Second Stage Lensmen

I love the lensman books. Love love love them. And I extra- special loved Second Stage Lensmen (1953), the fifth book in the series.

This book starts one second after the last book leaves off, with our hero Kim Kinnison and his lovely lady-friend, the brave and smart and beautiful Clarissa MacDougal basking in the glow of finally deciding to get married. Since Kim just saved the universe, it shouldn't be a problem, right?

Wrong.

Kim gets a mind-beam from his Mentor on Arisia telling him to think a little harder about his plan to get all the bad guys. It turns out they go much higher up than Kim had originally thought, and if he were to abandon his post and get married now, they would most certainly attack and destroy the earth.

So: Kim gets back to business. Clues first lead him to an Earth-like planet in an unexplored section of the universe. He gets ready to make a landing when he realizes that the entire planet is filled with women -- tall, beautiful, strong women, who don't wear any clothes, measure everything by its efficiency, have bred their men into a short animalistic subspecies that they use only for breeding, and have really bad haircuts:

But she wore no jewelry, no bracelets, no ribbons; no decoration of any sort of kind. No paint, no powder, no touch of perfume. Her heavy, bushy eyebrows had never been plucked or clipped. Some of her teeth had been expertly filled, and she had a two-tooth bridge that would have done credit to any Tellurian dentist -- but her hair! It, too, was painfully clean, as was the white scalp beneath it, but aesthetically it was a mess. Some of it reached almost to her shoulders, but it was very evident that whenever a lock grew long enough to be a bother, she was wont to grab it and hew it off, as close to the skull as possible with whatever knife, shears, or other implement came readiest to hand.

[This reminds me that I need a haircut.]

In order to obtain information about how this key planet fit into the schemes of the bad guys, Clarissa is made into the very first female Lensman. So at least the two of them can lens each other and have telepathic conversations across the depths of space, even if they can't get married....

All kinds of exciting things happen, and eventually Kim decides to go undercover and infiltrate the upper levels of the Boskonian bad-guy leadership. To do this he takes on the identity of a soldier that matches his body type. After some painstaking work to change the archival record (which is later tested for forgery by the head of the bad guys), plus some magic mind work on anyone who ever knew the ex-soldier, Kim takes his place, rises through the ranks, and does just about as well as you might expect the hero of a space opera to do.