History Literature / LensMan

* HonorBeforeReason: When Kinnison is deep undercover as meteor-miner and drug addict "Wild Bill" Williams, [[DudleyDoRightStopsToHelp he leaps into a crisis to save some people by repairing their busted Bergenholm]]. The people he helped assume he used to be a top-class engineer, [[TechnicallyTheTruth which he doesn't deny]]. [[TheWoobie Williams just implies the drug addiction led to his fall, and he's so ashamed of what he's become he wants his loved ones to think he's dead]]. Which ultimately makes his cover even more solid.

* TheSoCalledCoward: Nadreck refers to ''himself'' as a DirtyCoward. He's also probably the second most effective Lensman in Civilization, prior to the Children of the Lens; the fact that he doesn't stick his neck out leads him to take no risks and defeat the enemies of Civilization with consummate skill, efficiency and [[GuileHero guile]].

* TerrorHero: Nadreck of Palain's M.O. is to play on his foes' fears and paranoia from the sidelines until they go insane and destroy one another. He's used this technique to wipe out ''entire bases''.
* TooAwesomeToUse: Invoked and discussed within the context of the perpetual game of one-upmanship that is the Lensman Arms Race. Every so often, Civilization's scientists will come up with something leaps and bounds ahead of what the Boskonians are capable of dealing with. However, they'll intentionally hold off on using it until a decisive moment or unless they can guarantee no enemy survivors will report back to headquarters because they know that the Boskonians will be able to analyze, reverse-engineer, and develop their own countermeasures for anything wielded against them. This also works the other way.

* AnAxeToGrind: The Valerian [[RecycledInSpace space]] axe. The universe's personal battle armour (and its associated energy shield) deflects most hand-held projectile and energy weapons, and the Valerians are fast enough, thanks to their origin on a high-grav world, to close the distance before the few exceptions can do much good.

* AlienLunch: The planet Trenco, where anything has to be willing to eat anything in order to survive, and usually does - to the point where a creature will take pains to finish its lunch even while being lunched upon itself.

* AlliterativeName: Conway Costigan, Kimball Kinnison. Joan Janowick (in ''Masters of the Vortex''). And it doesn't stop ''there'': Christopher "Kit" Kinnison, Kathryn "Kat" Kinnison, Camilla "Cam" Kinnison, Karen "Kay" Kinnison, Constance "Con" Kinnison...

** Eventually, the human penultimate, Kimball Kinnison, reluctantly comes to the conclusion that Nadreck is right about this, and that he has to adopt the same sort of ruthless, coldly pragmatic thinking to succeed.

** His race regards cowardice as a ''virtue''. At one point, he's acutely embarrassed by the fact that he was forced to personally kill three enemies in single combat, instead of manipulating them into killing each other.

** Even a Second (and on occasion a Third) Stage Lensman is advised to wear it when a maximum effort is required. Despite having done everything up to that point without it, Kim Kinnison makes sure he puts his on before duelling Thralian Prime Minister Fossten, and Kim's teenage daughters [[spoiler:materialise Lenses for themselves ''out of thin air'']] when directing their share of the space combat at the Battle of Arisia.

* LensmanArmsRace: TropeMaker and TropeNamer. To give merely the first incident in a long stream of one-upmanship: Triplanetary's first contact with the Nevians end badly when a single Nevian ship destroys a small fleet of spaceships and the city of Pittsburgh while hardly breaking a sweat. Within weeks, humanity has reverse-engineered their allotropic iron technology, developed an inertialess drive which can outrun anything the Nevians can field, and refitted an existing prototype spaceship, the ''Boise'', to take full advantage of these technologies and repay the Nevians in kind. [[SerialEscalation This trend continues throughout the series]].

* NoNonsenseNemesis: Since Boskonia cares more about efficiency than [[ForTheEvulz villainy for its own sake]], there are quite a few of these. Helmuth from ''Galactic Patrol'' stands out -- his personal {{catchphrase}}, "Your reports are neither complete nor conclusive," and the fact that he's smart enough to ''never'' assume NoOneCouldSurviveThat (and chews out a group of {{Mooks}} who do) show that he attaches great value on certainty and thoroughness of information. In fact, Boskonia's all-business and self-serving attitudes are one of the biggest things that distinguish it from the much less "professional", more friendly and more co-operative Patrol.

