Literature / Lensman

"Holy Klono's tungsten teeth and curving carballoy claws!"

The Lensman series by E. E. "Doc" Smith counts as one the earliest Space Operas, and, therefore, the Trope Maker of many of the conventions used by the genre. This makes the series a must-read for anyone interested in the genesis of Science Fiction.

The series was assembled from Galactic Patrol, a serial published in Astounding Stories magazine from 1937 onwards. (Smith rewrote and expanded Triplanetary, serialized in 1934 in Amazing Stories, to serve as a prequel to the main series.) It describes the epic battle between Good and Evil as personified by Civilization (and their sponsors, Arisia) and Boskone (and their sponsors, Eddore), respectively. Each faction is, in fact, the pawn of a different race of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens who each have a grand plan for the sentient beings of the universe.

The Kinnison bloodline plays an important role for Civilization, since it was carefully bred over millennia by the Arisians to produce a race of super-beings that would ultimately supplant the Arisians themselves.

The title object, the Lens of Civilization, is an Empathic Weapon that initially grants its users Psychic Powers 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, special individuals, the Lens is largely a Magic Feather.

The Lensman series consists of:

• Triplanetary (serialized 1934, book publication 1948)
• First Lensman (book publication 1950)
• Galactic Patrol (serialized 1937-8, book publication 1950)
• Gray Lensman (serialized 1939-40, book publication 1951)
• Second Stage Lensmen (serialized 1941-2, book publication 1953)
• Children of the Lens (serialized 1947-8, book publication 1954)

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.

Masters of the Vortex (also known as The Vortex Blaster) appeared as works of short fiction which Smith reconfigured into novel form in 1960. It occurs in the same continuity but here the events of the Boskonian war are peripheral and irrelevant to the plot. Atomic powerplants around the galaxy have for many years been exploding, turning into all-consuming, all-polluting, inexorably-growing fireballs that defy analysis, explanation or control. Neal Cloud, a mathematical prodigy who heads up the scientific efforts to do all three, is inspired to develop a means for their destruction when he loses his family to one and sets out to clear the galaxy of them. Along the way, he has various adventures, foils a criminal mastermind and, with the help of a female cybernetic engineer every bit as brilliant as himself, finds out the stunning truth of exactly what the Vortices are and why.

The Lensman series was adapted into a (unlicensed) Japanese Anime movie (SF New Century Lensman) and series (Lensman: Galactic Patrol) , which took the basic outline and the names of most of the major characters and turned it all into a Star Wars 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 Compilation Movie of part of the series were dubbed in English by Harmony Gold USA. Later, Streamline Pictures redubbed the movie with the original soundtrack and no cuts for content.

In 1963 the New England Science Fiction Association named their annual SF convention "Boskone" (a play on "Boston Convention") in Smith's honor. The convention newsletter is named "Helmuth", of course.^note Helmuth is an intermediate Dragon who always begins his messages to his underlings by saying "Helmuth, speaking for Boskone!" After a group of fans got in trouble with the Boskone organizers, they started up an alternative (and, eventually, larger) convention called "Arisia."

WARNING: Spoilers may be unmarked.

---

Tropes used in the Lensman series include:

