Trivia / Lensman

• Dueling Dubs: Both Harmony Gold and Streamline Pictures released dubbed versions of the anime movie. Harmony Gold also produced a Compilation Movie of the first episodes of the series.
• Life Imitates Art: Development of the Essex-class Combat Information Center was inspired by the Directrix after operational analysis indicated that fleet losses early on in World War II were due to a lack of coordination.
• Science Marches On:
  • Spaceships developed on slide rule, with fantastic beam weapons that use vacuum tubes and punch cards! Given that every spaceship which flew in Smith's lifetime (d.1965) was probably drafted on slide rule, he wasn't doing too badly. It's also helpful to keep in mind that when he started writing, the concept of an entirely electronic programmable computer was itself the stuff of science fiction.
  • With the Ur-Example possibly being the gigantic Brain (1 cubic kilometer) of the ''Skylark of Valeron." Which had the advantage of "thinking" in not only electrical elements, but also gravitational, possibly the nuclear forces, and in faster-than-light forces supposed connected with thought in living creatures.
  • The GURPS RPG supplement threw in the explanation that the Arisians deliberately prevented anyone in Civilization from inventing the transistor or modern computing theory, because the entire point of the Arisian breeding program was to improve the powers of the mind. Allowing the existence of surrogate minds (i.e., computers) would have interfered with that development, by removing most of the need for heightened intellectual capacity beyond the current human average. Some canonical support for this theory exists – when the Arisian breeding program finally reached its end (i.e., when the Children of the Lens were finally born), Civilization did immediately start to develop advanced computing technology, as seen in both Children of the Lens and Masters of the Vortex. Although that begs the question of why even slide rules had been allowed in the interim...
  • Well before that, they already had Mecha-Mooks to crew at least some of their war fleets, and robots (albeit more primitive ones) were around before humanity had expanded beyond the solar system. Lensman information technology is ... weird by modern standards.
  • The early version of the Nebular Hypothesis that dominated the books' ideas of stellar and planetary formation, and the pre-DNA eugenics and Evolutionary Levels concepts used in the Lensman breeding programs.
  • The inertialess drive was theoretically possible when the books were written, but advancements in relativity and quantum mechanics have both made hash of it.
  • Negamatter. It's essentially antimatter, but as originally imagined by Paul Dirac in the 1930s. As such, it has negative mass and some other weird properties most scientists today don't believe it should have.
  • The vacuum tubes might not qualify, give that transistors can only handle very small power loads and tube circuits are very much more resistant to EMPs and hard radiation.
    • The vacuum tubes are best described as qualifying in some cases and not in others. In low-power benchtop gadgets such as the apparatus used by the Delgonians to extract life-force they certainly do. At the other end of the scale, however, the "sunbeam" works by converting an entire solar system into a giant "vacuum tube", and the description of its operation only makes sense in terms of vacuum-tube physics; a solid-state version would just be silly... In any case, vacuum tubes are far from obsolete in Real Life - specialised vacuum tubes are still the device of choice for a lot of high-frequency, high-power applications.
    • Note that the description of the Sunbeam in terms of a vacuum tube is explicitly called out as an analogy, and when Kinnison tries to correct the description he is told that the audience (Hayes and Lacey) do not need the exact detail, just the general idea.
  • Atomic power generation. As hinted in the "main sequence" and explicitly described in Masters of the Vortex, atomic power plants generate power from a "vortex of atomic destruction" which eats everything, not just fissile materials... and is self-sustaining. So the Lensman-universe equivalent of China Syndrome is an atomic vortex which escapes from the power plant's control, fuelling itself on ordinary rock and spewing a continuous effluvium of highly radioactive reaction products, like a version of Chernobyl that doesn't stop.
    • The climax of Masters of the Vortex is Neal Cloud and Joan Janowick's discovery of just why those powerplants are exploding, who is responsible, and what can be done about it.
  • At one point in the main series, Kimball Kinnison needs to find Civilization's absolutely smartest minds to work on a weapons project of utmost importance. To figure out who he needs, he performs an index search on the personality profiles listed in Civilization's main records database... using an electromechanical tabulating machine to process stacks upon stacks of hardcopy files.
  • Smith invents a collision of galaxies to explain the improbable number of planets in the galaxy. Now that planetary formation is regarded as a typical result of stellar formation, rather than the consequence of a near collision of stars, the explanation is superfluous as well as inaccurate.
  • All of the stories except First Lensman, Children of the Lens, and the first five chapters of Triplanetary were written before World War II, and give insanely-high-powered explosives names that imply they're types of chemical explosives. The post-WWII stories just use nuclear weapons instead.
• Shrug of God: Robert A. Heinlein claimed in his Expanded Universe anthology that Smith told him how the series was supposed to continue, though he refused to explain it because it wasn't his story. All he would divulge was that "the ending develops by inescapable logic from clues in Children of the Lens".
• What Could Have Been: There was going to be a Lensman movie written by J. Michael Straczynski and directed by Ron Howard, but it immediately fell in Development Hell before Universal decided to drop the project due to budget issues.