Trivia / Skylark Series

• Science Marches On:
  • The series' technology is heavily dependent on ether. The "orders" of energy, in general, don't fit with anything known to modern science. Ironically, when it was first published, the blurb praised how "realistic" the science behind the story was.
    • The implication is that first order effects correspond to electromagnetic forces, while second and third order effects encompass the then-developing vision of the strong and weak nuclear forces but with a mechanism encompassing what we currently would call preon theory; there is nothing in Smith's canon to suggest that the forces are long-range. Gravity as we understand it is the prototypical — but explicitly not the only — fourth order force. Gravity is also explicitly a faster-than-light effect in the Skylark novels, which can be assumed to retcon inertial dampening and the non-relativistic flight of the Skylark.
  • Considering what we now know about the formation of planets and chemical elements, it is extremely unlikely that Osnome would have such an abundance of heavy elements, and that light elements would be so rare.
  • Late in Skylark Three, it is mentioned that the Osnomians manufacture a cubic mile of uranium. This is completely impossible. There probably isn’t even that much uranium on Earth, anyway, though this happens on a planet with much more heavy metal than Earth.
    • A good example of the trope! Having started publication in 1930, Skylark Three was published about eight years before the discovery of nuclear fission by Hahn, Meitner, et al.
    • Given the technology available by the later parts of Skylark Three, it might very well be possible for Seaton and friends to mine uranium ore on other planets and haul the ore across space to Osnome to be processed, all using interstellar tractor beams.
  • As the series progresses, the spaceships become larger and larger to the point of being planetoids. And no wonder — they were building in powerful and sophisticated computers made from vacuum tubes^note "valves", which are incredibly bulky, hot and power-hungry by modern standards. ^note For a bit of perspective: if you removed the packaging and heat sinks, even the largest integrated circuits from a typical modern desktop would rattle around inside a vacuum tube — and one tube is the approximate equivalent of a single transistor.