Tropes A - G

• 2-D Space: Averted. Englobement is a standard tactic, as is the Cone of Battle.
• Absurdly Exclusive Recruiting Standards: downplayed example. Despite the discussion at the beginning of Galactic Patrol of how stringent the selection and training process is, "ordinary" Lensmen are more The Chosen Many. Gray Lensmen are a straight example, being a highly select group of Lensmen that no one is considered qualified to give orders to - not even other Gray Lensmen. Finally, there are the Second-Stage Lensmen whose numbers can be counted on the fingers of one human hand.
  • To put it in context: Lensman's Exam on Earth takes the top one million 18-year-olds on the planet, and the five-year-long selection process weeds out all but a hundred. Those who progress high enough but don't clear the final hurdle become the enlisted ranks and the non-Lensbearing Officer Corps.
• Action Girl: Clarissa Kinnison is surprisingly badass for the time period. Later on, Clarissa proves herself badass for most time periods.
  • 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.
• Advance Notice Crime: The campaign of terror that destroys the social order on Antigan IV culminates in a declaration that at midnight on a specific day, the president will disappear. Despite the president being in a vault surrounded by unquestionably trustworthy guards at the time, he does indeed disappear (along with the guards); Kinnison guesses afterward that a hyper-spatial tube was used to bypass all the defences. Then a similar campaign and announcement occurred on Radelix...and it turns out that in both cases, the president was incidental; the whole thing was actually a trap for Kinnison himself, snatching him when he comes to the president's rescue.
• Alliterative Name: 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, William "Wild Bill" Williams II...
• Alien Non-Interference Clause:
  • Zig-zagged by the Arisians and Eddorians. While the Arisians do meddle in the development of lower civilizations, they will almost never personally intervene to save an individual's life or even avert a planet-wrecking disaster. All they care about is that what civilization does survive becomes stronger in the long run. The Eddorians, for their part, similarly loathe revealing themselves personally. But that doesn't stop them from eagerly (and destructively) meddling with lower civilizations all the time, and they are so subtle and advanced that only the Arisians and the Children of the Lens ever learn more than hints of their full schemes.
  • Averted at the mundane level. Unlike the Federation of Star Trek, the Galactic 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. The Patrol's enemies, Boskone, are similarly unhesitant... in riddling lower civilizations with massive drug rings or simply conquering them outright.
• Always Chaotic Evil: 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, so there may not actually be all that many innocent victims...
• Amalgamated Individual: 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, and the fiction is only discovered when it's far too late.
• Amulet of Concentrated Awesome: Played straight by having the Lensmen's lenses amplify their Psychic Powers. For the Second-Stage Lensmen they turned out just to be magic feathers, as Second-Stage Lensmen are advanced enough to use mind powers on their own.
  • The Lens amplifies psi power in humans, it does other things for other species (some of whom are already naturally powerful psionically).
  • 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 materialise Lenses for themselves out of thin air when directing their share of the space combat at the Battle of Arisia.
  • Due to being Loyal Phlebotinum, and the nature of mind-to-mind contact, it also functions as an impossible-to-counterfeit badge of rank, and a justification for Lensmen being incorruptible and thus able to operate above the law when necessary.
• Ancient Conspiracy: The Eddorian master plan to dominate all life in the universe is older than our own solar system... and the Arisian master plan to stop the Eddorians is only slightly younger.
• Ancient Tradition: The Arisians are committed to guarding every intelligent species' right to determine its own way of life, and are just as old and powerful as even the Eddorians. The only reason they don't destroy the Edddorians during their original incursion into "this" universe is that, to protect themselves from their own malicious underlings, the Eddorian leadership has developed artificial thought screens that can also stop the Arisians. The Children of the Lens are bred specifically to destroy these thought screens.
• Animal Eye Spy: Kinnison does this mostly, using everything from dogs to worms to infiltrate enemy bases or perform critical tasks. Nadreck takes a hint later.
• Animated Adaptation: Obscure (and unlicensed) anime adaptation, Lensman Galactic Patrol.
• Annoying Patient: The first time Kinnison ends up in Prime Base's hospital, he's one of these, constantly demanding non-hospital food and to be allowed more physical activity than he's capable of doing. Justified by Kinnison's frustration level — he knows perfectly well that he was injured because he made a foolish move. When he's injured even more severely in a later novel, but without the "I had the Idiot Ball" element, he's more reasonable.
• Appeal to Force: In First Lensman, Roderick Kinnison suggests that the Galactic Patrol conquer North America by right of the bigger fleet. First Lensman Samms convinces him to cool his jets and challenge the Morgan political machine through free and fair elections instead, because Virgil Samms believes in the rule of law and seizing power by force would undermine the legitimacy of the Galactic Patrol. (Instead, the Lensmen rewrite the rules so that they are legally above the law.)
• Applied Phlebotinum: Ultrawaves, good for everything from FTL communication to X-Ray Vision!
• Arbitrarily Large Bank Account: Technically a Gray Lensman doesn't have any money of his own. What he does have is blanket permission to write out a check for anything he wants, from a pair of stockings to a spaceship worth a hundred-million credits or more. No matter what it is or how much it is, the Patrol will cover the check.
  • At that, very few of these checks are ever cashed by the Patrol - they're even more valuable to collectors. The Red Lensman's first check, in a $1000 frame, became a permanent advertisement for the establishment where she bought her wedding gown.
• Artistic Licence – Physics: The space-drive and energy system in Triplanetary that is fuelled by allotropic iron. Even assuming a liquid allotrope of iron existed, i.e. one that was liquid at room temperature as mercury is, iron is at the very top of the nuclear stability curve and cannot yield energy by either fission or fusion; nuclear reactions involving iron consume more energy than they release. However, the plot demanded it and the knowing reader is invited to assume that some other as-yet-undiscovered form of mass-energy conversion process is being utilized.
• Author Avatar: In Triplanetary, Ralph Kinnison is reading a Lensman-like sci-fi story when the news about Pearl Harbor comes on the radio. He comes out of retirement, taking a job in a munitions factory where his training in organic chemistry makes him a useful asset. E.E. "Doc" Smith, SF author, had a PhD in organic chemistry (although specifically related to foodstuffs rather than explosives). ( He ultimately fails. Shells and mines loaded at the factory go off prematurely and kill good men. Kinnison walks away from the job rather than accept orders to violate quality control and safety standards - orders which could be implied as being issued under Eddorian influence. While details are sketchy at this late date, it was well known to fans who knew Smith that the explosives factory section, including the firing, was autobiographical.
• Awesomeness by Analysis:
  • The Arisians' "Visualization of the Cosmic All", which effectively gives them precognition from sufficiently analyzing a person or object or fact.
  • Costigan also has a talent for figuring out the details of how to operate, repair, and modify both alien technologies and alien social interactions with a brief observation.
• Badass Army: The Lensmen may have been SF's first, being equipped with small arms that vaporize a person, personal shields that can survive said small arms, a machine gun equivalent that can boil steel in seconds, 'caterpillars' - giant tanks fitted with starship-grade weaponry...
• Badass Family: The Kinnisons, of course. At the opening of Galactic Patrol, Kim Kinnison - even as a freshly-minted Lensman - is the penultimate badass of a millennia-long line of badasses. His eventual marriage to Clarissa only brings more badassness into his line, and the two of them are nothing compared to what their children become.
• Badass Unintentional: Nadreck the Palainian kills three of Boskone's highest-ranking leaders in single combat in an Offscreen Moment of Awesome. He considers that mission a fiasco because he failed to get them to kill one another instead, and his species values self-preservation as much as those strange, warmblooded Tellurians value courage.
• Balance Between Good and Evil: Civilization v. Boskone. That is, initially. Once they gear up for total war, this ceases to apply.
• Bastard Understudy: Among Boskone (and their controllers, e.g. the Eddorians) it is regarded as quite acceptable, even praiseworthy, for an underling to scheme to supplant their superior – the idea being that if they're successful, the superior was no longer fit (e.g. not cunning and ruthless enough) to hold their position anyway.
• Batman Gambit: More than once, the Galactic Patrol (or just Kinnison himself) trick Boskone's forces by exploiting their predictable aggression and evilness.
• Beam Spam: On a regular basis, escalating throughout the series. Fleet confrontations generally rely on weight of numbers, with half a dozen or more ships ganging up on one until they can overload its shields.
• Beardness Protection Program: Kinnison grows a beard to go undercover as Chester Q. Fordyce.
• Beethoven Was an Alien Spy: Tyrants throughout Earth history, including Nero, Genghis Khan, and Adolf Hitler, were guises used by Gharlane of Eddore. Also, an in-universe example with the scientist Bergenholm. In the second book, he comes up with the breakthrough to make the Inertialess Drive safe and efficient. Later, they find out that he was an Arisian.
• Belligerent Sexual Tension: Kimball Kinnison and Clarissa MacDougall's first meeting produces some real fireworks, complete with mutual insults and name-calling. Their relationship eventually gets a little less prickly, but Kinnison still finds himself reluctant to admit that he's in love with her because he's done some horrible, horrible things as a Lensman and he's not sure she'd still have him if she knew. Naturally, she does. It helps that she goes on to become a Lensman herself.
• Benevolent Conspiracy:
  • The Arisians, although they are content to let entire civilizations collapse as long as the crucial bloodlines who are being cultivated to Guardianship of Civilization manage to survive.
  • Also, Virgil Samms, the first leader of the Galactic Patrol, essentially heads a smaller one in First Lensman, aimed at exposing and deposing America's corrupt political leaders, who are basically in the pay of Boskonia.
• Beware the Nice Ones: Lensmen get referred to as "sublimated boy scouts" by one character, but by Klono's amazingly alliterative appendages, don't let them catch you engaging in piracy or dealing drugs. Not to mention that they use planets as strategic weapons.
• BFG: The Standish, the equivalent of a machine gun, and its replacement, the semi-portable. The former even has an underslung grenade launcher.
• Big Bad: Every layer of Boskone has these, up to and including the All-Highest of Eddore itself... but Helmuth, speaker for Boskone, is the most human-like and relatable.
• The Big Board: Trope Maker, to the extent that the US Navy borrowed the idea.
• Bizarre Alien Biology: The Palainians' metabolism has to extend into the "fourth dimension" in order to function in their native environment (Pluto is as far inside Earth's solar system as they feel comfortable living), and there are other races that take this to even greater extremes.
• Bizarre Alien Locomotion: 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 Future Slang by being the proverbial stupidest thing in existence that still counts as an animal.
• Bizarre Alien Senses:
  • The Rigellians (and many other races) use a bizarre sense that gives a worldview much like the best solid-modeling programs. They can even see things like the innermost components of shielded power reactors. ^note The flip side of this is that they rely exclusively on that sense and lack both sight and hearing. In consequence, it's sheer torture for other species to spend time in their cities, because their cars have no windows, their buildings have no sources of light and they make no attempt whatsoever to avoid loud noises... a visit to Rigel therefore involves a great deal of sitting around in the dark being startled by loud bangs, screams and howls of various kinds. High-stage Lensmen can also develop this sense.
  • The Cahuitans (Masters...) are such high-energy beings that the only relics or evidence of Galactic Civilization they can perceive are the cores of nuclear power plants. Even their thoughts are on such a high bandwidth that communication with ordinary beings is almost impossible. This lets them down badly when they try to ensure they're doing no harm before turning what they perceive as 'kindling' into incubators for their offspring.
• Black-and-White Morality: Yes and no. The Arisians defy this on numerous occasions, repeatedly stating that good and evil are ultimately relative, and the Arisians and the races of Civilization recognize that different races will have Blue-and-Orange Morality. However, from the perspective of the races of Civilization, personal liberty is recognized as a pole star to be desired by everyone, the rigid fascism and Social Darwinism of Boskone are utterly inimical to this, and the narrator does use "evil" as a shorthand for Boskonian actions.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: A possible alternate interpretation. Civilization is unquestionably good, but equally unquestionably not always nice. While they try to avoid unnecessary damage and loss of life when it's reasonably practical, they also are not blind to the logic of military necessity — and if that means blowing up a few planets along the way when saving the Material Cosmic All, well, so be it. They also employ some efficient but ruthless people in their ranks; for example, Nadreck of Palain. By contrast, while Boskonia realistically enough employs many Punch-Clock Villains and even deluded idealists who are not evil so much as simply patriots for their side, their whole system is a vicious totalitarianism designed and ultimately managed by ancient alien horrors for their own sinister ends, and employs systematic brainwashing, torture, and war crimes as a matter of course with none of Civilization's qualms.
