For fun, I've been re-reading E.E. "Doc" Smith's "Skylark" novels for the first time in (lessee) some forty-nine years: They do creak a lot, but they retain a certain almost plausible science fiction charm. Hardest to suspend disbelief in is the cavalier treatment of Einsteinean realtivity: However you do it, you can't, by any theoretical means of propulsion, go several thousand light years out into the universe, and then come back, and find things only a couple of years older than when you left. I'd like to believe you could, but I can't. Also, 'tis all too plain that "Doc" Smith in 1928, knew virtually nothing of the universe that we have discovered in the 79 years since: Compare his "dead stars" with the black holes we all know about nowadays.