* OhCrapMoment: Virgil Samms's crew has one after realizing that some of their opponents they took as merely corrupt and greedy politicians are actually in the direct employ of the Triplanetary League's major enemy.

* PowerOfLove: This is what enables Clarissa to [[spoiler:find and bring back Kinnison after he went through the [[HyperspaceIsAScaryPlace Hell Hole]] and was trapped in a far off dimension that not even Mentor and the children could find.]] The chapter's even ''called'' "The Power of Love".

* UncannyValley: In-Universe. Both Grey Roger's robot slaves, and Roger himself, receive comments to this effect by various characters.

** Her daughters, two sets of twins aged eighteen and nineteen, aren't far behind, and later on they turn it {{up to eleven}} -- possibly twelve.

* EarthShatteringKaboom: In the third volume the bad guys' main base has a scuttling charge that [[ColonyDrop pulverizes the crust of the planet it's on]]. This being the origin of the LensmanArmsRace, they have to find [[SoLastSeason a way to beat that]]. So starting in the forth book, the superweapons of choice are ''planet-sized antimatter bombs'' and planets travelling in opposite directions and smashing the target between them. Yeah, beat that. ([[UpToEleven And they do]], with colliding planets from [[AnotherDimension another universe]] travelling at fifteen times the speed of light.)

* ShownTheirWork: For such a dated (and [[UpToEleven often over-the-top]]) series, Lensman can be surprisingly hard science-fiction at times.

* UnscrupulousHero: Nadreck of Palain. All Gray Lensmen are expected to be somewhat [[DirtyBusiness pragmatic and utilitarian]]. But Nadreck takes it UpToEleven, in part because Palainian culture [[BlueAndOrangeMorality considers deceit to be a virtue]].

* AlienNonInterferenceClause: The Arisians and Eddorians do not engage in direct conflict with each other or with the lesser races, and instead work through cutouts and manipulation. This is because the Arisians are strong enough to keep the Eddorians more or less bottled up, but not strong enough to kill the Eddorians' elite council members, and too much Arisian meddling with Civilization will hinder the development of the lesser races.
** Averted at the mundane level. Unlike Star Trek's Federation, the Patrol has no hesitation in revealing itself openly to non-spacefaring worlds with a full technology transfer. In Virgil Samms' day, Bennett becomes the Navy Yard of the Patrol; in Kim Kinnison's, it's war-wracked Klovia which is assisted to rebuild in exchange for being the Patrol's foothold in the Second Galaxy.

* AlwaysChaoticEvil: Nearly all of Boskone is so evil that virtually no prisoners are ever taken. On ''both'' sides of the war. Several entire Boskonian homeworlds (all of them effectively planet-sized fortresses) are destroyed with no survivors over the course of the series, and no one in Civilization ever thinks twice about it. On at least one occasion, Kinnison notes that the previous life on that planet--which had included a flourishing civilization--had been exterminated to make way for the base; this is hinted at as being standard Boskonian technique.

* AmalgamatedIndividual: Kinnison and Worsel create a fictitious Director of Lensmen, Star A Star, as a cover story. Afterwards, various Boskonian leaders attribute various actions of Kinnison, Nadreck, and other lensmen to this Star A Star.

* EnigmaticEmpoweringEntity: The Arisians serve this role for much of the plot, bestowing Lenses on those they judge worthy of them.

* EvilOnlyHasToWinOnce: Averted. The Arisians point out to Helmuth that there is absolutely no way to defeat them, and that if humanity proves incapable of using the Lens to defeat Boskone, then they'll just let him conquer and corrupt this iteration of Civilization while they wait for another one. Indeed, ''Triplanetary'' reveals how the Eddorians have managed to ruin Earth's civilization more than once in the ancient past, only for humanity to keep evolving anyway.

