I Read Books: Second Stage Lensman

I do like this cover

Second Stage Lensman kicks off just where Grey Lensman finishes; Kinnison is walking off into the sunset with Clarissa MacDougall and they’re going to get married. Like a complete arse Mentor of Arisia interrupts them and tells Kinnison to think. He does and realises that because he lives in a universe designed for MAXIMUM SPACE OPERA he needs to do something first.

Turns out he hasn’t defeated and destroyed Boskone and their next obvious step is to attack Tellus, the somewhat idiosyncratic series name for Earth. There’s a big fight and the good guys win. The enemy fleet destroyed, Kinnison then tries to track the bad guys through drugs and crime. He follows a lead which eventually takes him to Lyrane II, a planet inhabited solely by women. Logical, passionless women with no taste for beauty and a hatred for strangers, especially males (on this planet about one in a hundred births,  are 30 inches tall, grow up in maletoriums until they reach about 20 when they mate a hundred times then are killed when they threaten to go crazy and fight everything. It's probably not a piece of social comment).

There he finds the only survivor of the zwilniks (drug smugglers) is Ilona of Lonabar, an exotic dancer who wears lots of jewels. (The women of Lyrane killed the men). Kinnison goes telepathically en rapport with uncounted lensmen to identify the jewels and their origin, coming into contact finally with the fourth Second Stage Lensman, Nadreck of Palain VII, a four dimensional frigid world monster indescribable to warm blooded oxygen breathers. After this Kinnison goes undercover as a jeweller turned fence; MacDougall goes to Lyrane to try and figure out why the bad guys are interested.

The bad guys having learned from the events in the previous two books have been hiding themselves by erasing their existence from the memories of their underlings. Nevertheless Kinnison uncovers the existence of the Eich (returning from Grey Lensman) on Lyrane VIII and more Overlords of Delgon (returning from both Grey Lensman AND Galactic Patrol) on Lyrane II. They destroy the Overlords and Nadreck uses a thought screen drill to spy on the Eich, giving them a clue to the enemy headquarters in the Second Galaxy.

They launch an attack on the Second Galaxy, defeat the enemy fleet and find an uncontacted planet called Klovia that they take control of and turn into a fortress. This, of course, is a distraction from the actual plan, which has Kinnison go undercover on the Boskone headquarters planet of Thrale while Nadreck goes to its frozen counterpart Onlo. Kinnison takes the place of one Traska Gennel, a second lieutenant in the royal guard and makes his way up the hierarchy to become Tyrant of Thrale. There he plots the destruction of Klovia while enduring the suspicion of Prime Minister Fossten, the power behind the throne.

The final battle begins, Fossten and Kinnison have a mental duel that Kinnison wins discovering that Fossten is a giant brain, like the Arisians. Mentor misleads Kinnison, claiming that there was an insane Arisian that they thought was dead and perhaps that's who this is*. The Boskonian fleet defeated by the Patrol, he returns to Thrale and begins the long task of turning it into a civilised planet. In the meantime Nadreck has tried to get all the Onlonians to turn on each other and very nearly succeeded but is mortified to have to admit that three of them held out and he had to kill them in person. Having finally defeated the bad guys Kinnison retires into the role of co-ordinator of the Second Galaxy and marries MacDougall.

Read This: If you’ve read the previous ones and want even more twists and turns, some of which are pretty good. In addition the book makes a turn away from the "Boskone vs Civilisation: no quarter!" of previous novels as the Patrol avoids mass genocide by occupying and converting the enemy. It's possible that this is a reaction to world events during the period it was written.
Don’t Read This: If weird ideas about a planet of women aren’t your thing; also if space battles of various sizes from single ship to gigantic don't do anything for you; or if increasingly bizarre undercover roles leave you cold.
A Personally Gratifying Development: Is that the classic nature (classicness? classicity?) of the lensman novels has been confirmed recently as Second Stage Lensman has been nominated for a Retro-Hugo, an award for years in which the Hugo awards were not awarded. Confused? This part of the Wikipedia article may help.

Crossposted on GoodReads.

My reviews of the earlier novels in the series:

Triplanetary
First Lensman
Galactic Patrol
Grey Lensman

* Actually Gharlane of Eddor, the second in command of the Eddorians.