• Blue-and-Orange Morality: Recognized among the races of Civilization, to the extent that different races' Lensmen have entirely different codes of honor and conduct. However, Black-and-White Morality still applies between Civilization and Boskone. Nadreck, the Palainian Second-Stage Lensman, is regarded as every bit as much a hero by his race's standards as Kinnison is by human standards. The Blue and Orange part comes in because Palainians consider cowardice and guile to be virtues. Nadrek is so thoroughly ashamed of "botching" his single-handed elimination of a major Boskonian base so badly that three (out of, at the very least, hundreds) of the Boskonians failed to kill each other/themselves and thus Nadrek personally had to eliminate them using (shudder) physical conflict that he records the details of this operation only under strong protest, and immediately places the recording under "Lensman's Seal", which effectively means "Ain't nobody seeing this never." Kinnison's reaction is pretty similar to the reader's: "Took out an entire base all by himself, something nobody else could have done, heroically risked his own life in personal combat to finish up the job, and he's embarrassed because he thinks it wasn't elegant enough. Palainians are weird."
• Boarding Party: Many, many times. Justified in that many of the villains are space pirates by nature, and interested in loot as much as interruption of trade. On the other side of the coin, Kinnison and his allies sometimes need intelligence and/or technology from their enemies, and that often means boarding Boskonian starships instead of blasting them to sightless atoms.
• Brain Monster: In the novel Galactic Patrol, Mentor of Arisia is revealed to Kimball Kinnison to be (barring a few minor bits and appendages) "simply and solely a brain." Then in Second Stage Lensmen the Boskonian Prime Minister Fossten is revealed to be a nearly identical brain, explained by his being a renegade Arisian. Except that this was a false appearance in both cases, arranged by Mentor to hide from Kinnison that Fossten was really Gharlane of Eddore.
• Break the Cutie: Herkimer Herkimer III wants Virgilia Samms to tell him the secret of the Lens, and there are no lengths he won't go to in order to make her talk. It ends very badly for him.
• Brother–Sister Incest: Never happens in the books themselves, but the five Kinnison kids are the new ultimate beings – a race separate from the rest of humanity and the founding population of a new species of Sufficiently Advanced Aliens. One brother, four sisters, do the math. Vaguely foreshadowed (as strongly as the era would allow, anyway) in the last book. There are also hints at one point that Christopher Kinnison might harbor a few unfilial feelings for his mother Clarissa... and maybe it's mutual.
• Call to Adventure: Dronvire, the first Rigellian Lensman, especially. He was essentially the only member of his species sufficiently motivated to take up a Lens. (The Rigellians do have many other virtues by human standards, but are not a very driven species, nearly always taking the path of least resistance.)
• Casual Interstellar Travel: After the Bergenholm drive is created, ships can travel many times the speed of light, and cross the galaxy in a manageable amount of time.
• The Chosen Many: The Lensmen as a whole. In point of fact, according to some sources, the Lensmen inspired another famous Chosen Many, the Green Lantern Corps. (The Corps' creators deny this, although later they made amends by adding GLs named after elements of Lensman.)
• Cigarette Burns: When a minor bad guy decides to torture information out of Jill Samms, he starts proceedings by putting his cigarette out on the skin just under her armpit.
• Cigarette of Anxiety: Before the final battle in Children of the Lens, one of the Kinnison girls is trying to chain-smoke, but is so wound up that she only manages one or two puffs before stubbing the cigarette out and lighting a new one.
• Clothes Make the Superman:
  • The space armor in Triplanetary incorporates forcefields that can resist steel-cutting rays. It only goes up from there.
  • True in a psychological sense as well, at least for Clarissa, who at one point thinks that she's competent enough wearing anything, or nothing at all for that matter, but when she's in her "grays" she can hit "Service Maximum".
• Code Name:
  • "Boskone" originated as the Galactic Patrol's secret codename for operations against the space pirates, unaware that the code name was devised by a Patrol scientist who was a physical manifestation of Arisian telekinetic power. They deliberately fed the Patrol the right name.
  • "Zwilnik" was the Patrol's codename for their operations against a drug smuggling ring at around the same time as Operation Boskone; by Kimball's time, the word "zwilnik" has become standard slang referring to drug traffickers. This may well be due more to the properties of the Lens, and the way its translation function works, than to anything else. When translating the Boskonians' own word for themselves, it would be "aware" that a suitable new English word had already been invented to translate it, and would therefore use that word in preference to either reproducing the sound of the Boskonian word or making up a new word itself.
• Cold-Blooded Torture: Used several times, always by villains.
  • Herkimer tortures Virgilia Samms for whatever information she can give him about the Lens. He thinks it's working, but actually she's in telepathic contact with several Lensmen, who are already on the way to rescue her and kill him, so they tell her to go ahead and talk; it won't matter in the end.
  • The Overlords of Delgon torture their victims to near-death in order to loosen their grip on their own life force — which the Overlords then consume as a delicacy. They have no biological need for it, they just enjoy it.
  • Kinnison is captured by the Eich, maimed and tortured, with the intent that his broken body will send a message to the Patrol. But he gets away before their pet Overlord can consume his life force and ruin his mind.
• Colony Drop: One weapon (that eventually becomes standardized for both sides) is the "free planet" - a small, rocky, generally otherwise-useless planetoid given a network of inertialess drives so that it can be dragged off wherever needed, then turned loose to seriously wreck someone's day. Then "weaponized planets" become the norm not so later...
• Combat Pragmatist:
  • Costigan. Kinnison also.
  • The standard Galactic Patrol hand-to-hand combat textbook largely follows his advice. The narrative notes that Lensmen "do not fight according to the tenets of the square ring," after Kinnison uses neck chops, thrown chairs, and a boot to the groin to dispose of several attackers.
• Cool Starship: The Boise, the Brittania [sic], and the Dauntless all come to mind.
  • When one runs the numbers for the starship Dauntless, one learns that its power system can generate six times the solar insolation experienced by Earth. That is, Dauntless could, using 1/6th of its full power, take the place of the Sun for the planet Earth.
  • The Boise from Triplanetary. Humanity's first interstellar space ship, natch.
• The Corrupter: Everyone involved in the galaxy-wide Boskonian thionite smuggling operation is this to some degree or another, working to subvert Civilization from within. In-universe, the Lensmen seem to regard this as an even more insidious danger than the Space Pirates attempting to assault them from without.
• Cosmic Chess Game: The war between Boskone and Civilization is this, from the point of view of both the Eddorians and the Arisians. Both races are so evenly matched that they could never defeat each other in a straight fight, and both loathe getting personally involved in their plots (albeit for different reasons), so they must resort to manipulating the younger races of the galaxies over the course of eons to achieve dominance.
• Dark Is Not Evil: Initially, the frigid-blooded, poison-breathing, multidimensional Eich, briefed in a perpetual aura of near-absolute zero cold, are truly scary monsters and the epitome of evil. But later, the Palainians (a closely related species, about as similar to them as we are to Human Aliens) turn out to be honorable and reliable (if weird) allies of Civilization.
  • This depends on whether you read the books in order of publication or in-universe chronology. If the latter, humanity meets the Palainians FIRST and has been on live-and-let-live terms with them ever since.
• Deceptively Human Robots: Most of Gray Roger's crew look outwardly identical to people, but given the setting's lack of processing power, they're effectively remote-controlled puppets.
• Deflector Shields:
  • Usually referred to as "ether-walls" or "screens." Unlike their Star Trek successors, for ships these are almost always multi-layered (two or three layers is typical) and there's a final layer ("wall-shield") that's almost integral with the outer skin of the ship. When the wall-shield fails, that's it. Screens also reradiate the incoming energy as light of frequency dependent on the intensity of the attack — failing screens are described as going through the spectrum to ultraviolet, then — black.
  • Personal shields are also standard protection for Patrolmen. As was later the case in Dune, a shield's repulsive force is proportional to the speed of the impacting object — or in this case, proportional to the speed of the impacting object to the 5th power — so ray gun blasts are completely intercepted while an axe swing might just make it through.
• Democracy Is Flawed:
  • The Lensman books are ambiguous on the flaws and virtues of democracy, showing a fair amount of both. The Patrol itself is a very powerful executive agency, arguably a sort of heroic State Sec, which also seems to have considerable influence in the civilian federal government, and this is not generally considered problematic by the (mainly military) protagonists. In the prequels, a power struggle between the emergent Patrol and a faction of civilian politicians also shows the latter to be decidedly the bad guys. On the other hand, the books are completely unambiguous about totalitarianism and dictatorship being bad things, and the evil politicians are beaten by democratic means, at the ballot box, while they themselves use all sorts of underhanded and undemocratic methods (including an attempted outright coup) to stay in power. In short, democracy is the preferred form of government for the good guys, but certain aspects that are normally part of modern democracies (civilian control of the military, checks and balances, and the rule of law) are unnecessary if you have the Omniscient Morality License.
  • When Boskonian worlds inhabited by human-like cultures are conquered, the Patrol initially imposes a sort of highly restricted pseudo-democracy loyal to Civilization, vaguely reminiscent of Adenauer's West German government under American supervision after World War II in real life. It is explained that, from Civilization's point of view, they cannot be trusted with full self-government immediately when their previous social systems have been highly fascist and authoritarian: left to themselves, the oppressed proles will only vote their former oppressors right back into office out of inertia. At the same time, it is hoped that with proper care, these states will gradually "grow" into real democracies in a generation or so.
• Destruction Equals Off-Switch: Two examples. After killing Helmuth, Kinnison blasts a control panel to lower the shield over the central dome of Helmuth's grand base. Later, when acting as the Mole in Charge of the Boskonian grand fleet, Kinnison blasts a control panel to disable the flagship's Bergenholm, thus keeping the flagship out of the upcoming battle.
• Did We Just Have Tea with Cthulhu?: Virgil Samms feels like this after establishing maybe second or third contact with the Palainians. Many people who have any dealings at all with the Arisians also end up feeling this way.
• Did You Just Punch Out Cthulhu?: Subverted. Mentor of Arisia assists Kimball Kinnison in destroying Prime Minister Fossten (Gharlane of Eddore), then convinces him that Fossten was a renegade Arisian and that Kinnison dispatched him without help.
• Disintegrator Ray: Without the later trappings of safety and convenience. The beams used really do vaporize their targets, with all the attendant thermodynamics, so best wear a shielded suit when firing unless you want your front half to be blackened cajun-style.
  • Kim Kinnison fires his DeLameters while unarmoured on several occasions, and it's hinted that its ancestor, the Lewiston, can also be fired by an unprotected user. The Semi-portable projectors, on the other hand...
  • The DeLameters do have power settings, also.
• Dolled-Up Installment: The "first" novel in the series, Triplanetary, was originally unconnected to the saga, but later rewritten and expanded as a "Prequel".
• Earth-Shattering Kaboom: In the third volume the bad guys' main base has a scuttling charge that pulverizes the crust of the planet it's on. This being the origin of the Lensman Arms Race, they have to find 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. (And they do, with colliding planets from another universe travelling at fifteen times the speed of light.)
• Eldritch Abomination: Not only are the Eddorians already from a horribly different other continuum, but they have to disguise their appearances or mere humans will go insane upon seeing them. So insane that they don't even scream or flee; they just lie in place, mute, twitching and paralyzed.
• Elite Agents Above the Law: The Gray Lensmen can go anywhere and do anything they consider necessary for their missions. They also have bottomless expense accounts, paying for anything and everything only with chits that the Patrol will honor. They can't be given orders, only requests and suggestions, as they are officially considered their own best judge of how they can best contribute to the defense of Civilization and the defeat of Boskone.
• Empathic Weapon: The Lens functions as a psychic enhancer (for humans, at least), and is attuned to its user in such a way that anyone else who tries to use or handle it when it's not connected to its rightful user is killed instantly. For the latter reason, it vanishes shortly after the owner's death.
