Skylark Duquesne

Skylark #4

by E.E. "Doc" Smith, Jack Gaughan (Illustrator)

Dick Seaton and Marc DuQuesne are the deadliest enemies in the Universe--their feud has blazed among the stars and changed the history of a thousand planets. But now a threat from outside the Galaxy drives them into a dangerous alliance as hordes of strange races drive to a collision with Mankind!

Seaton and DuQuesne fight and slave side by side to fend off the invasion--as Seaton keeps constant, perilous watch for DuQuesne's inevitable double-cross!

Genres: Science Fiction, Space Opera, Fiction, Classics, Science Fiction Fantasy, Novels, Speculative Fiction

238 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Edward Elmer Smith (also E.E. Smith, E.E. Smith, Ph.D., E.E. “Doc” Smith, Doc Smith, “Skylark” Smith, or—to his family—Ted), was an American food engineer (specializing in doughnut and pastry mixes) and an early science fiction author, best known for the Lensman and Skylark series. He is sometimes called the father of space opera.

Reviews

[Adrian]

Series Solo Read 2024
Well I have to say I agree with myself from 5 years ago. Good job I didn't read the review before I started this, or was it, hmm.

Well it did just sort of lose its way, a lot of new people were introduced just to solve the issue and all the existing people took back seats after 3 books of building up their characters. And the to crown it all loads of threads were left unresolved. At the end we focus on the anti hero and his girlfriend heading off through the universe whilst all the good guys are not even mentioned.
Very disappointing

Series Solo Read 2019
I will think on the rating over the next couple of hours whilst I relax in the sunshine. It’s a toughie 🤔

Well I've given it a 3 star rating, which is the lowest of the 4 books in the series. It was heading for a very solid 4 stars until about 20 pages to go when to me it sort of lost its way. If there had been a 5th book in the series then I would be thinking everything would be resolved in that book, but there isnt and therefore it won't be (everything resolved in the next book).

It was, up until that point a great space opera story, full of spaceships, aliens and multiple galaxies, and then ol' "Doc" goes and spoils it by not finishing the story at all. We get the final battle against the Chlorans and then all we get is DuQuesne and Hunkie heading off into the sunset of a far galaxy. Absolutely nothing about Seaton, Crane, Shiro, Dunark, their partners, the Norlaminians, the Dasorians or the Jelmi. Even the Fenachrone disappearing off into the distance is not followed up. It really does seem to me that he was expecting to write a 5th book. And I wish he had to wrap it all up. So 4 + stars going into the last 20 pages or so, but it has to be 3 ⭐️ overall, what a shame.

[Megan Baxter]

Despite the controversy this year, I push on with my efforts to read all the Hugo nominees for best novel. It's coming along, I jump around in time a lot, and I enjoy doing it. It's great fun getting a larger sense over how science fiction has changed, and what sorts of books were being nominated at any given time.

Note: The rest of this review has been withdrawn due to the changes in Goodreads policy and enforcement. You can read why I came to this decision here.

In the meantime, you can read the entire review at Smorgasbook

[Simon Mcleish]

E.E. Doc Smith has for a long time been an author I go back to for a comfort read, since I was 13 and discovered the Lensmen series. But now, each time I read them again, I become more and more aware of how problematic they are. (And that is ignoring the writing quality, which could perhaps best be described as "vivid" rather than scoring high in literary merit.)

The novels from this, his first book series, are perhaps more obviously old fashioned than his later books - it is now almost a century since the first was published, though versions later available have been revised. Sexism is perhaps the easiest to pick up as a problem, with men doing the exciting stuff (and they are all heroic figures, both in physical prowess and in engineering) while the women have their art and, above all, children to take care of. There is casual racism - the non-white humans in this series are servants, albeit highly valued ones. This time around, I picked up colonialism, the acceptance of a special role for white men, especially in spreading the (in the books) superior values of American values. In a universe divided between humans and non-humanoid Chlorans, it's easy to guess which will be cast as the bad guys.

Maybe it's time to leave this series behind, but it's like letting go of a dirty comfort blanket.

[prcardi]

Storyline: 1/5
Characters: 1/5
Writing Style: 1/5
World: 1/5

The old school pulp here was tarnished a little by a partially coherent plot. Why Smith might have tried to turn this into a more modern novel can probably be understood by comparing Skylark Duquesne to other works written at the same time, books such as Herbert's Dune and Heinlein's The Moon is A Harsh Mistress. Smith also tried to elbow into the 1960s sexual revolution by making this just a little more risque than the previous 1930s entrants in the series. Comparatively though this is classic science fiction pulp - haloed in ugly glory. The biggest surprise for me in this volume was seeing Smith reach a ceiling of technological escalation. That has been a staple of the series thus far, and it was disappointing to see him turn elsewhere for assistance in raising the stakes.

