The Best of Lester Del Rey (1978)

 

It's taken me a little while, but Del Rey finally makes it into my own personal top tier, and I take back any disappointed noises I may have made on the grounds that van Vogt has fired off at least a couple of duds, and even Simak managed one. Of Del Rey's novels, most that I've read have been juvies - those being what I tend to find in second hand book stores for some reason - and although they've been good or even great, it's difficult to get the measure of a writer keeping at least some of his schtick reigned in for the sake of a particular audience; and then there's Day of the Giants which is fantastic, and Nerves which isn't. The Best of mostly comprises short stories which first appeared in Astounding, Galaxy, Unknown Worlds and the like, and this seems to be where he really shines.

It may be the ideas, which often pack a genuine punch of astonishment even after a half century of fucking everything having a twist ending; or it could be the telling, which is fresh, and engaging, and didn't seem loaded with reminders of having been written prior to the invention of teenagers - Superstition, for one example, reminded me of Stephen Baxter on more than one occasion. Whatever it may be, Del Rey does it with a lightness of touch that makes it seem easy and compels you to keep reading in much the same way as did Philip K. Dick, where the poetry is shaped in what is described rather than given as description in its own right.

This being said, I encountered a lull around half way through which picked up with the aforementioned Superstition, although this may have been down to me and my daily circumstances rather than to anything Lester wrote. However, focusing on his strengths, he seems at his best when jamming something which shouldn't work into the middle of an otherwise traditional story, then forcing everything else into line. If this sounds familiar, I suspect Superstition's apparent reference to the similarly awkward A.E. van Vogt may not have occurred just in my imagination:

'This story sounds like something from those papers of Aevan's we found. A fine mathematician from before the Collapse, but superstitious like you. He actually believed in mind-reading, clairvoyance, and teleportation!'

The story - some unknown force instantaneously throwing a number of spacecraft across two-hundred thousand light years - actually sounds like the work of A.E. van Vogt, here presumably rendered as A.E. van, then just plain Aevan in case that wasn't obvious; and what follows slaps the reader about the face with the similarly inexplicable whilst simultaneously pondering on religious models of reality with the sort of conviction that Dick managed in a few of his later books. Related themes of theology and morality are revisited in For I Am a Jealous People, The Seat of Judgment and Vengeance is Mine, each of novella length and as such extremely satisfying. I was mostly expecting well-executed tales of robots and rockets, but Lester Del Rey obliges you to consider what you're reading.

This comes just after some online observation made about how he could be a bit of a twat in real life, but the same has been said of Harlan Ellison - one of Del Rey's proteges - so I don't really care.

Day of the Giants

Lester Del Rey Day of the Giants (1959)
Firstly, the flying saucers shown destroying a city with rays of some description on the cover appear nowhere in the novel. Weirdly, I find this sort of inattention to detail on the part of a publisher often serves to indicate that something truly special is to be found behind the wildly misleading painting; and so it is here. I can't say anything I've read by Lester Del Rey ever truly blew my nuts off, but there was always, I felt, a lot of promise, enough so as to suggest there might be a genuine classic hidden somewhere in the back catalogue. It might be this one.

Our story transports an average farmhand and his twin brother to Asgard, realm of the Norse Gods of legend. Ragnarok is approaching and so the Gods are recruiting, and the twin brother has the makings of a hero. Unfortunately our guy was caught up by accident, and being as Asgard doesn't take kindly to non-heroic types, he strives to make himself useful so as to avoid the wrath of his hosts. This he does by teaching them about gunpowder, how to make hand grenades, uranium-235, and other martial innovations which had never occurred to them, Asgard being a stubbornly traditional society. He also undertakes some pruning and restores Yggdrasil, the world tree, to full health; and his advanced weaponry aids in the defeat of the frost giants at the end.

It probably doesn't sound like much, aside from predating Marvel's similarly urbane version of Asgard by a few years, and the story approximately distills Lord of the Rings down to a snappier 128 pages - unassuming rustic type travels far to battle terrible power and so on and so forth; but the telling seals the deal. Where the one about how the chess club loser defeats the thickies, so beloved of Asimov and others, is almost a genre in its own right, Del Rey writes something which almost feels like Simak in its good natured understatement - no lecturing, no speechifying, and Leif Svensen really is just a regular guy, as distinct from the former star of the Charles Atlas adverts created in revenge for some high school wedgie which Isaac the author can neither forgive nor forget. Asgardian magic is explained, or at least accounted for, without any stretching of points or ill-fitting lectures about protons, and most of the book is simply our man titting about in Asgard, making sense of things, and teaching dwarves about firearms. There's no hint of questing, nor of any attempt to get the reader's pulse racing, and it's funny without telling jokes. I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of Loki as amiable and witty, but long-suffering given most of his peers being mainly about the mead and fighting; and by the time he nips back to Earth to bring back cartons of fags for Leif and his twin, I was sold. It's fantasy without the hey nonny no, or science-fiction which remembers that it also has to tell a story, which it does before delivering a lesson about conservatism, tradition, and the importance of taking chances; so it's a great story, well told, and it even has something to say. Wonderful.