• Enigmatic Empowering Entity: The Arisians serve this role for much of the plot, bestowing Lenses on those they judge worthy of them. Kinnison realizes later that they're also actively weeding out Boskonian infiltrators who are skilled enough to get through the selection process.
• Equal-Opportunity Evil:
  • Boskone dosn't really care what planet its mooks come from, as long as they don't screw up. On the other hand, the Eddorians are looking for the perfect race to be their front; and because of the very nature of the Eddorians, the more sexless, the better.
  • The Kalonians got the job initially because the only function of their women is the production of men. The Lyranians, on the other hand, are a Matriarchal society to the same degree. Give them a few years and a little bit of help... Helen of Lyrane and Clarissa Kinnison put a firm stop to that.
• Eternal Prohibition: All illegal drugs are still illegal in the far future, as they should be; indeed, much of the Galactic Patrol's work is replicating a galactic DEA (with Judge Dredd's plenipotentiary powers). Drug pushing seems to be regarded as the most serious of crimes; the punishment is either death or corrective psychological therapy. The Patrol focuses its efforts on thionite, which is really nasty stuff (and more importantly, whose dealers are part of the Boskonian food chain). Bentlam weed, on the other hand, seems to be the equivalent of marijuana — the Patrol doesn't even bother mentioning it. (Not that using it, even for an undercover job, doesn't make Kinnison feel disgusted...)
• Everybody Smokes: Even the women. Tobacco is never once maligned in the series. Fine brand cigarettes are imported to Tellus all the way from Alsakan, all the way across the galaxy. Society marches on...
• Evil Counterpart:
  • Kandron of Onlo is basically this to Nadreck. Considering what Nadreck is like, this makes him frightening indeed.
  • To a lesser extent, Helmuth is one to Kinnison.
• Evil Only Has to Win Once: Reversed. 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 past (including TWO nuclear wars), only for humanity to keep evolving anyway. It is the Arisians who only have to succeed once in molding a race into a force that can destroy the Eddorians.
• Evolutionary Levels: Lensmen are graded on stages from First to Third; only specially bred individuals get past First-Stage Lensman at the time of the story. It is hinted at that humanity would evolve as a whole to the point that achieving Second Stage would be common.
• Exact Words: When Mentor tells you that you have almost caused a disaster, it means the situation is still salvageable.
• Explosive Overclocking: Primary beams, which take the mechanism of a regular beam projector and use it as a one-shot cartridge.
• Extremophile Lifeforms: The palainians land on Pluto, but aren't comfortable getting any closer to Sol than that. Their biology extends into the fourth dimension to accommodate this extreme.
• Famous for Being First: Title dropped in First Lensman, where Virgil Samms is the first of the Lensmen and the founder of the Galactic Patrol. Later in the series, Kimball Kinnison becomes the first Second Stage Lensman (being the first to return to Arisia for advanced training), and Clarissa MacDougall becomes the first female Lensman.
• Fantastic Firearms: Triplanetary includes a pistol that uses compressed air to shoot fast acting poison darts. Later books rely instead on Ray Guns, though.
  "One touch anywhere on the skin and the guy dies right then. Two seconds max."
• Fantastically Challenging Patient: In "Second Stage Lensmen", an unnamed surgeon at one point complains about the difficulty in stitching up the wounds of the dragon-like Worsel the Velantian - the surgeon had to bore holes with an electric drill and use linesmen's pliers.
• Faster-Than-Light Travel: The "inertialess drive" and later, Hyperspatial tubes.
• Fake Memories:
  • Supplied by the Boskonians whenever their agents bite the amnesia pill and on one occasion more benignly by Kim Kinnison in order to rehabilitate one of those agents, who had been their puppet since she was fourteen.
  • Kinnison once has Worsel give him false memories in order to sow disinformation among the Eich leadership.
• Fate Worse than Death:
  • After the trio has been captured by Gray Roger, Clio has the following conversation with her guide:
    "But I wouldn't want to keep on living!" Clio declared, with a flash of spirit. "And I can always die, you know."
    "You will find that you cannot die," the passionless creature returned monotonously. "If you do not yield, you will long and pray for death, but you will not die unless Roger wills it. I was like you once. I also struggled, and I became what I am now — whatever it is."
  • Later Conway remarks that the woman "isn't alive — she's full of the prettiest machinery and communicators that you ever saw!" Which leads to a major Fridge Horror moment when one stops to wonder just how many other of Roger's robots started out as human.
  • 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 they are about to die and their life force is easier to extract).
• The Federation: A multi-species multi-planet civilization is common these days in science fiction, written and visual (see Star Wars, Star Trek, Brin's Uplift Universe, et cetera) but it had a definite start, and it was here. Ironically enough, unlike most modern portrayals where the bad guys tend to be a single species, both the heroes and the villains were multi-species and multi-planet (the heroes unusually so for the time period and possibly still to this day).
• Females Are More Innocent: Played straight with Illona of Lonabar. Averted with the Lyranians and the female villains in First Lensman.
• Feminine Mother, Tomboyish Daughter: In Children of the Lens, Clarissa Kinnison is described as a womanly feminine lady who tried hard to make her daughters grow up as feminine women too - and failed. They would not play house, or play with dolls; instead they played with atomic engines, flitters, and speedsters, and they also enjoyed roughhousing with their big brother Kit.
• Final Battle: Starting with Galactic Patrol, each book ends with a Final Battle of Civilization against Boskone. The final Final Battle, in Children of the Lens, is necessarily a psychic one, since the Eddorians cannot be killed by any physical force, however applied.
• Finish Him!: Mentor to Kim Kinnison, regarding Gharlane, and with good reason: "Destroy him therefore, forthwith, before he regains consciousness, lest much and grievous harm befall you."
  • Revealed in the following book to be a subversion. Gharlane was already dead, and Mentor was employing Exact Words: "Destroy" instead of "slay" or "kill" - and the "much and grievous harm" would be psychological harm if the 'mad Arisian' illusion cracked and Kinnison learned about the Eddorans.
• Florence Nightingale Effect: The Chief Surgeon and the Port Admiral try to set this up between Clarissa and Kinnison, only for the two of them to annoy the hell out of each other at first. Later, of course, they do fall in love. As the Arisians had intended them to do all along. They were the penultimates in their breeding program. This is lampshaded early on: in the first book Triplanetary it's mentioned ... and demonstrated ... that the two breeding lines would instinctively be incompatible with each other until the time was right.
• Forced into Evil: Not all Boskonians are irredeemably evil; in fact, many are as much victims of their oppressive systems as the people the Galactic Patrol tries to protect. The Lensmen try to recover and deprogram the less hardened ones when they can afford to make a distinction.
• Fridge Horror: "Lensmen pay their debts - even to spiders and worms." After Kimball Kinnison gets help from animals, he rewards them by guiding them to find food. Except that both the spider and the worm lived on planets that he later annihilated. The same thing happened earlier with a dog, except it doesn't even mention him rewarding the dog , which probably perished in a drug-induced stupor even before its planet blew up.
• Friend or Foe?: Telling the difference was one of the reasons the Lens became a necessity. One of the advantages the Lens has over any other badge of office is that it's impossible to fully duplicate one as a counterfeit.
• FTL Test Blunder: In the first test of the inertia-neutralising "Bergenholm", it turns out that the neutralisation field extended far beyond the hull of the ship, which results in every nearby object being flung through the air at extreme velocity when the ship takes off. Between the resulting chaos, and the fact that the departure was too rapid for sensors to track (reaching faster-than-light speeds instantly, with no period of acceleration), it appears at first as though the test ship was simply destroyed. Fortunately the ship and crew are fine in the end, apart from suffering the equivalent of severe space-sickness when inertia is removed.
• FTL Travel Sickness: The Inertialess Drive is the primary means of FTL travel; it leaves people feeling space-sick, although the feeling can be adjusted to. However, travel by hyperspatial tube causes a sickening sensation that no one ever becomes accustomed to.
• Future Slang: Lots of it, including "zwilnik" as mentioned above, but the most prevalent is "QX" as a replacement for "OK." And "jets" replace "balls," as in "having the jets to pull this off."
• Futuristic Superhighway: In the Big Applesauce of the future, Lensman Virgil Samms drives his gyro-stabilised two-wheeler onto the Wright Skyway, a limited-access superhighway with a maze of feeder ramps running all the way up the skyscraper he's working in, and higher (presumably exits for Flying Cars). The only problem is learning to ignore the bombardment of very noisy advertising (which he later discovers is NOT limited to humanity!).
• Gadgeteer Genius:
  • Practically every inventor or engineer in the series can whip up new devices or radically modify and rebuild existing ones in a matter of minutes, often in the middle of a raging battle. Justified in Fred Rhodebush and Lyman Cleveland's case, since they are the acknowledged world experts in their fields. LaVerne Thorndyke is their equivalent in Kim Kinnison's era.
  • Kinnison (a combat officer) plays the role himself to a degree, on Velantia, but even here it's justified because the technical breakdown of the captured Boskonian battleship has already been performed by experts and the Velantian engineers are mostly duplicating from blueprints. When it comes to tapping the enemy's communications, however, he has to wait until his Chief Communications Officer arrives. Later in the series, he has technical experts to do the work for him. He does work out off his own bat that it is possible to adapt the Velantian thought-screens to function without the need for a metallic conductor to carry them, and then performs the necessary modifications himself.
• Gambit Roulette: Not just the Arisian billion year plan (with redundancies!), but many of Kimball Kinnison's infiltration gambits require him to completely assume a new identity, at one point going so far as to systematically (and psychically) write himself into each and every portion of an enemy soldier's past! To say nothing of the identity that required him to become an alcoholic drug addict, deflecting attention from himself by getting so smashed and high simultaneously that he could barely move a muscle. His mind, on the other hand...
• Gender-Restricted Ability:
  • Smith's stories had only one woman who was deemed worthy of the Lens. First Lensman had the Arisians Hand Wave it by explaining that the Lenses were intrinsically "masculine". Some of the authorized sequels just threw other Lenswomen in anyway. And a canon Lenswoman did eventually appear, throwing the original claim somewhat into question, but that's Arisians for you... they say whatever elicits the desired reactions.
  • The Arisians told the first crew of Lensmen Candidates that there would be, eventually, just one human woman Lensman, which was Clarissa. Her daughters are not fully human, therefore the Arisians were not lying. This was mostly Virgilia Samms' conjecture, rather than anything said verbatim by the Arisians.
• General Ripper: Roderick Kinnison, Kimball Kinnison's ancestor in the prequel First Lensman, is a vanishingly rare positive example of this archetype. Not a lunatic, he is nevertheless a militarist, conspiracy theorist, advocate of preventive war and more than a little contemptuous of the civilian authorities. He remains a good guy because 1) he abides by the legit chain of command, and 2) the alien conspiracy he denounces is all too real.
• Generican Empire: The civilization that the protagonists work for is only referred to as "Civilization."
• Generic Federation, Named Empire: Civilization and Boskone.
• Gladiator Revolt: In Triplanetary, a small group tries to overthrown Emperor Nero (who is really Gharlane of Eddore).
• A God Am I: The Arisians and Eddorians, and even more so, Kimball Kinnison's children.
• Goggles Do Something Unusual: The ultra-wave "spy ray."
• Good Republic, Evil Empire: For all the extraordinary powers of enforcement the Galactic Patrol has, the Civilization it protects generally puts a high value on personal freedoms and local governmental autonomy. Boskone, on the other hand, is unapologetically despotic and malevolent.
• Great Off Screen War: The Jovian Wars. There were at least four of them, they resulted in the Triplanetary League forming from Venus, Tellus, and Mars.
• Guile Hero: While Kinnison himself is certainly one, and every Lensman is expected to be one to some degree, the real shining example of this trope in the Lensman 'verse is Nadreck of Palain VII, who prefers to manipulate his enemies into fighting one another by using his powers to amplify their natural flaws, hatreds, and jealousies. He wipes out one Boskonian base that we see using these methods, and there's evidence that he's pulled the same trick on others.
• Guilt-Free Extermination War:
  • Depending on the book. In First Lensman, this is averted, but in chronologically later books, as the Boskonian war heats up, it becomes an axiom of battle that no quarter is ever asked or offered by either side, and belonging to Boskone is grounds for death without trial. Relaxed after the destruction of Ploor. The Patrol is getting thoroughly sick of the Mook turkey shoot, and lets the fleeing Boskonians return to their homeworlds.
  • Aversions do occur where circumstances permit - when time constraints are sufficiently relaxed and/or the numbers of Boskonians involved are sufficiently small that it is practical to "rehabilitate" them rather than simply disposing of them. Examples include the Petrinos in First Lensman, the crew of the base in the Blakeslee incident, Illona Potter, and last but not least Thrale, where vast resources are deployed to rehabilitate the entire planet.

