Galactic Patrol / The Annotated Lensman (ePub)

If you are looking for LARGE PRINT paperback editions of EE 'Doc' Smith's Lensman series, please stop scrolling and see if mine are right for you. You'll be glad you did.

Since the Lensman series has gone into the public domain there are a lot of enterprising folks out there taking the manuscripts and generating copies, mainly eBooks for re-sale that are straight out of Project Gutenburg. Well, nothing wrong with that except those who want to enjoy a quality reading experience are probably going to be disappointed. Maybe just use Project Gutenburg.

I wanted to deliver the authentic paperback experience like the one I had as a kid in the 1970s.

In this LARGE PRINT Edition I have used the 16 point Open Dyslexic 3 Font. It's very readable. In fact after working with this font it is a little weird but I love it so perhaps I'm a little Dyslexic! But seriously I loved making this edition. It looks and reads great!

I have done some basic editing on the text. I have focused mainly on grammar, not with a heavy hand, but just to improve the flow for a contemporary reader. The manuscripts are formatted in such a way as to use a heavy arsenal of punctuation: italics, capitalization, capitalization with italics, exclamations, double and triple exclamations, ellipses, dashes, and more. The purpose was clearly to create emphasis and tension, but often it impedes the flow. So these things were revisited. I considered removing all italics completely at one stage - but relented. It is Space Opera after all.

I have provided annotations as a value-add proposition. These are not necessarily scholastic--some are--but mainly my thoughts about how certain aspects of the stories reflect in other works, stuff like Star Trek, which owes a heavy debt. The thing about these stories is they come at the beginning of classic science fiction and had a huge impact--certainly on my generation--and others as well. So, we know how science fiction "worked out". Smith did not know that. He had no idea. For all he knew his stories could easily have been forgotten long ago, but they weren't. That's because in the main, they're still worth reading. But the books need to be accessible in a form that does them justice.

With respect to the cover art, well, I don't have the wherewithal to do something of the unforgettable vision and imagination of a Chris Foss. But the Hubble Space Telescope has provided something that EE 'Doc' Smith himself would have found amazing; I am sure.

Enjoy this voyage back to the classic age of science fiction.

....When Lensman Kim Kinnison of the Patrol discovered the secret Boskonian base, it was invulnerable to outside attack. But where a battle-fleet would meet insuperable resistance, a single infiltrator might penetrate the Boskonian defenses-if he had the guts to take on million-to-one odds. ....