Absolutely. You look at other books of the era. The endless martian pulp books (can't remember their names, found them too stilted to read through), Edgar Rice Burroughs novels and so on. Absolute good and evil are very straightforward, and unmistakable. But then again, historically, they were dealing either with the end of the first world war, or the second. Good and Evil were painted in broad strokes at that point in society's collective life.
It's possible I read one of the serials that was mentioned earlier. I don't have a copy myself, more's the pity. They can't be found unless you're really *really* lucky. Something to do with EE Smith's widow hating the Lensman anime and deciding to pull any re-publications of the books for a full generation as punishment. Don't know if this is true or not, but I do know you can't find them anywhere... My references were from an old collection a friend of mine has. He's somewhat older than I am, and he treats the collection like it's written on gold leaf, so it's again very possible.
But even if that's the way it is in the series when it went to print, you still have an Arisian race who elected to perform mass genocide on another species by deliberately *mind-controlling* entire CIVILIZATIONS to create these super-Arisians. And for the sole purpose of killing the Arisians' enemies.
Imagine what would have happened if the Galactic Patrol, with their new Lensman-equipped members, meet an actual Boskone, who tells them, "Sure, I'm not a nice guy. But wait until I tell you about how the Arisians have screwed YOU!"
The Arisians in general, and Kinnison in particular were a lot like the pulp heroes of the period. They were square-jawed, straight-shooting people who were unrelentingly honest and etc, etc, etc. But the fact that they committed horrendous crimes on people who just happened to be in the way was always overshadowed by the concept that what they were doing was in the Greater Good. A sequence that occurs to me is when Kinnison was zoned out near a Boskone base, trying to use mind-control to reach in and get into the minds of the people there. When he left, the place was a radioactive crater.
It's all very pulp hero stuff, but it's also extremely callous and uncaring of the "little people" that get in the way. It's no surprise the characters in the story were all larger than life. No-one else mattered. In fact, they didn't matter so *much* that collateral death wasn't even a *concern* to those involved. It was just "the price of victory". Ho hum. On to the next base.
I'm hardly a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination, but the sheer INhumanity the Lensman typically demonstrated really seemed beyond the pale to me.
It's possible I read one of the serials that was mentioned earlier. I don't have a copy myself, more's the pity. They can't be found unless you're really *really* lucky. Something to do with EE Smith's widow hating the Lensman anime and deciding to pull any re-publications of the books for a full generation as punishment. Don't know if this is true or not, but I do know you can't find them anywhere... My references were from an old collection a friend of mine has. He's somewhat older than I am, and he treats the collection like it's written on gold leaf, so it's again very possible.
But even if that's the way it is in the series when it went to print, you still have an Arisian race who elected to perform mass genocide on another species by deliberately *mind-controlling* entire CIVILIZATIONS to create these super-Arisians. And for the sole purpose of killing the Arisians' enemies.
Imagine what would have happened if the Galactic Patrol, with their new Lensman-equipped members, meet an actual Boskone, who tells them, "Sure, I'm not a nice guy. But wait until I tell you about how the Arisians have screwed YOU!"
The Arisians in general, and Kinnison in particular were a lot like the pulp heroes of the period. They were square-jawed, straight-shooting people who were unrelentingly honest and etc, etc, etc. But the fact that they committed horrendous crimes on people who just happened to be in the way was always overshadowed by the concept that what they were doing was in the Greater Good. A sequence that occurs to me is when Kinnison was zoned out near a Boskone base, trying to use mind-control to reach in and get into the minds of the people there. When he left, the place was a radioactive crater.
It's all very pulp hero stuff, but it's also extremely callous and uncaring of the "little people" that get in the way. It's no surprise the characters in the story were all larger than life. No-one else mattered. In fact, they didn't matter so *much* that collateral death wasn't even a *concern* to those involved. It was just "the price of victory". Ho hum. On to the next base.
I'm hardly a pacifist by any stretch of the imagination, but the sheer INhumanity the Lensman typically demonstrated really seemed beyond the pale to me.