Tropes H - P

• Harmful to Touch: Lenses, when not being worn by their proper owners. This is explained as the Lens attempting to sync up with its rightful owner, which interferes fatally with anyone who doesn't fit. It's considered to be a useful feature, since it means they can't be stolen.
• Heavyworlder: The Valerians, who were originally human colonists, evolving into a Human Subspecies because of it.
• Hell-Bent for Leather: Downplayed. Much is made of the uniform of a Gray Lensman being plain, utilitarian, drab, and, well, gray, but it's only mentioned in passing that it's a gray leather uniform.
• The Hero: Kim Kinnison.
• Hero of Another Story: See the entry for Nadreck the Palainian under Magnificent Bastard.
• Hired to Hunt Yourself: Kinnison, while disguised as Major Gannel, arranged for this to happen to himself. He had the Patrol plant evidence that THE Lensman was tracing Boskonian communication lines, and then as Major Gannel had to show only a slight willingness to investigate before being ordered to do so. This was set up to let Kinnison go off-planet and join the Dauntless in investigating a Boskonian ship traveling down a hyperspatial tube.
• Hiroshima as a Unit of Measure: From a footnote, “Detet: the distance at which one spaceship can detect another.” A useful unit for ensuring there are no gaps in your watch-formation.
• Honey Trap: It is revealed early on that this is a standard Boskonian technique, but Lensmen are made of stern enough stuff to resist.
• Honor Before Reason: When Kinnison is deep undercover as meteor-miner and drug addict "Wild Bill" Williams, 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, which he doesn't deny. 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.
• Horrifying Hero: The Lensman Nadreck, a Palainian who lives partly in another dimension and who "fights" by mind raping his enemies into submission. His (relative) altruism and courage make him something of an aberration among his own kind, who are all a species of intrinsically paranoid, ruthless cowards.
• How Do I Shot Web?: Lenses do not come with instruction manuals; each Lensman has to learn how to operate their own Lens in the manner they find most intuitive, to the point where almost all Lensmen are told never to return to Arisia or attempt further contact. Kimball Kinnison is the first (though not by much) to realise that its uses go far beyond what he was initially told about, and will need to approach the Arisians for help in working it out. When his Admiral reminds him of this injunction, he states that he does not recall being given the warning - and with good reason; Mentor actually tells him that if he lived long enough, he would be bound to realise what he did and return for further training.
• Human Aliens: Kinnison not only manages to pass as a native on Thrale (a planet Civilization's run of humanity could not possibly have colonized – knowingly, anyway), but even manages to impersonate one of Boskone's officers there.
  • He did telepathically absorb practically all of the memories and skills of the Thralian officer he was replacing, and unknowingly had the Arisians filling in the blanks where he couldn't. His Lens also enables him to tell when someone is suspicious and blank their suspicions accordingly.
  • Also, in the Lensman universe, convergent evolution is a scientific fact: all the separate branches of humanity are virtually identical, even if they arose in entirely different galaxies. This is attributed to all non-Eddorian life in the known universe sharing an ultimate ancestor (the Arisians), meaning that species differentiation would be produced only by evolving in different environments. This is brought up by characters in the series, where they will mention how close to baseline Tellurians a particular alien is, often saying something like "Tellurian to within ten decimal places." There is a two-dimensional scale, with characteristics listed left to right on some basis of decreasing significance, rated from A for "identical to Tellurian" to Z for "as different as possible" (the places are not "decimal"). The first seven places are stated to refer to, in order: type of atmosphere the being breathes, blood type (warm, cold, frigid etc), stance (bipedal, quadrupedal, etc), type and arrangement of head, type and arrangement of arms, type and arrangement of legs, type of skin. A species described as "Tellurian to ten places" has a classification of AAAAAAAAAA... and from what details of the code are described this can be decoded as meaning an oxygen-breathing, warm-blooded, upright biped with Tellurian-type head, arms, legs and skin.
• Humanity Is Superior: Guess who runs Civilization? There were four species the Arisians selectively bred and eugenically improved for millions of years. The four races were the humans, the Velantians, the Rigellians and the Palainians. Humanity was considered the most desirable candidate of the four races because each of the others, despite being superior to humanity in many qualities, had a significant flaw: the Palainians were intrinsically cowardly and very bad at multitasking, the Rigellians too nonaggressive and unambitious, and the Velantians deficient in resistance to mind control and in attention span. Humanity, on the other hand, while having the fewest special strengths, had no specific weaknesses.
• I Did What I Had to Do: Admitted by both Conway Costigan and Nerado at the conclusion of the Nevian War.
• I Have You Now, My Pretty: Gray Roger, like any good Space Pirate, tries to force himself on The Hero's Love Interest. Subverted in that Roger is actually an asexual alien who reproduces by binary fission and is mainly just trying to figure out what this "sex" thing is and why other races think it's such a big deal anyway. When he says he wants to use her for experiments pertaining to sex, what he means and what she... and The Hero... think he means are two entirely different things.
• Imagination-Based Superpower: The powers granted by each Lens are limited only by the bearer's ability to perceive what they're doing as possible. Even the ability to withstand another being's telepathic attacks is as much down to willpower as innate ability. A lucky few — including Kimball Kinnison — discover that they've actually had innate powers of their own this whole time, and that the Lens only served to awaken them. This is not coincidental.
• Immune to Mind Control: Subverted by a number of characters who believe that they are immune to mind control but learn differently. (Or who get mind-controlled without realizing it.) Played straight in the case of Karen Kinnison, who really is the ultimate in mental defense.
• Incorruptible Pure Pureness: Incorruptibility is one of the prerequisites that determines whether or not someone is worthy of becoming a Lensman. It's more emphasized for human recruits, though, as not all non-human beings are subject to the same vices.
• Inertial Dampening: The Bergenholm inertialess drive, which was the origin of the trope.
• Insufferable Genius: Sir Austin Cardynge is Earth's mightiest mathematical brain, able to think in the language of mathematics. He's also a "conceited old goat" full of fury, but Kinnison notes that "you can afford to make concessions to a man with a brain like that." Furthermore, he's just the one named example of the Conference of Scientists, all of whom are insufferable geniuses and who collectively (with much friction and argument) develop the theory for two of the superweapons in the Lensman Arms Race.
• Interstellar Weapon: The hyperspatial tube-launched planets are probably one of the more effective examples in play.
• Invincible Hero: The main characters may appear as this to some readers since they tend to be good at nearly everything in the story. Even on the rare occasions when Kinnison is hospitalized, he always bounces back better than before.
• Jack of All Stats: Of the five Children of the Lens, Christopher. More generally, humans compared to the other races of the universe. Most generally, the Lensmen as a whole, as they often work alone, and thus need to be skilled at everything — ranged combat, close combat, stealth, investigation, infiltration, diplomacy, starship piloting, starship repair, everything.
• Joker Immunity: Boskone could give HYDRA a run for its money. It just keeps coming back.
• Judge, Jury, and Executioner: With their telepathic powers (and incorruptibility), the Lensmen generally don't bother with trials or due process. That said, quite a few Boskonians Kim Kinnison encounters not only keep their lives but get help to become honest citizens of Civilization.
• Klingon Promotion: Standard operating procedure among the Boskonians, as their hierarchy is built on power and intimidation. If you can't keep your underlings from killing you and taking your job, you clearly weren't doing that well at it in the first place.
• Lensman Arms Race: Trope Maker and Trope Namer. 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. This trend continues throughout the series. And yet boots-on-the-ground investigation and infiltration never go out of style.
• Literally Prized Possession: In "Children of the Lens" Kimball Kinnison wins ten millos in a side bet with his son. He has the one-cento coin mounted in a thousand-credit frame and presented to the librarians who won the bet for him.
• Loyal Phlebotinum: The Lenses, which kill anyone other than their owners who tries to wield them.
• Ludicrous Precision: The slang phrase "I check you to nineteen decimals" invokes this for effect, as a rather over-the-top way of saying "Your conclusions / suspicions match up with my own."
• Mad Mathematician: Sir Austin Cardynge. (Not actually insane, just... focused. Or perhaps Heinlein would call him unsane.) And he's not necessarily the worst. Among Tellurians and similar species, it's an accepted fact that high levels of mathematical intellect will lead to a bit of instability, and the exceptions are at least Second Stage.
• Make Sure He's Dead: One of the first signs that Helmuth is a cut above your run-of-the-mill pulp villain is the fact that he refuses to take Kinnison's apparent death at face value and explicitly commands his underlings to look for the body to verify.
• The Man Behind the Man: Boskone works like a giant onion around the Eddorians. Each layer plays The Man Behind the Man to its subordinate group, which in turn has its own subordinate bunch.
• Mecha-Mooks: Grey Roger's minions in Triplanetary. Played with in that the escaping heroes unhesitatingly gun down both robots and humans on sight without a moral quiver (they are enemy troops after all).
• Membership Token: Lenses serve as this for the Lensmen, as their inherent properties make them impossible to steal or counterfeit.
• Mental Fusion: Mentor of Arisia is actually a fusion of four different Arisian minds, a technique the Children of the Lens later learn for themselves.
• Mind Rape:
  • Used heavily by the villains. Also occasionally by the heroes, though mainly on villains who have already perpetrated mind-rapes themselves. Particularly Nadreck of Palain, although his entire race's moral philosophy differs radically from that of humans.
  • Kim Kinnison pulls a neat inversion when rehabilitating the drug-blasted mind of a young woman who had been hypnotised into being an enemy agent. He leaves something in her head as protection for her, telling his colleagues afterwards that the next person who tries to hypnotize her will be lucky if he escapes with his life.
  • Camilla Kinnison pulls a mild variant of this on an obnoxious fellow who hits on her at a spaceport, painting an image of herself in his mind as a Hellraiser-like cosmic horror who will eat him the next time they cross paths.
• Mind Virus: By the end of the series, Boskonia's subliminal propaganda is sufficiently advanced that mere exposure to it in writing is sufficient to drive whole populations insane, causing mass disturbances and breakdowns in public order.
• Minovsky Physics: Ultra-waves, ether, thought-waves, the Bergenholm (extended right to and past to the logical conclusion of "just how big an object can we throw around?").
• The Mole: One of Kinnison's usual tactics, successful to the point that he eventually ends up running the Evil Empire in time for their (at that stage in the story) climactic battle with Civilization.
• Mole in Charge: In a heroic example, Kimball Kinnison goes undercover as "Major Gannel" on Thrale and rises far enough in the ranks during his mission to become the next (and last) Tyrant of the planet.
• Mook Horror Show:
  • Any time Nadreck is unleashed at the Mook Boskonians. Since he is both more or less the most Unscrupulous Hero imaginable and a borderline Eldritch Abomination himself, they are entirely justified in being terrified of him.
  • Kinnison sometimes approaches this as well, though not to the same degree.
  • Any of the protagonists is a One-Man Army who can take on large numbers of mook enemies and win. Even gentle Clarissa has done this on occasion. What makes Nadreck this trope is that he usually doesn't just kill the mooks, he drives them mad, Cthulhu-style.
• Mouth of Sauron: Helmuth, "speaking for Boskone," appears to be the Big Bad of the series at first (if you read the series in publication order), but he turns out to be only a part of a much vaster scheme orchestrated by the Eddorians themselves. Note that Helmuth actually predates Sauron; Galactic Patrol was published fifteen years before The Fellowship of the Ring.
• Multiple-Choice Chosen: Takes place at a species level. The Arisians have been selectively breeding four species to the point where their offspring would be Stage 3 Lensmen. They eventually settle on humans.
• Mundane Utility: The ability to render objects inertialess is not just used for FTL travel, but also to replace elevators. Step out into a yawning shaft, drop "free" for fifty or a hundred floors in a fraction of a second, and walk out at the desired level without a hair being mussed. The one drawback is that skirts are out as female office wear.
• My God, What Have I Done?: Played with in Masters of the Vortex.. Medury took great pains to ensure he was doing no harm before he triggered the first Vortex. By the time the Cahuitans discover what the 'kindling' for their incubators actually was, they've evolved beyond remorse but they do act immediately to minimize the damage they've caused.
• Never Found the Body:
  • The nature of high-energy space warfare means you usually don't have a body to find, which Grey Roger uses –twice– to his benefit.
  • Helmuth of Boskone is smart enough to know never to assume No One Could Survive That! and insists to his mooks that they always try to find the body. It's not enough to save him in the long run, but it does help make him one of Kinnison's most dangerous opponents.
• Nice Job Breaking It, Hero: In Masters of the Vortex, a loose atomic vortex can be destroyed with high explosives if you can match the characteristics of the charge to the activity of the vortex at the time of detonation. If not, you either feed the vortex (and make it larger) or spread it into multiple smaller vortices all over the place. Played straight; it's a mistake of the latter type which costs Neal Cloud his wife and children (though not at Cloud's own hands; the mistake was made by a 'bungling nitwit' who is bluntly stated to have died in the attempt).
• Nice to the Waiter: Even when he's infiltrating the bad guys' organization to work his way up the hierarchy, Virgil Samms refuses to take credit for work those under him did. And when Kim Kinnison sifts through a broken-down, burned-out meteor miner's head to find the information he's looking for, he cures the man's epilepsy and gives him the drive to go back out into space and succeed. In fact, when Kimball uses a spider as part of his scheme, he makes sure to find a nice, juicy fly for the spider to eat as well, and it's all part of the same thing.
• No Conservation of Energy: Averted; whether it's ray guns actually vaporizing people or Deflector Shields reradiating energy to their surroundings and setting them on fire, Smith is one rare sci-fi author who understands that not only does energy have to be generated, it also has to go somewhere.
  • Metal objects don't simply disappear - they glow, melt, and even evaporate if the beam is powerful enough.
  • In the climactic battle of the last book, anti-matter projectiles are used, and Smith very explicitly states that when an electron and positron collide, they annihilate, giving rise to two photons of very hard radiation. The really big anti-matter projectiles can fill volumes with diametres best expressed in light-minutes with lethal levels of ionizing radiation.
  • In Masters... Neal Cloud realises this aversion just before he blows out Vortex Number One - the resultant explosion is considerably more violent than he had originally anticipated, and the careful preparations made for his safety are woefully inadequate. He barely gets away with his life.
• No-Nonsense Nemesis: Since Boskonia cares more about efficiency than 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 No One Could Survive That! (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 more familial Patrol.
• "Not So Different" Remark: At the end of First Lensman, the Patrol has the enemy fleet on the ropes and the enemy subfleet commanders are invited to parley rather than be butchered. Samms scans their minds as they come aboard his ship and gets a shock when he finds that one of the enemy commanders is of Lensman grade.
• Not the Fall That Kills You…: Smith was also capable of telling physics to take a hike when it suited the story. For instance, he had characters matching "intrinsic velocities" in ways that conveniently ignored just how astronomical (in the literal sense) those velocity differences must have been, up to and including high fractions of lightspeed. Smith's Technobabble explanation of the impossibly stormy atmosphere of the planet Trenco pretty much ignores the laws of thermodynamics, and his calculations for the destructive power of his ultimate explosive Duodec are an elaborate joke in the form of a mathematical formula. Smith was reportedly delighted to be called on this, because it meant his fans were paying attention.
• Nuclear Option: More like Casual Nuclear War, for lack of a better term. Several variants of atomic weapons are used: Super-atomic bombs which convert their entire rest-mass into energy, and duodecaplylatomate (or "duodec," for short), an extremely high-yield nuclear explosive described as "the quintessence of atomic destruction" and similar phrases. And of course, the famous negabombs, "antimatter" projectiles that come in every size up to planetary mass. All are used increasingly liberally as the war escalates; expect no trace of any Nuclear Weapons Taboo.
• Obliviously Evil: The vast majority of Boskonia's rank-and-file are unwitting pawns, totally in the dark about their state being run by a conspiracy of monstrous aliens. While many of them still manage to be quite thoroughly despicable individuals for more soberingly mundane reasons, many more are simply conscripts Just Following Orders. Some are actually genuinely good people who will fight fanatically against the forces of Civilization to their last breath — Because the very effective Boskonian propaganda machine has convinced them that Civilization is an evil empire out to enslave and exterminate their people.
• Oh, Crap!: 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.
• Oh, My Gods!: Spacemen have their own god, named Klono, who shows up in expletives like "Holy Klono's tungsten teeth and curving carballoy claws!" The Valerians prefer Noshabkeming, but quite a few spacemen say prayers to both.
• Old-School Dogfight: Averted - the closest thing they have would be speedsters, used for scouting and transportation.
• Omniscient Morality License:
  • The Arisians like to jerk the lesser races' chains a lot, but it's for their own good. (Eventually.) Of course, the Atlanteans, the Romans, and the Americans (and the rest of the modern-day nations of Tellus) might have a different opinion of 'their own good', considering what the Arisians permit to happen to them. And that's just Tellus... The alternative, however, would have been worse.
  • The Lensmen effectively have this delegated to them. Because the Arisians have checked them for corruptibility and found them sound, any Lensman of a certain rank (a Gray Lensman) is set above the laws of Civilization, authorized to act as Judge, Jury, and Executioner. They have unlimited authority because abuse is not a concern. They still make mistakes, get killed, and have moral qualms.
• One Riot, One Ranger: Kinnison frequently takes on Boskonian bases single-handedly and wins. He's rarely far away from backup forces that are ready to move at his signal, but even then, most of the time they only come into play to mop up after he's already dealt the deciding blow.
• O.O.C. Is Serious Business: Played with in Grey Lensman. When the Eich try to invade Arisa, one Arisan grabs hold of their leaders' minds and stops them cold. He informs them that they are completely outmatched, and he'll let them live, as a lesson to the others. When the psychologist sneers that the Arisan is "dealing with the Eich", and manages to move "by sheer effort of will", the Arisan basically goes "So, what?", smacks him upside the mental head, and stops him. This might be the most casual way we see any Arisan speak in the entire series, and the mockery shows precisely how little of a threat the Eich are, even before he starts lecturing them.
• Our Dragons Are Different: The Velantians. For one thing, they're incredible telepaths.
• Our Nudity Is Different: Some physically human societies have either radically different nudity taboos or none at all, and Lensmen are expected to adopt local customs unless some pressing reason not to do so is in play. Most of them are so used to it that they do not even think about it, but Clarissa strongly dislikes working in the nude (though she can and will do it if necessary). A few human races are the opposite, as well, with clothing rules that cover everything, like the Tomingans.
• Outside-Context Problem: The Nevians in Triplanetary - when they first show up wreck both the Patrol and the pirate fleets. Once the Boise gets the proper upgrades, however...
• The Paralyzer: The Nevian Paralyzer gun. Most of the other hand weapons don't have a stun setting as default, although it's implied that they can be tuned or modified in the field to produce it.
• Pardon My Klingon: The Lenses assign random words to alien concepts with no direct human equivalent, and all the Lenses use the same word afterwards.
• Perpetual Storm: First Lensman has the planet Trenco, which has forty seven feet of rainfall each night, the worst electrical storms in known space, and wind velocities of over 800 miles per hour.
• Powered Armor: According to many, the Ur-Example, certainly a very early one (decades before Starship Troopers). Includes protective force-fields, inertial dampening tech, rocket thrusters, a generous heat ray, and the multi-kilohorsepower engines required to move it around.
• Power of Love: This is what enables Clarissa to find and bring back Kinnison after he went through the 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".
• Prequel: First Lensman, the last Lensman novel written by Smith, which finishes linking Triplanetary to the rest of the series.
• Prosthetic Limb Reveal: After Port Admiral Haynes undergoes an experimental regeneration treatment (and needs assistance because his prosthetics don't fit any more) Nurse Clarissa MacDougall is shocked to discover just how many prosthetic parts Haynes had.
  MacDougall: I had no idea, Admiral Hynes, that you... that there...
  Haynes: That I was so much of a rebuild?
• Proud Warrior Race Guy: Worsel of Velantia, and also the confusingly named (Human) Valerians and their scion, Van Buskirk (who are a Human Subspecies because of the high gravity of their planet).
• Psychic Block Defense: Mechanical thought-screens and their psychically generated equivalents. The former are not always unbreakable, but are in widespread use even among natural telepaths, as they offer the advantage of not requiring any effort from the wearer to maintain his, her or its own psychic shields around the clock. Just make sure the new power-pack is connected in parallel before you slip out the used one...
• The Psycho Rangers: By Children of the Lens, the Eddorians have seemingly come up with a way to create Lenses of their own and begin fielding "Black Lensmen" in an attempt to counter Civilization's finest. The results are rather disappointing, to the point that the Children of the Lens deem the Black Lensmen to be a non-issue without even doing anything about them, making their existence feel like a Red Herring.
• Purple Prose:
  • Each space battle seems to be a test to see if Smith can one-up himself.
    "And from the mouth of that gargantuan cone [of battle] there spewed forth a miles-thick column of energy so raw, so stark, so incomprehensibly violent that it had to be seen to be even dimly appreciated. It simply cannot be described." (... And he was only up to the second book in the series by this point!)
  • Smith hangs a huge, hilarious lampshade on his own purple writing style in Children of the Lens — there's a scene where Kinnison is traveling undercover as a writer of pulp space operas, and the few paragraphs of his latest work that are quoted are so over-the-top they make the narrative in which they're embedded sound as spare and laconic as Hemingway.

