“This Story is Dated.”

I recently had the opportunity to finally pick up and read a classic of science fiction, E.E. “Doc” Smith’s Triplanetary.  I’d had the paperback sitting on my shelf for quite some time, but had only in the last couple of months gotten around to reading it.  I was a little confused at first, since none of the stuff about the Arisians or the Eddorians that was on the back cover was in the book.  It turns out that Cosmos Books had only printed the original 1934 serial version of Triplanetary, from before Smith rewrote it to fit in with the Lensman series in 1947. Instead of the actual Lensman version of Triplanetary, that the cover advertised, these folks printed the original, and packaged it along with another story, “Masters of Space,” that Smith had serialized with E. Everett Evans in 1961 and 1962.  Not knowing anything about the story, and being unsure if it was supposed to be part of the Lensman series or not, I went looking around the internet to find out about it.