Lensmen!

As for who decides where it goes from here, last we heard Ron Howard and Universal were behind the project. JMS confirms that they’re still behind it saying, “We’re looking to do new things with effects, and of course with Ron Howard involved it’s always going to be character-oriented, so we combine what you can do with effects these days with a really strong character story.” Sounds like the film is a lot farther along than it was back then, when they were still trying to secure the rights necessary for making the film. Since JMS has written a script and turned it in, I suspect that means they now have the rights to make it. If they like what he did, this thing may actually move ahead.

If it does move ahead, if this thing actually gets made, we’re talking space opera on a scale not seen in anything since Star Wars. The scope of Lensman is huge. Talking about the size of it all, JMS tells the BabCast, “I think it really does create that world and what’s cool about it is all the character stuff that’s in there now. It’s just the sheer scope and scale of it, which is what the Doc Smith books were always about to me to a large extent; the scale was insane. We found ways to really dramatize that.”

Then he goes on to give us a taste of just what he’s written. Says Straczynski, “Case in point, this is a very small example from the script, take this as being emblematic of the scale of the whole thing: you’ve got these two fleets battling it out, you’ve seen it a hundred times before. But now, within that massive fleet battle you have two ships locked on with gravity (lances?) firing at each other, they’re linked together like scorpions in a bottle tied with a string, by the gravity beams. Inside that, you have the crew of one ship in EVA suits with armor coming out to try and board the other ship. They send their people out to stop them, so we have hand-to-hand combat.” In Smith’s books warriors use very vicious weapons called “space-axes” in hand to hand combat.