Tropes Q - Z

• Quitting to Get Married: Clarissa comments at the end of Gray Lensman that she's facing a huge amount of demerits for having not one, but three men in her quarters^note one of them is her love interest Kinnison which under other circumstances might well be considered irregular to say the least, but the other two are extremely senior officers and all three are Lensmen, so she's just joking. The chief surgeon (one of those men) assures her she won't get in trouble, because her resignation to marry Kinnison will be backdated to before the meeting. (Note that Clarissa hadn't said anything about resigning, everyone^note including Clarissa, to be honest just assumed she would, and a woman quitting her career to get married was par for the course when the stories were first published.) Turns into a 10-Minute Retirement when Mentor delivers a psychic Dope Slap to Kinnison at the beginning of Second Stage Lensmen ... but before she gets to go through with the wedding at the end of that book, she resigns again^note from the Nursing Corps; by that point she's a Lensman herself, and you don't resign from that job while you're still breathing, or whatever your species' equivalent is.
• Ray Gun: By the time of Galactic Patrol, DeLameters are standard Patrol equipment, capable of vaporising anything that doesn't have advanced shielding.
• Raygun Gothic: Before it was retro, even.
• A Real Man Is a Killer: All Tellurian Lensmen are male, because a Lensman must be able to kill without a conscience if the situation calls for it and only men can be natural-born killers like that; women, supposedly, just don't have that kind of sociopathy in them. Virgilia Samms is disqualified from being a Lensman for this reason, and she says that there will one day be a woman Lensman, but she'll be an absolute freak of nature. Actually, Virgilia's being fed a crock of bullshit. The Arisians don't want women in the Lensman corps because it might screw up their breeding program.
• "The Reason You Suck" Speech:
  • Helmuth receives one when he tries to visit Arisia:
    Mentor: Inflated — overwhelmingly by your warped and perverted ideas, by your momentary success in dominating your handful of minions, tied to you by bonds of greed, of passion, and of crime, you come here to wrest from us the secret of the Lens, from us, a race as much abler than yours as we are older — a ratio of millions to one.
    You consider yourself cold, hard, ruthless. Compared to me, you are weak, soft, tender, as helpless as a newborn child. That you may learn and appreciate that fact is one reason why you are living at this present moment. Your lesson will now begin.
  • Later, one of the lesser Guardians does the same to a couple of trespassing Eich leaders. Unlike Helmuth, they remain stubborn in the face of his overwhelming mental power — so he kills them while their colleagues watch, as a demonstration of just how outmatched they are.
• Red Oni, Blue Oni: In First Lensman, Roderick Kinnison and Virgil Samms have this sort of dynamic going, with Rod's impulsive charisma balanced by Samms's methodical cunning.
• Revenge Is Sweet: The Overlords of Delgon had been enslaving and torturing Velantians to death for millennia. With the help of the Galactic Patrol, the Velantians became able to go on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge, and whenever they successfully wiped out a den of Overlords it felt wonderful. One particular episode in Second Stage Lensmen had Worsel of Velantia return from a raid on a den of Overlords radiating "self-satisfaction, bliss, and contentment." This despite being banged up, stitched up, and bandaged due to injuries received in the fight.
• Rule of Cool: Averted, surprisingly; the basic fictional scientific principles such as the Bergenholm drive, hyperspatial tubes, force fields, rays etc are all handled with consistency and care. Smith finds new ways to apply these principles, rather than whipping out more Applied Phlebotinum. Even his predilection for the Boarding Party, and, of course the Valerian Space Axe Recycled In Space, are solidly justified. Though the Bergenholm drive only averts it in the basic view; in the details it is more an example of playing it straight. "Inertialess" objects still display inertial behaviour in cases where it would be too awkward to behave "realistically". For example, true inertialessness would halt all thermal motion of atoms and molecules, which would wreak lethal havoc on any biological system, far beyond the "space-sickness" which is the worst such effect described (and then only in the case of the first prototype, later developments avoid this). A spaceship going inertialess in a gravity well would instantly, without perceptible time-lapse, fall to the bottom of the well and likely be vaporised in the heart of a star; again this simply does not happen, and the behaviour of the Bergenholm drive in relation to gravitational fields can only be explained by assuming it to also function as a Cavorite-style gravity shield - the first test of the initial prototype inertialess drive indeed does exactly this.
• Roaring Rampage of Revenge: Worsel, to avenge the millennia his people suffered at the hands of the Overlords of Delgon (not to mention his own suffering), vows to obliterate the entire species from the universe. Pretty much does. Considers the fact that he has to torture some of them for information to be a bonus. This is a species that tortures its victims slowly to death in order to enjoy their agonies and then consume their life-force as they die. Not because they need to do so to live or anything, they just like it. Little wonder that the Velantians' allies saw fit to help them destroy it.
• Save the Villain: Lensmen will try to save even Boskonian agents if rehabilitation is at all possible. They have no hesitation about destroying those that prove to be too hardened or indoctrinated to save (which generally translates to pretty much all of the upper echelons of their leadership).
• Scary Dogmatic Aliens: Boskone is The Empire pitted against the benevolent and free Civilization. Consider the stories were written in the run-up to, and during, WWII and you can see who they stand for. It's probably not coincidence that the title of the Eddorian leader is also one of the titles of the German Kaiser ("All-Highest"). Also Cf. Helmuth von Moltke, German commander at the start of the First World War.
• Schematized Prop: Any and all weapons, but particularly the DeLameter blaster. Almost all spaceships.
• Science Hero: Quite often, the tide of the war against Boskone is changed as a result of brilliant scientists whipping up the newest Big Thing just in time to give the Space Pirates a thrashing.
• Sci-Fi Writers Have No Sense of Scale:
  • Averted; Smith appears very much aware that he's portraying a galaxy-wide civilization. Here's the Gray Lensman on leading the assault on a major Boskonian stronghold:
    Kinnison: "With around a million fleets to handle we can't spend spend much time on any one."
  • The starships of the Galactic Patrol use total conversion of matter to energy for their engines. At first, the power was conducted in meters-thick, liquid-helium-cooled silver busbars, because nothing less could handle it. It's specifically noted that to utilize their extreme power sources to their fullest, they needed to go a step further than that and discover room-temperature superconductors.
• Screw This, I'm Outta Here: After Ploor is destroyed, the remnants of the Boskonian fleet flee back to their respective planets. The Patrol, thoroughly sick of killing mooks like shooting fish in barrels, lets them go.
• Secret Weapon: Primary beams, kept secret from the Boskonians throughout most of Gray Lensman. The Galactic Patrol only used them when they knew none of its victims could escape to tell the tale.
• Sequel Reset: Every one of the original four novels ends with the Lensmen thinking they've finally destroyed the nerve center of Boskone's operations and wrapped things up for good... which means that every sequel has to have a scene establishing that, no, there's still one level higher to go (at least until they finally confront the Eddorians).
• Serial Escalation: Goes hand-in-hand with the Lensman Arms Race. Each book introduces at least one superweapon that's ultra-powerful at the moment it's revealed but that becomes so ubiquitous by the sequel that it's practically the new baseline for weapons tech, resulting in scientists on both sides developing still more powerful superweapons in an effort to break the status quo. Wash, rinse, repeat.
• Shades of Conflict: The general perception of Boskonia in Civilization early on, fueled by numerous war crimes and atrocities, is that they are all deranged psychopaths and deserve no mercy. While remaining largely true for some particularly vile units and organizations, this gradually changes as more or less peaceful contacts with the enemy increase, and people realize that there are both more and less evil individuals and cultures within Boskonia's not completely monolithic evil empire.
• Shipper on Deck: After Kinnison's disastrous encounter with the Wheelmen in Galactic Patrol ends up with him laid up in a hospital, Doctor Lacy and Port Admiral Haynes conspire to set him up with Clarissa MacDougall, an eligible nurse who happens to also be related to the Samms family. The two do eventually fall for one another. Just as the Arisians intended from the start of their breeding program.
• Show, Don't Tell: For all the loving detail Smith put into his descriptions of technology and military tactics, his character descriptions tended to be "This is what you should think about this character."
• Shown Their Work: For such a dated (and often over-the-top) series, Lensman can be surprisingly hard science-fiction at times.
• Skip the Anesthetic: Played with in Gray Lensman. Kinnison has barely survived torture and needs radical surgery. He offers to just keep his mental nerve block up, but the doctors convince him that he needs to be out cold due to possible psychological trauma from what they'll have to do to him. Then the anesthesia only blocks the pain and leaves Kinnison conscious. Worsel has to be brought into the operating room to put Kinnison under via mental powers.
• Sleazy Politician: In the prequel First Lensman, Senator Morgan, who mixes shady political dealing and ties with corrupt corporations and the mob with secret subservience to the evil alien empire. His chief aide, Herkimer Herkimer III, is probably the closest thing Lensman has to an utter monster. (Well, as far as human beings are concerned, at least.) Morgan can probably also be considered a mild Strawman Political against left-wing economic populism.
• Sleep Cute: Costigan and Clio Marsden share a chaste moment of slumber together after their rescue from Grey Roger's clutches.
• The So-Called Coward: Nadreck refers to himself as a Dirty Coward. 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 guile.
  • 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. Like the other few hundred enemies in the base.
  • 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. He doesn't enjoy it one bit.
• So Last Season: The powers of Civilization, Boskone, and the Lensmen keep going up and up and up... by the final novel, even the superhuman Kimball Kinnison has to take a back seat to the final Guardians of Civilization.
• Solar System Neighbors: Martians and Venusians are mentioned, while Pluto was colonized by the exosolar Palainians long before Earth (Tellus) discovered space travel.
• Sorting Algorithm of Evil: Boskone, played to the hilt. Every time Kinnison thinks that this time Boskone is for sure, absolutely, 100% beyond a doubt finished... surprise! Those bad guys were just a puppet of the next and even more dangerous layer of Boskone.
• Space Battle: While most of the action centered on the larger-than-life heroes as individuals, occasionally the emphasis shifted to the larger-than-life fleets of space battleships they commanded.
• Space Friction: When you're totally inertialess, running into a hydrogen atom in the almost-perfect vacuum of space actually does qualify as friction. Friction from the interstellar medium, in fact, is the only limiting factor on the acceleration of an inertialess drive.
• Space Is Cold: During Virgil Samms's visit to a sub-zero planet, Smith takes pains to explain that the vacuum of space is a very poor heat conductor. The metallic ground, on the other hand...
• Space Pirates: The Boskonian empire before they turn out to be a Greater-Scope Villain. Not a hard mistake to make, when it's the only face the enemy shows you.
• Space Police: The Galactic Patrol serves as Civilization's peacekeeping force, though they're a lot more overtly military than a lot of other examples of the trope. Standard Lensmen serve as special agents and have broad authority to deputize whoever they think is necessary to help them with whatever their mission is; the Grey Lensmen have even more extraordinary powers, both legally and (usually) in terms of abilities, as they have free rein to investigate just about anything that catches their attention with minimal oversight.