I always suspected he had one like this hidden away somewhere.

Nerves

Lester Del Rey Nerves (1942)
This is the novelisation - updated and expanded in 1975 - of a shorter story first published in 1942, but Lester insists it's essentially the same thing so that's what I'm going with. With the passage of time having overtaken the science-fiction element, Nerves was left beached as, I suppose, a medical thriller - not really my sort of thing, but scooped up regardless for reasons described nearly a year ago. It's set in a nuclear power plant, and the title refers to the tension which tends to mount when a nuclear power plant explodes, but also to the synaptic connections of Jorgensen, the man who knows how to stop the nuclear power plant exploding if only they can get him to wake up after the core went meltdown with himself inside.

Having been written in 1942, Nerves imagines those nuclear power plants of the future in the same way that Gernsback imagined us eventually sucking baby food from feed tubes so as to dispense with the grinding hardship of chewing. The power plant of Nerves not only supplies power to a massive community of erm… atomjacks and their families, but also manufactures super-heavy stable isotopes for use in whatever sciencey stuff we'll be doing in the future; and these super-heavy isotopes found somewhere on the periodic table way past plutonium and the others are stable, as I say, so they aren't really radioactive; but even if they were it wouldn't matter because if you're exposed to radiation there are all sorts of treatments available and in certain cases you just have a bit of a rest and you're usually fine. I suppose I should just be happy that no-one develops mysterious super powers.

Science-fiction has generally had a lousy track record in predictive terms, and Nerves is an example of science-fiction getting it really wrong. Science-fiction getting it really wrong can often be massively entertaining, but Nerves focusses on the tension, which doesn't work quite so well as it probably did in 1942, before even the immediate effects of exposure to radiation were fully understood, never mind what happens when one of the fucking things blows up. Furthermore, it attempts to weave tension from too large a cast of fairly generic characters, at least a couple of whom spend time talking about how they'll be able to pipe the waste into the local river and get rid of it that way - and these are good guys saving the day, not Mr. Burns and Smithers.

I assume Nerves was pulled out and given a fresh coat of paint partially in response to just how much the public loved their disaster movies during the seventies, but given how faithful it seemingly remains to the magazine version of 1942, it seems a little like reprinting First Men in the Moon as a Star Wars cash-in.

Moon of Mutiny

Lester Del Rey Moon of Mutiny (1961)
I'm unlikely to ever push expectant mothers into oncoming traffic in order to get at a Del Rey I haven't read, and I didn't really have coherent plans to read any more, but this popped up in a crappy book sale - along with Nerves - and would have been pulped in the absence of a buyer, and somehow I just couldn't let that happen. It's another juvie, as might be surmised from the title and - as with a number of Lester's other juvies - stars a plucky young space cadet who brushes his teeth and doesn't want to disappoint dad - who happens to be a space general or something of the sort. This time it's young Fred Halpern who gets booted from the academy for failing to go by the book, and whose freewheeling ways somehow end up saving the day on the moon. It would be sheer arseache under any other circumstances, but Del Rey's writing is always a pleasure, and so much so that it's fairly easy to forget that you're almost reading Enid Blyton in terms of plot. Moon of Mutiny is hard science-fiction in the Asimov sense, and Del Rey communicates some truly peculiar ideas about rocketry and lunar geology without lecturing or jeopardising his popular touch; and as always, the hokey message you're probably expecting never quite materialises in familiar form, leaving us with a startlingly original rendering of a tale which probably would have been a waste of time with anyone else sat at the typewriter.

The Mysterious Planet

Lester Del Rey The Mysterious Planet (1953)
This is another juvie so I probably shouldn't have sighed quite so hard when the main character turned out to be a plucky teenage lad, all full of spunk 'n' shit, whose dad is some big cheese spaceship captain on Mars. The Mysterious Planet doth tell of how the aforementioned big cheese spaceship captain takes his boy along with him on a mission to investigate the mysterious arrival of a wandering planet in the solar system, because why wouldn't you take your kid along? Our boy forms an uneasy friendship with another lad, one whose big cheese spaceship captain father is considerably richer than everyone else and has thus pulled a few strings to get his slightly thick offspring on board; and some moon or other has been colonised by mostly Hispanic astronauts, so our boy and his wealthy but stupid chum befriend another teenage astronaut.

Bob spent most of the time with Juan Román. The boy seemed to have buried his grief somewhere deep inside himself, and to be resigned to whatever happened. He was strangely serious and naive, with little of the gaiety for which his people were famed.

Should have played him a few bars of La Cucaracha. That would have cheered him up a bit.

Anyway, despite superficial resemblances of plotting to certain details of the Cybermen back story from proper Doctor Who - not least those sleek black ships - the people of the rogue planet, are a lot like us.

Yet Bob was sure now that Thule was more like Earth than its mere outward appearance. There was less difference between the race of Thule and the original inhabitants of Earth than there had been between various Earth cultures in the past.

