The Skylark of Space

[ffutures]

If anyone's been thinking about a retro SF game and looking for inspiration, I heard recently that Project Gutenberg is about to add the first two or three books of E.E. "Doc" Smith's "Skylark Of Space" series, which presumably means they're out of US copyright - unfortuately Euro copyright law works differently, or I'd definitely be interested in using them as source material for an RPG. But an American publisher might not have that problem.

Obviously you'd need to check the legal situation carefully, but they've got FTL, antigravity, mysterious explosive elements, all sorts of death rays and gratuitous violence a-plenty. Well worth a look.

Comments

[draconin.livejournal.com]

You're right, I probably shouldn't include that one as "his" but the ghost writer Stephen --?-- really did an excellent job. He captured E.E.(Doc)'s style quite well. I keep the series on the shelf with all of the others and don't have any problem with that.

PS. All this started me reading the Skylark series again! I'm just passing the halfway point on the fourth one as I write. You're right, the succession of threat/resolution, higher-level threat/resolution etc would probably lend itself very well to the creation of a game.