• The Spartan Way: Present, though somewhat downplayed. In Galactic Patrol, it's mentioned that out of an initial selection pool of one million per planet per year, only about one hundred are deemed worthy of receiving a Lens. Given that a typical Lensman is among the most physically, mentally, and morally tough people in the galaxy, it's to be expected that the selection process must be quite demanding. Even those who wash out still have learned valuable skills that the Galactic Patrol can and does put to good use.
• Stalker with a Test Tube: The Arisians have been interfering with most of human history, conducting a breeding program to produce humans with mental powers exceeding their own. The Kinnisons become the end result.
• State Sec: The Galactic Patrol in First Lensman is a heroic example. They function as Secret Police and spy on Boskone's organization, but also quickly absorb the Triplanetary Service (a regular military outfit) and other military forces of Civilization, as well as building their own fleet. By the time of Galactic Patrol, they have completely subsumed Civilization's government.
• Starfish Aliens: The Nevians, Palainians and Rigellians, among others. Thoroughly inhuman and occasionally monstrous aliens who (at least insofar as the named examples are concerned) are either humanity's allies from the start or become so.
• Submersible Spaceship: In Galactic Patrol, it's mentioned that the "big teardrop" spaceships sink in water but are readily maneuverable underwater. Later on, there's a brief report that a fleeing spaceship "dove into the deepest ocean of Corvina II, in the depths of which all rays are useless."
• Subspace Ansible: The Lens allows telepathic communication with other Lensmen or powerful telepaths, at a range depending on the skill and power of the individuals involved. If they're advanced enough, Lensmen in different galaxies can communicate with each other with no more difficulty or inconvenience than an online chat room.
• Sufficiently Advanced Aliens: Arisians and Eddorians. Arguably the Ploorans. All three races appear to be naturally evolved Level Three telepaths.
• Super Breeding Program: The Lensmen are the product of an Arisian breeding program to create a race of ultra-powerful telepathic beings to defeat the Eddorian menace.
• Superior Twin Teamwork: In Children of the Lens, the titular children are two pairs of twin sisters plus their older brother. Once grown, they can form a Mental Fusion called the Unit, at one point described by Mentor of Arisia as "the most powerful and the most nearly perfect creation this universe has ever seen." Unusually for twin tropes, the twin sisters are non-identical.
• Super Prototype: Numerous Cool Ships, from the Brittania to the Chicago.
• Supporting Leader: Kinnison's controller, Port Admiral Haynes, doesn't get himself directly involved much unless there's a space battle of stupendous scale to coordinate. Nevertheless, his leadership and support often prove invaluable whenever Kinnison finds himself in a tight spot.
• Taking You with Me: When fighting a losing battle, Boskonian gun crews purposely overload their weapons. This burns out the gun and kills the gun crews, but the resulting high powered beam is enough to break through the shields of the Patrol's defensive cruisers. It backfires when Patrol scientists figure out a way to safely use the method, creating the devastating primary beam.
• Technobabble: Mixed liberally with actual science, and Smith was reportedly delighted by fans who could spot the difference.
• Technicolor Eyes: The non-Kinnison breeding line is characterized by auburn hair and "gold-flecked, tawny eyes".
• Telepathic Spacemen: The point of the story.
• Terror Hero: 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. In fact, Nadreck prides himself on this technique so much that the one time it doesn't quite get to 100% (forcing him to invade the base and personally kill the last three Boskonian personnel who didn't crack), he is humiliated, treating the matter as My Greatest Failure.
• Too Awesome to Use: Invoked and discussed within the context of the perpetual game of one-upmanship that is the Lensman Arms Race. Every so often, the scientists of either Civilization or Boskone will come up with something leaps and bounds ahead of what the other side can deal 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 their enemy will be able to analyze, reverse-engineer, and develop their own countermeasures for anything wielded against them.
• Touched by Vorlons: Several characters are touched by the Arisians to varying degrees, particularly the second-stage Lensmen in the later books. Generally speaking, this is when said humans are in direct opposition to an Eddorian, specifically Gharlane, and require protection.
• Tractor Beam: They appear here first, as an offshoot of research into anti-inertia forcefields. Interestingly, against negamatter bodies, they behave in the exact opposite fashion, repelling them instead of capturing them. The inverse of the tractor, the pressor, also exists - although it has never enjoyed the same percolation into popular culture as its attractive brother.
• Trademark Favorite Food: Kinnison and his big, thick, rare beefsteaks.
• Transhuman: The end goal of the Arisians' great eons-long plan, realized by Kim and Clarissa Kinnison's offspring, is the creation of a species of superbeings to whom the powers of even a Second-Stage Lensman are second nature from birth.
• Translator Microbes: The Lens of Civilization allows its wearer to communicate with anyone as if in their native language; the wearer doesn't hear the original sounds at all.
• Tsundere: Clarissa Kinnison (nee MacDougall) may be one of the prototypes for the "feisty, temperamental redhead that ultimately falls for the hero" archetype that's so prevalent in science fiction.
• Twin Switch: First Lensman Samms does a variation on this so he can infiltrate a drug cartel while under Patrol protection. The reason he can switch with his cousin is carefully explained.
• Types of Naval Ships: Played with. Speeders are smallest (room for one or two people) and fastest. Covettes, frigates, and destroyers aren't used at all. Cruisers are generally designed for specialized tasks, such as prevent hostile ships from going "free", scouting, or launching negabombs. Battlecruisers are used for commerce raiding (by the Boskonians), or for fighting commerce raiders (by the Patrol). Battleships and super-dreadnoughts are front-line combat units although we see far more of the latter then former. Finally, the slow maulers and super-maulers were designed for planetary bombardment, although thanks to the strength of theater shields they proved more successful in ship to ship combat.
• The Unfettered: Gray Lensmen, officially called Unattached Lensmen, are free to pursue whatever avenues they desire in pursuit of their moral duty to protect Civilisation, and are given pretty much a blank check to use Civilization's resources as they see fit in that pursuit. Technically they are answerable to the Galactic Council and the Port Admiral of the Galactic Patrol, but in the field they answer only to their own conscience.
  Kimball Kinnison: On this job I can recognize nothing of good taste, of courtesy, of chivalry, or even of ordinary common decency.
• Unobtainium: Dureum, a "super-dense" metal which allows it to be used inside of Hypertubes.
• Unscrupulous Hero: Nadreck of Palain. All Gray Lensmen are expected to be somewhat pragmatic and utilitarian. But Nadreck takes it up to eleven, in part because Palainian culture considers deceit and cowardice to be virtues. Make no mistake, if Nadreck is after you, he will absolutely arrange your death in any of the ways that his cunning, his resources, and his powers allow... but he'll only personally assault you as a desperate last resort.
• Unstoppable Force Meets Immovable Object: Invoked by the narrative when Helmuth's base self-destruct system triggers a tremendous duodec explosion, with the planet being the immovable object. The result is the planet temporarily breaking apart, before crashing back together, deformed beyond recognition.
• Unusual Euphemism: By Klono's Carballoy Claws! Also a Future Slang version of Curse of The Ancients. Klono seems to have whatever alliterative attributes the person swearing by him wants him to have: iridium intestines, gadolinium guts, und so weiter. Lampshaded as being why he's such a popular space-god. "He's got so much stuff - teeth and horns, claws and whiskers, tail and everything - that he's much more satisfactory to swear by than any other space-god I know of."
• Unwilling Roboticisation: What happened to Clio's guide - and possibly others - in Triplanetary.
• Wall of Text: It seems Talking and Talking and Talking is a free action... It's mentioned that telepathic communication is vastly faster than speech.
• We Didn't Start the Führer: Or the Kaiser, or Nero, or the Tyrant of Asia... Many of history's most famous tyrants were actually Eddorian sleeper agents.
• We Have Reserves: When Patrol marines storm a Boskonian battlecruiser, the defending officers have no reservations about tossing armour-piercing grenades into the melee, which kill almost as many of their own forces as they do of the Patrol attackers.
• Weird World, Weird Food: 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.
• We Will Spend Credits in the Future: Possibly the Trope Codifier. The credit is the base currency of Civilization.
• What Measure Is a Mook?:
  • As the series goes on, we learn much of Boskone is Obliviously Evil and honestly thinks Civilization are the bad guys who'll do horrible things to captured Boskonians (lampshaded in First Lensman, where the surviving Petrinos switch sides upon realizing how badly they've been lied to and used). Kinnison occasionally feels really bad about committing what amounts to mass murder of people who present about as much of a threat to him as an ant does do a boot.
  • Kinnison is deeply disturbed when the bad guys capture and murder some of his crew in a mission gone wrong. His boss Haynes tries to tell him these things happen, and says any man in the Patrol would still give his eyeteeth to ride out with Kinnison, but it doesn't take. Kinnison even tries to "fix" the qualifications of a volunteer Suicide Mission so he's the one who goes, but his friends beat him to the punch and prove they're better qualified. They also remind him his life is worth a lot more than just about anyone else's. This is probably why Kinnison likes working alone whenever he can.
• Worthless Yellow Rocks:
  • Iron, the basis of the Nevians' technology and economy: five pounds is a king's ransom, but to humans it's so common we build our ships' hulls out of it!
  • The "super-atomic motor" in the stories works by converting the total mass of the fuel into energy. "Allotropic Iron" is an artificially produced allotrope that packs a lot of mass into a very dense liquid, and as such, makes a very efficient and easy to handle fuel for their ship's atomic motors.
  • Illona goes around wearing shedloads of credits in jewels, but they're not considered a big deal on her home planet of Lonabar. She's wearing so much jewellery, in fact, they let Kinnison set up a cover identity as a shady jewel dealer.
• Worthy Opponent: Kinnison and Helmuth deeply respect each other's capabilities, which is part of why they try so hard to kill each other. Two books later, Helmuth is still Kinnison's gold standard for a careful and skilled opponent, to the point where the latter expresses honest dismay when he catches Boskone's minions making mistakes that would have never happened on Helmuth's watch.
• Wouldn't Hit a Girl: Kinnison can mow down male thugs left and right without batting a lash, but he never harms a woman, end of discussion. Not even when they try to kill him or when he thinks they're literally waving thionite in his face. This causes him no small headache when he is forced to deal with the genocidally misandric matriarchs of Lyrane II.
• You Are Number 6: In Boskonia proper, the inhabitants have "registry numbers" rather than family names. It's unclear whether this is only true for some of its sub-divisions, or true only for the lower classes; it doesn't seem to apply to the elites.
• Your Princess Is in Another Castle!: Except for the two prequels that he is not in, all of the novels end with Kim thinking that THIS time he's finally obliterated Boskone's leadership for sure... Although in Children... he begins to think that "there IS no top". (Thankfully for Civilization, he's wrong, even if the final layer is above his paygrade.)
• You Have Failed Me: Helmuth loves this trope, mostly because it encourages his minions to be thorough in their work, but he's not above sparing underlings who defy him (Gildersleeve's crew).

