YMMV / Lensman

• Anvilicious: The Lensman books are quite free of political preaching by the standards of modern sci-fi, but one thing that is made clear is that the author doesn't like habit-forming drugs. Eldritch Abominations may be the Big Bads of the plot, but the real monsters are the drug dealers, who suffer unconditional death penalty when captured. Later in the books, this is replaced by mandatory treatment in most cases. In one prequel book, there's also a mild Author Tract on the evils of drugs, including a couple of lines basically amount to "Even the Soviet Union helped fight the international drug dealers. That's how bad drugs are." Though ironically enough there are several scenes of the heroes smoking, as the harmful effects of tobacco weren't yet understood.
• Author Tract: It's taken for granted that libertarianism is the right form of government. At one point, government is loftily mentioned as having been "reduced to its proper sphere and concentrated in the Patrol." Later on, the Port Admiral of the patrol - head of combat and operating forces - ends up the President of the Galactic Council too, even though the Port Admiral already has a seat on the council.
  • Second-Stage Lensman has a sequence involving straight up government manipulation of the media to deceive the public. Luckily, it's the good guys, but we know the Boskonians also have their own propaganda.
• Complete Monster:
  • Secret of the Lens: Lord Helmuth is the tyrant of the Boskone Empire who seeks dominion over the entire universe, sending his men to take over or even destroy entire planets, with the hero's farm world obliterated on his orders for the sake of killing one man. Helmuth keeps the populaces of the planets he takes over incapacitated with drugs, leaving them too drugged up to do anything but passively accept his reign, and has countless put to awful, grueling slavery for the rest of their lives in mines to keep a steady supply of the drug. Helmuth is also a frighteningly awful boss who executes subordinates for seemingly any reason he can think of, murdering two competent commanders merely for not having been thorough enough with their attempts to kill the Lensmen and nearly killing another for the transgression of running his mouth–-later executing him anyways in dissatisfaction with his service.
  • Galactic Patrol Lensman:
    • Lord Helmuth is the monstrous ruler of Boskone. A genocidal tyrant, Helmuth has entire planets exterminated on a regular basis, killing countless members of the galactic patrol, and approves sadistic plots of his chief agents, such as Neizel's plan to painfully turn a whole planet to stone via the mineral Geonium. Helmuth is also a terrible boss, frequently painfully killing subordinates for failing. Even in other heroes' backstories, it is revealed Helmuth occupies worlds and subjects inhabitants to genocide if it suits his interest and fancy.
    • Neizel of Boskone is one of the utter worst of the Boskonian Empire's already-polluted ranks, engaging in the conquest and slaughter of entire planets with the same regularity as the other commanders and going beyond. Neizel harvests a substance called Geonium which kills its victims through slow and agonizing petrification, letting the Geonium break out through a star system with a nightclub full of aliens turned to stone as one of myriad casualties it causes. Neizel happily intends to sell the Geonium as a weapon to tyrants with the right price, gloating that there are planets where the rulers would "much rather take care of stone than people".
• Cult Classic:
  • A lot of people are genuinely fond of the anime movie.
  • The original stories were themselves published in an era when science fiction was regarded as lowbrow stuff unworthy of being called literature, ensuring any following they had was a cult one, and they were not widely in print for decades until Positronic Publishing released an ominbus of all seven volumes in May of 2023.^note That being said, they are easily found in digital audio and ebook formats, including the aforementioned omnibus. Nevertheless, in many ways they set the tone for the stories that followed in their wake and continue to attract a modest number of fans to this day.
• Genius Bonus: Galactic Patrol includes a very amusing technobabble explanation for the unlikely properties of one of Smith's favorite inventions, Duodecaplylatomate, AKA Duodec, the ultimate chemical explosive. You have to understand scientific notation to figure out the joke. Smith was reportedly delighted to be called out on this "mistake".
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The Arisians' true form in the series' present day resembles that of the Utroms.
• Mainstream Obscurity: Despite being one of the Trope Codifiers of modern Space Opera (with the Lensmen directly inspiring the Green Lantern Corps), it isn't a very well known series outside of fans of Golden Age SF.
• Once Original, Now Common: Much like The Lord of the Rings is for fantasy, this is essentially the archetype for the Space Opera style of science fiction. Of course, with that comes the fact that so many of the concepts that seemed fresh and new when it was first written have either been explored even further or overplayed in the intervening years.
• Serial Numbers Filed Off: The shareware game Children of Arisia takes place on the planet Medon, where the player, a third-level intellect, must fight against the forces of Boskone and the Overlords of Delgon who are attacking humanity via a hyper-spacial tube...
• Values Dissonance:
  • When the series started, eugenics hadn't been discredited by association with the Nazis yet, so aliens "encouraging" Earth's best and brightest to make babies with each other was seen as the proper thing for Sufficiently Advanced Aliens to do. Ironically, it doubles as In-Universe values dissonance; the aliens see no moral issue with trying to make humanity do this.
  • On another note, pacifistically inclined modern readers may be uncomfortable with the Galactic Patrol's willingness to use overwhelming force against Boskone's fortified planets, or feel that they do so without due regard for collateral damage. Whereas the books were written during and immediately after World War II, when the Allies were indiscriminately pouring megatons of explosives over German and Japanese cities and few people found anything questionable in this.
  • The idea that a human woman could be a ruthless, cold-blooded murderer is seen as appalling and impossible in First Lensman. This is why women Lensmen aren't admitted, except for one who Virginia Samms hypothesizes would have to be some kind of monster; a real Lensman must be a killer. Actually, this one is shown to be incorrect. Clarissa isn't any more ruthless than Virginia; it's implied that the real reason behind the ban is that women Lensmen would screw up the Arisians' breeding programs. Today, the idea that women can't be natural-born killers would be laughed at.
    • There's a scene in Second-Stage Lensman where Kinnison tells a Boskonian woman that men and women are equal in Civilization. Even though he's working for a service where women (of any species) aren't allowed to serve as combatants and all the Lensmen are men. This may be foreshadowing, since the first female Lensman appears later that same book. Also, two of the four most powerful Lensmen — and possibly sentient beings — in the entire series turn out to be girls, and they're all the kids of Kinnison and that first female Lensman.
  • Galactic Patrol has a darkly amusing bit where the newly graduated Lensmen congratulate themselves on their lifelong abstinence from harmful drugs...while they're all smoking.
• Values Resonance: When the good guys learn Clarissa is about to be the first female Lensman, none of the men have any problem with the idea that she's a "real" Lensman. In fact, the only Lensman - and possibly person in the civilized galaxy - who does is Clarissa herself. For two decades. Children notes that the Lensman vote to give her full Grey status was unanimous.

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