Back in graduate school, I used to enjoy tormenting a friend (who’s grown up to be Professor Alan Filewod of the University of Guelph) by opening any of the dozens of science fiction and fantasy paperbacks that littered his rooms at Massey College, reading random passages aloud and mocking their style and contents with the snotnosed superiority that is every grad student’s birthright. Robert Howard, H. Beam Piper, even Edgar Rice Burroughs himself (though not the Barsoom books) all fell before the scythe of my disdain. Filewod, though, is not one to take assaults on imaginative literature lightly and he prepared a trap: a volume of E.E. “Doc” Smith with the page quoted below bookmarked so that I’d be sure to open to it. My mockery ceased that day.
In view of the contents of the quotation, it might be worth noting that Smith worked for a time in Homer Simpson’s dream field, pastry science.
The eye faded out, its sharp outlines blurring gradually as its highly specialized parts became transformed into or were replaced by the formless gel composing the body of the creature. The amoebus then poured himself out of the cup, assumed the shape of a doughnut, and rolled rapidly out of the room.
E.E. “Doc” Smith, Skylark of Valeron
Here’s Burl Ives, whom I still think of as O.K. Crackerby, singing a song that’s mentioned more than once in Ken Kesey’s Sometimes A Great Notion:
