First Lensman

First Lensman is a space opera novel by the American writer Edward E. Smith, first published in 1950 by Fantasy Press in an edition of 5995 copies. It picks up more or less where Triplanetary left off.

The story follows Virgil Samms, the first being in this cosmos to wear a Lens of Civilization, a badge of authority that is a form of pseudo-life and that grants its wearer telepathic powers. Samms is chosen because the Arisians know him to be incorruptible, and his ambition is to found an organisation able to defend civilisation against the forces that would dismantle it. What he needs first is a mark that members of that organisation can be identified by, and no counterfeit of it should be possible. A trusted subordinate leads him to Arisia, a planet nobody approaches, where a benevolent Arisian greets him and presents him with the Lens. The rest of the book covers the work of building the Galactic Patrol around it, and the opposition that work attracts at home and in deep space.

Smith's Lensman sequence is one of the founding space operas of the genre, written for the pulp magazines of the 1930s and 1940s and later reworked into a connected series of books. In terms of internal chronology First Lensman is the second novel of the series, and by the order in which Smith actually wrote them it is the sixth or the fifth.