I read this as part of my Hugo finalist challenge and do not find it a worthy nominee to the award. I would guess that voters that year were honoring E.E. Smith, whom had passed away before he saw the book, his last, published.

[Derek]

Definitely an uneven member of the series. Smith's excesses are on full display here, between the weird creepy sexism (a planetary sub-governor casually called "the pistol-packing mama with the wiggle"), the outrageously cosmic scope of travel and energies and destruction and industry, and a new threat that overshadows that of the previous novel by an order of magnitude. Everything is so magnified that Smith has pretty much left the reader behind; he is lost in his own invented terminology and physics and technology.

Marc DuQuesne remains the most intriguing character; ruthless but meticulously honest in his agreements, arrogant, logical. Yet his motives never seem to make much sense--why is your goal centered around domination of Earth when you have the entire universe to expand into?--and at times his entire existence is wasted by being written as Dick Seaton's evil mirror image; it is only by this novel that more thought is spent on his goals.

The tendency--in my edition, at least--to change scene without a chapter break or even a courtesy double-spacing between paragraphs is jarring and weird. I wonder if it was a consistent typesetting error.

[Caleb Wachter]

I always enjoyed DuQuesne's character as a lingering foil, and in this book he actually gets to take center stage at the end. The problems our heroes face become literally unthinkable, as the invading Chlorans make the Fenachrone pale in comparison by their sheer power (but I never felt as invested in defeating the Chlorans as I did with the Fenachrone).

Doing battle at literally hundreds of thousands of light years distance is also a pretty neat trick ;)

Great ending to this classic Space Opera. Take a gander at this series if you're interested in seeing one of the stories which shaped the great movers and shakers of today's Sci-Fi establishment. It's impressive, and somewhat depressing, how far removed we are from simpler stories like the Skylark Saga.

[James Hein]

This series just ended without a very good resolution.

I do enjoy EE Doc Smith's writing style and given the time when this was written his ideas were quite ahead of his time.

This was a reread since I first read them when I was a teenager (quite a while ago).

[Little Timmy]

This series is not as awesome as his Lensman series but a very good SiFi series by one of the early masters. Very recommended

[Neil Willcox]

Retcon ahoy! Some forty years after writing the first three Skylark novels* Smith returned to the series at the end of his career in the 1960s. He places the events of the novels in (probably) the 1980s (an off hand comment on American and Russian moon artefacts of the 50s and 70s). The women are subtly updated, and they get more page space. Crane’s manservant Shiro is promoted to full Skylarker (all household tasks can be accomplished by using a headset to direct automated forces), and also gets a wife, a San Francisco-born Japanese-American woman called (sigh) Lotus Blossom.

Anyway, shortly after Seaton and Crane solve all the problems in Skylark of Valeron, the Norlamins do some calculations and realise that the pod carrying the disembodied intelligences off into eternity will inevitably fail within a year. They predict that the full time immortals of the group will probably clear off, but Seaton’s nemesis and former dictator of Earth, Marc C DuQuesne probably won’t. (He’s American, it’s pronounced do-kane).

DuQuesne promptly runs into two different alien species, both of which have enslaved numerous human planets. Meanwhile Seaton et al, deciding that they need more science and stuff, and having discovered that the sixth order of force includes vibrations on the level of thought, send out a thought to try and contact friendlies with information, something that has unexpected results.

Anyway, psychic powers. But also then genocide (despite the book having brought back one race of beings who were wiped out in Skylark Three) and eugenics. It’s in the hands of the Jelm (who have been bred by their alien captors for passivity, and want Earth genes to reinvigorate their race) and DuQuesne, who is still a villain even if, finally, he learns and grows up. But still, Smith should really have known better by the time he wrote this.

Read This: For a strange but still interesting end to the series.
Don’t Read This: If yet more weird random nonsense coming out of nowhere puts you off your space opera.

