E.E. Smith

Rangers, but yeah - that's one of my favorites. I've never read the Garrett - if it's anything like the Harrison, I'll have to look into that.
 
The thing I find hardest about them is the sheer gung-ho relentless unashamed vigilantism of the Lensmen. Judge jury and executioners - no mention of the process of law anywhere. People killed, entire city block razed, whole planets destroyed (sometimes by whacking other planets into them) because someone on them has a name with too many harsh consonants and incompetently deals a bit of smack. To extend J-Sun's point Kimbal and all the rest are Elliot Ness and the Gangbusting G-men writ
Absolutely
Nonetheless, I'd still like to know where the Lensmen got the money!
I may be remembering this all wrong, but didn't one of the first 2 books (Triplanetary of First Lensman) trace the family lines of the Kinissons and whatever Mrs Kinnisons' family was called all the way back to Atlantis, and imply that their goodness and intelligence meant that they'd been building the family fortune all that time?

As for the idea that good planets were basically completely good and bad planets were completely bad came from where they originated from.
As I recall the galaxy was actually two galaxies which had collided. One being inhabited by the Arisians and their offspring (humanoids) or species influenced by them, and the other by whatever the supreme baddies (XXXX?) were called, and those trained to be evil by them.
Some planets, where creatures had evolved without either ones influence were ripe for the picking of either group, but that's where the polarisation of goodness comes from.

Of course the evil ones had attempted to infiltrate the Arisian based planets, which accounted for communism and any other anti-American trait. (Also Ghengis Khan and Caligula, if memory serves.) The idea currently being regurgitated by Marvel or DC comics that Atlantis was a society built purely on the perfect ideas of Arisia was also proposed in Triplanetary if I recall. An agent of XXXX managed to get it swallowed by the sea, of course.

This is all from my certainly poor memory of the series from reading it 40 or 50 years ago. So feel free to shoot me down in flames, with a Kinisson type kangaroo justice.
 

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