Children of the Lens.
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by E.E. Doc Smith
by E.E. Smith
by E.E."Doc" Smith
by E.E. Smith
by E.E. 'Doc' Smith
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