* My reviews:
The Skylark of Space
Skylark Three
Skylark of Valeron

[Barry Haworth]

In setting out to read the Skylark series I took it upon myself to read all four books. While I have read and enjoyed the first two books many times over the years and have fond memories of the third (though I had only read it once), I remember that the fourth book had struck me as being very badly written the one time I read it, more than forty years ago. Reviewing the series for my latest reading I was quite surprised to learn that it had been nominated for the 1966 Hugo Award. Was it really as bad as I remembered?

After rereading it I think the answer is - yes.

The book has a number of flaws. The chief among them is it is what might be called a "do-over sequel", where an author having told a story and brought it to satisfying to conclusion, immediately undoes that solution in the sequel so as to have the story to do over again. This happens multiple times in this book. First DuQuesne, Seaton's arch enemy from the previous books who was captured and sent on a one way trip to the end of the universe at the end of previous book, is released from that fate by way of a rookie mistake and sets about trying to get his revenge on Seaton - only to fail at this himself due to a frankly not very credible mistake. Evil races who had been the baddies in previous books and been destroyed turn out not to have been destroyed after all and have to be dealt with all over again, and (as in previous books) Seaton and friends, lacking the technologies they need to deal with their problems have to search the universe for races which have the technologies they need. Do-overs occur within the book, such as when DuQuesne runs into something he can't handle and appeals to Seaton for help; he is accepted back into the fold, betrays him, and then calls for help again and is forgiven again when he runs into something else he can't handle. And of course, the threats are bigger, the countermeasures are bigger, and the stakes are supposed to bigger too, except that I really found it hard to care by the time I got to the end. Nor did DuQuesne's love interest (who went, I kid you not, by the name of "Hunkie") help matters.

I am really at a loss as to how the book could have been nominated for a Hugo. I can only put it down to nostalgia on the part of those voting, harking back to Smith's earlier, better stories.

[Royden Jones]

I will admit that while there were parts of DuQuesne I liked... there was an awkwardness to me. When I found that it was originally serialized in the last months of his life, I feel that it was not edited as Smith might have. I am glad that I have read it, and I am glad that I have finally sat down and read all four books (rereading the original).... but I am more likely to re-read the first book (Skylark of Space) or the 1927 serials that started it. I am much likelier by far to re-read the Lensman saga.

I do want to say that I liked DuQuesne, and am glad that I read it.. but parts of it felt awkward to me. It occurs to me as I write this that it has a sort of 'uncanny valley' issue. I can accept the way females and other races were written about a century ago because I am aware that his writing was actually more forward thinking than others at the time. This, which he wrote pretty close to 50 years ago.. while more 'forward thinking' and inclusive than his earlier work suffers an uncanny valley effect - it is 'close enough' that the differences are more noticeable.. if that makes sense?

[Chris Sudall]

It was a relief to get to the end of the Skylark series. I ended up here on the back of reading the Family D'Alembert series, which I started as a boy and then finished the series recently. Admittedly that series wasn't even written by Smith BUT the covers are all so great!!!
Anyway! Smith's science in this series is a bit mindboggling, the way he describes it at times can make it hard to get a handle on it (added to the fact that the science seems so unlikely).
Yes it's old and the language and descriptions of woman are a bit much, but it is still a good read.
The distances and ideas covered are VAST and the enemies suitably dark.
I probably enjoyed this a little less than the rest of the series due to the sudden ending and the fact that our 'heroes' barely get a mention at the end.
Let's be honest the ending is a little odd, I won't spoil it here, but seriously it is a bit daft and also a huge jump from the focus of the earlier writing (book and series).
Need to find time for Lensman at some point!

[Pierce4831]

This is my second reading of the Skylark series. The first time was many years ago--So long ago that I didn't remember the stories, but I credited them as part of my motivation to go into science. I now understand why; in Smith's novels, science is important and the source of enormous power, and it is to be shared for good. Perhaps others were motivated in the same way that I was. If so, that's enough to make these books worthwhile.
Smith wasn't a great writer, and his books don't show signs of a viable sense of humor, but that in itself is sometimes funny. His biggest problem is that he explains far too much. His extremely long scientific explanations contain bits of real science and large amounts of total nonsense. His social ideas are outdated, but not that offensive. In his novels women are unevenly treated, but they are usually soulmates for the heroes.
Despite these criticisms, I enjoyed my second reading. I'm not at all sure that you will.

[Steve Prentice]

Once again an OK book with a reasonable plot and a vivid imagination.