** All this aside, what the Delgonian Overlords do to their victims. Their favorite type of sustenance is the life force of their torture victims (the purpose of the torture being to break them until their life force is easier to extract).

[[folder: Tropes A - G]]

[[folder: Tropes H - P]]

[[folder: Tropes Q - Z]]

[[folder: Anime Tropes]]

* YouGottaHaveBlueHair: Helmuth is described as having blue hair, blue eyes, and blue-tinted skin. The anime adaptation, for whatever reason, chose to turn him into a forty-foot monstrosity. Something like Leader Dessler of Gamilas of ''Anime/SpaceBattleshipYamato'' fame, is probably what was intended.

* BigDamnHeroes: When the young Lensman and his friend are attacked by a mass of carnivorous plants on a planet, the boy inadvertently uses the Lens to send out a distress call and another Lensman responds saying he's on his way and [[GunshipRescue dives out of the sky to blast them free]].

* DoomedHometown: Boskone destroys Anime!Kimball's peaceful farm world practically as soon as the Lens is on his hand.

* InNameOnly: Let's just say that the anime's plot has more in common with ''Franchise/StarWars'' than any of the ''Lensman'' books. The only elements they kept from the novels were the Lens itself and the names.
* RecycledSoundtrack: The Harmony Gold dub used part of the score for the unreleased ''{{Anime/Robotech}} II: The Sentinels''.

* BizarreAlienLocomotion: The Zabriskan fontema, which spends its entire life rolling in a straight line across its flat desert homeworld to collect solar energy because it literally cannot do anything else -- it can't turn, and it can't stop itself from trying to roll forward, no matter what gets put in its path. It becomes a contributor to the Lensman 'verse's FutureSlang by being the proverbial most stupid thing in existence that still counts as a living creature.

* StunGuns: The Nevian Paralyzer gun. Most of the other hand weapons don't have this setting as default, although it's implied that they can be tuned or modified in the field to produce it.

The ''Lensman'' series was adapted into a (unlicensed) Japanese Anime movie ("SF New Century Lensman") and series ("Lensman: Galactic Patrol") , which took the [[BroadStrokes basic outline]] and the [[InNameOnly names of most of the major characters]] and turned it all into a ''Franchise/StarWars'' ripoff. Doc Smith's estate attempted to sue the anime's creators over the series but the lawsuit was thrown out on a technicality. (The litigants had waited too long before acting and thus failed to protect their copyright.) The movie and a CompilationMovie of part of the series were dubbed in English by Harmony Gold USA. Later, Creator/StreamlinePictures redubbed the movie with the original soundtrack and no cuts for content.

The title object, the Lens of Civilization, is an EmpathicWeapon that initially grants its users PsychicPowers which vary in strength and effectiveness from user to user, as well as providing an identification for Law Enforcement that cannot be forged or duplicated and instantly kills anyone attempting impersonation. For certain, [[TheChosenOne special]] individuals, the Lens is no more than a MagicFeather.

The book version converted ''Triplanetary'', an originally unrelated serial, into a {{prequel}} by adding new material to the beginning. The original serialized version of''Triplanetary'', but not the revised version of the novel, has gone into public domain, meaning that a number of e-bookstores have the old version, sometimes for free.

The ''Lensman'' series was adapted into a (unlicensed) Japanese Anime movie ("SF New Century Lensman") and series ("Lensman: Galactic Patrol") , which took the [[BroadStrokes basic outline]] and the [[InNameOnly names of most of the major characters]] and turned it all into a ''StarWars'' ripoff. Doc Smith's estate attempted to sue the anime's creators over the series but the lawsuit was thrown out on a technicality. (The litigants had waited too long before acting and thus failed to protect their copyright.) The movie and a CompilationMovie of part of the series were dubbed in English by Harmony Gold USA. Later, Creator/StreamlinePictures redubbed the movie with the original soundtrack and no cuts for content.

* RayGun: By the time of Galactic Patrol, DeLameters are standard Patrol equipment, capable of vaporising anything that doesn't have advanced shielding.

* TranslatorMicrobes: The Lens of Civilization.