Backstage Lensman

Infobox short story
name = Backstage Lensman
author = Randall Garrett
country = United States
language = English
series = Lensman
genre = Science fiction
published_in = Analog Science Fiction and Fact
publication_type = magazine
publisher =
media_type = Print (Paperback)
pub_date = June 1978

Backstage Lensman is short story by Randall Garrett, a parody or pastiche of the Lensman series of E.E. 'Doc' Smith. It was first written in 1949, lost and then rewritten in 1978. To readers of the Lensman books it is highly amusing but much less so to others.

Garrett claimed that "Doc read the first version of Backstage Lensman and laughed all through the convention. It was his suggestion that I call the spaceship "Dentless" rather than "Dauntless"."

Garrett plays on the rather breathless and adjective-heavy prose of Smith -- long strings of adjectives and adverbs, many of them compounded by hyphens, or offering the highest extremes, e.g. inconceivable, completely, irresistible, unimaginably, ultra-, indescribable. "The awesome awfulness of the unimaginable vastness of the intergalactic void", "the depths of degradation, the valleys of vileness, the caverns of corruption" or "beams, rods, cones, stilettos, icepicks, corkscrews, knives, forks, and spoons of energy raved against the screens of the "Dentless"."

There is an almost complete lack of levity, but the long, stern descriptions are given a final twist in an appended sentence. The 'blocky' plotting and the characteristic long background discussions are parodied, as is the unevenly applied physics (Smith often has problems with mass, inertia and gravity).

Character names are rather feebly punned -- Frite of the Meich, Gimble Ginnison, the Starboard Admiral Partisipple, Hess von Baschenvolks, Flatworthy, Woozle, Shadrack, Houston Carbarn, Banlon of Downlo, Banjo Freeko. Personal characteristics are exaggerated -- Ginnison uses phrases like "Jeepers!" and "Gee whiz!"; Shadrack describes himself as "a yellow-bellied, chicken-livered, jelly-gutted coward."

This story appeared in:
* The magazine "Analog", June 1978
* "Takeoff", an anthology edited by Randall Garrett, 1980
* "Shaggy B.E.M. Stories", an anthology edited by Mike Resnick, 1988

Quote

"I got a line through Banjo Freeko, the planetary dictator, but only after I blew up the mining industry on his planet and killed a few thousand innocent people -- regretfully, of course. But I do that all the time. It revolts me, but I do it."