However, this novel had all the problems of the other books in this series - one dimensional characters, the fact that the 'science' is fantasy not fact (though that is a consequence of what was known when Smith was writing), the stereotypes by sex and so on (see my reviews of previous books) with the added problems that the genocide Smith seems to revel in is on a galactic scale this time, that one of the main protagonists expresses obnoxious political views about racial purity (which I hope weren't Smith's own views) and actually I thought the denouement somewhat weak and hence disappointing.

It has been an interesting experience to read some books I read (and loved) as a child while exploring others by the same author that I had never read before but, frankly, I am glad that I have completed the series because there are vastly better novels to be read.

[Robert Whelan]

Written almost twenty years after the last entry, I can't help thinking, cynically, that this was written as a 'cash grab'.

Because the series was finished, the bad guy needs to be resurrected, and, because the protagonist is so powerful, the stakes need to be increased even further, this time to galaxy-spanning destruction.

Got to ridiculous levels of absurdity when the psychic power of witches was used to create mathematics that then enabled the building of more powerful weapons to facilitate the genocide of 'uncounted trillions'.

I got the strong impression that the author had lost interest by the end but at least he spared us long expositions of fictional science. On the positive side, some of the aliens were interesting.

I read this to complete the series as I'd already purchased all four but wouldn't really be interested in anything else by Doc Smith.

[Daniel Smith]

The technology was sometimes interesting, and the variety in worlds and lifeforms as well. But I couldn't get past a lot of the negative aspects of the book. It didn't age well and some of the character portrayals are pretty poor to the point of being stereotypical and offensive. The main character seems to half-heartedly support genocide at times, and there is little to no character development. Also, the ending goes off on a weird tangent in the last 20 pages where psychic powers are real, one of the main characters decides to go off and become an autocratic dictator, and we don't hear from the good guys at all. Weird choice to end the whole series.

[Donald R]

Classic Sci Fi

E.E. “Doc” Smith is a historic name in sci-fi. This book is classic Doc Smith. Yes, it is dated and some of the writing is overly dramatic and definitely sexist. (Indeed, this book was written when men were men and women were women and is reflection of the culture at the time it was written.) But, if you are a sci-fi fan you should read E.E “Doc” Smith’s books to get a grasp of the origins of modern sci-fi. (As you should read John Campbell, Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov and a host of others.) This is pure escapism, bug eyed monster era sci-fi. Enjoy it.

[Trevor Swain]

Old fashioned scfi but I get a warm feeling every time I read an E E DOC SMITH book like returning to an old friend. Very politically incorrect but it aS written in a bygone age. Give it a try with an open mind space opera at its best

Space opera at its best old fashioned politically incorrect in many ways but it was written in a bygone age E E DOC SMITH is one of my go-to writers if I want something familiar to read

[Mr Rob]

Embark Series

I first read this series in the late sixties & have read each book every other year since & as avidly as the first time. Yes, the books are dated & are not what people nowadays call PC but they are still a damn good read. E.E.Doc Smith is one of the forefathers of Sci fi along with Asimov, Clarke & the rest, every Sci fi fan should read these books.

[David Williamson]

Fantastic and enthralling ending

This book is the fantastic and enthralling ending to the Skylark series by E. E. Doc Smith. It combines all of the daring and exciting action and adventure, of the whole series, into a climatic ending. Doc Smith is undoubtedly the Grand Master of the Space Opera genre.

[Bill Jones]

More Space Opera. This is the last of the Skylark series, and generally wraps up the adventures. Of course every step is bigger, better, stronger, faster or it wouldn't be Space Opera - good light reading!

[David]

Not quite up to the Lensman books, but classic Space Opera all the same.

[Kenneth]

The fourth and final novel in Smith's Skylark series, this is the one that find Richard Seaton and Blackie DuQuesne on the same side, fighting on the same side against alien invaders.

[John]

At first read I was thrown off the bull by the ending and had to read it again. And then I liked it!

[Dayo Johnson]

Good story, I like the end, different from the run-of-the-mill endings

[Dan Ramirez]

Just finished re-reading the series and it was just as good as it was back in the 60's when I read it for the firs time!

[Rex Libris]

DuQuense ends up escaping his prison and builds his own skylark. In a surprise twist he ends up saving everyone he vowed to kill.

[Guido]

Why you might like it: Foundational high-scale space opera; idea lineage. Rubric match: not yet scored. Uses your engineering/rigor/first-contact/world-building rubric. Tags: classic, space-opera

[Jon]

A good end to the series - both the hero and the villain win! They destroy galaxies together and both stay true to their characters.

[Kyle]

Hugo Award Nominee (1966)