The Lensman anime contains the following tropes:

Anime Tropes

• 2D Visuals, 3D Effects: For several spacecraft, a holographic Helmuth communicating to his minions, an illusionary chase sequence, and the Lens. The anime was one of the first uses of CG for the mass market.
• Big Damn Heroes: When the young Lensman Kim and his friend Van Buskirk are attacked by a mass of carnivorous plants on a planet, the boy inadvertently uses the Lens to send out a distress call. Another Lensman responds, saying he's on his way, and dives out of the sky to blast them free. ^note That Lensman was the anime's version of Worsel. The scene was more or less adapted from the Galactic Patrol novel, although Worsel wasn't a Lensman yet in the original story.
• The Cameo: The crowd on planet Radelix in the movie features some rather surprising faces, including discolored cameos from Nezumi Otoko, E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial, a Kemur Man, Alien Metron, and Boba Fett.
• Doomed Hometown: Boskone destroys the peaceful farm world that the anime version of Kimball called home practically as soon as the Lens is on his hand.
• Eldritch Abomination: Helmuth, oddly enough, in the books he's just a blue skinned humanoid with a machine gun. In the anime the whole planet of Boskone is his body.
• Evil Is Visceral: Boskone ships are purple organic-looking blobs, in contrast with the silver geometric shapes of Galactic Patrol ships.
• In Name Only: Let's just say that the anime's plot has more in common with Star Wars than any of the Lensman books. The main, if not the only, elements they kept from the novels were the Lens itself and the names of the characters.
• OEL Manga: The American indie comic publisher Eternity Comics published an adaptation of the anime from 1990 through 1991. According to their comments in collections, the adaptation's writers Paul O'Conner and Tim Eldred deliberately attempted to follow the Broad Strokes of both the anime and the original novels as much as possible in their version.
• Recycled Soundtrack: The Harmony Gold dub used part of the score for the unreleased Robotech II: The Sentinels.
• Robot Buddy: Sol.
• Starfish Aliens: Helmuth and the rest of the Boskone.
• Take Up My Sword: Kim is given his lens by a dying Lensman he finds when he saves the Britannia from crashing. (Of course, Lenses just don't work that way in the original series.^note During an early screening at Worldcon '84, the fans in the audience were horrified and started screaming "No, don't touch it!" until the lens was shown not to be deadly.) The anomaly is immediately lampshaded in the film.^note Receiving his lens from a dying Lensman is identical to how Hal Jordan received his Green Lantern ring from a dying Abin Sur, Green Lantern Corps being widely noted for being an expy of Lensman.
• Tron Lines: Spreading from the Lens on the back of Kim's hand.
• You Have Failed Me: Helmuth has two generals at the beginning, and none at the end due to this.

---