J Michael Straczynski did the best SF TV series ever *, Babylon5. He has now taken on another epic story; he is bringing Lensman to the Big Screen. The brainchild of E.E. “Doc” Smith, Lensman is a huge and complex story, and it couldn’t be in better hands. Besides the many books, part of it has been done as an anime, and of course there are audio book versions available. If you didn’t already know, Lensman is the original Space Opera, inventing the sub-genre. Some claim it was also the very first science fiction series ever written, but with a first story publish date of January 1934, I think Edgar Rice Burroughs’s John Carter of Mars** series beat it to print with the February 1912 story Under the Moons of Mars. Which everyone remembers is also being made into a movie now, right?

*: Possibly now eclipsed by the new Battlestar Galactica, but maybe not: I’m going to re-watch both before I decide. You should do the same.

**: Notice how I avoided the whole science-fiction-vs-fantasy category argument for both book series by pretending it didn’t exist. Which it doesn’t when comparing these two works, since both of them would end up on the same side of the argument as voiced by any given debater; which side they ended up on would depend on who was doing the debating.