"E. E. Doc Smith - Lensman 8 - The Dragon Lensman" - читать интересную книгу автора (Smith E. E. Doc)

written an exciting, first rate science fiction novel, fully able to stand on
its own merits.

Were he able to read it, Doc, I'm sure, would be pleased. In The Dragon
Lensman,
through David A. Kyle, E. E. "Doc" Smith has returned to literary life!
 Lloyd Arthur Eshbach Myerstown, Pennsylvania March 1979

_ Foreword

For all those of you who have previously read E. E. "Doc" Smith's accounts of
the
Galactic Patrol and the Arisian-Eddorian conflict, most of this Foreword is
redundant.
You are hereby waved on to the last three paragraphs beginning with "The
chronicler . .
." For those of you who are newcomers, or whose memories have clouded with the
years, a few words of background are certainly desirable.

Billions of years ago Mankind began to evolve on a small planet of the star
Sol. Billions of
years before that, Tellus, also known as Earth, had been created in the time
of the great
Coalescence. And billions of years before that event, our Milky Way galaxy,
also known
as the First Galaxy, was inhospitable to life, almost barren of planets and
virtually
deserted.

The life-spores of Man existed before all these things, incredibly far back
for uncountable
eons. The ancestral source was the race of the Arisians from the beginning of
Time,
Visualizers of the Cosmic All, future guardians of Civilization.

Fully as ancient, nearly equal in macrocosmic mind power, and as evil as the
Arisians
were good, were the Eddorians of the Second Galaxy. Whereas the Arisians were
of our
own space-time continuum, the Eddorians were not, coming on their wandering
planet to
the Second Galaxy from a different, horribly alien plenum. They were dedicated
to a
continuing search for more worlds to sate their lust for dominance. Their
ambition was at
last to be glutted by the Coalescence. In that cataclysmic event their
enslaved star island
passed, end to end, through our own galaxy. The stupendous interstellar forces
which
were unleashed thus created billions of new worlds. The inevitable conflict