I think this just means that they aren't Communists or something. Anyway, Thule needs a sun of its own, and Earth's orbit looks mighty fine, and any questions raised by so ludicrous a premise are answered with surprising conviction. They all sort it out in the end, although I don't remember how. Del Rey writes well, clearly and at a reasonable pace, with enough style to allow one to suspend disbelief regarding both wacky science and the cornier elements of the tale; but ultimately there just wasn't 180 pages worth of story here, so it sags in places. Never mind.

Selections from The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology

John W. Campbell (editor)
Selections from The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology (1956)
Isaac Asimov said of John W. Campbell, editor of Astounding Science Fiction, that the man was the most powerful force in science fiction ever, and for the first ten years of his editorship he dominated the field completely. By agency of his magazine, Campbell was first to publish many of the greats - Asimov himself, Heinlein, Lester del Rey, Theodore Sturgeon, and of course the mighty A.E. van Vogt. It's therefore probably inevitable that the stock of his name has lost some of its currency in recent years, just as has that of Hugo Gernsback, arguably Campbell's spiritual forebear in the field. Campbell popularised a very specific strain of science-fiction - two-fisted, deeply conservative men having space adventures whilst reeling off lists of scientific statistics, the sort of thing which led to Star Wars, Alien, and the rest. I can't be arsed to dig out my copy of Brian Aldiss's Trillion Year Spree, but I expect he will have said something along those lines; and assuming he did, he will have had a point.

Campbell was unfortunately of his time in the sense of Oswald Mosley and senator Joseph McCarthy being of their time, with all kinds of unsavoury views regarding race, socialism, and the institution of slavery, as Michael Moorcock reported in an editorial piece entitled Starship Stormtroopers, essentially a brief history of authoritarian currents in science-fiction literature:

He also, when faced with the Watts riots of the mid-sixties, seriously proposed and went on to proposing that there were 'natural' slaves who were unhappy if freed. I sat on a panel with him in 1965, as he pointed out that the worker bee when unable to work dies of misery, that the moujiks when freed went to their masters and begged to be enslaved again, that the ideals of the anti-slavers who fought in the Civil War were merely expressions of self-interest and that the blacks were 'against' emancipation, which was fundamentally why they were indulging in 'leaderless' riots in the suburbs of Los Angeles.

The more I know about Campbell, the less I like, and yet I'd nevertheless rather not see him chucked down the same oubliette as Gernsback. Whilst I agree that his talent and reputation may be historically overplayed, and that as a person he sounds absolutely ghastly - as I'm sure Sir Kenneth Clark would agree - for better or worse, his influence upon the genre is undeniable, and his legacy is not entirely lacking in redeeming qualities. Just like Gernsback, Campbell's vision was arse, but it was populist, bestselling arse, and providing you keep in mind that it was arse, there's nevertheless some pleasure to be gained.

The Astounding Science Fiction Anthology came out in 1952 as a mammoth hardback assemblage of twenty-two short stories by what were then the biggest names. I gather it was one of the first anthologies of its kind, and as such left an indelible stamp on the genre as a whole. This collection is one of several paperbacks reprinting just eight of those stories, because paperback technology of the time was supposedly not quite up to reprinting the whole thing; and I picked it up, still buzzing from reading a Murray Leinster collection and hoping to keep the magic going.

Leinster's fiction very much ticked all of the Campbell boxes, but as with A.E. van Vogt, I nevertheless find the atmosphere and peculiar narrative twists compelling and often so odd as to actively undermine the square-jawed subtext; which isn't to say that they're anything deep, just immensely enjoyable. That said, I've noticed a peculiar quality of Leinster's view of the alien entirely in keeping with what Moorcock regards as the authoritarian tendencies of Campbell's lads. First Contact is a variation on The Aliens from the collection of the same name, in which humans encounter extraterrestrials in deep space. Whilst the encounters are not overtly fraught with hostility, they seem informed by the paranoid cold war politics of the time, and bizarrely so. Both tales spin upon the supposed inevitability of alien species who really want to be able to trust each other but somehow know this to be impossible, and so they must destroy each other.

Well duh.

It makes for odd reading in 2016, but it helps that Leinster reaches an amicable conclusion, in part revealing the folly of xenophobia; which makes a pleasant change from the alien as foul bug-eyed Communist and, I suppose, might even get its message to those needing it with greater efficacy than would a more overtly liberal tale. Although that said, The Aliens seems particularly weird for having an out and out declared xenophobe on the crew of its ship, and one stated as having been chosen specifically so as to provide a variant perspective to that of the ship's more reasonable captain - all seeming very pertinent right now, of course...

Ugh... yeah - getting back to this book, the first story is Asimov's Nightfall which I read in 2008 and thought was amazing. Almost everyone I know who has read Asimov, read and enjoyed his work as teenagers then later came to regard his writing as big on ideas but otherwise piss poor and very much overrated. I didn't actually read anything by him until 2008, by which point I would have been in my forties, and I thought he was fucking terrible, particularly those Susan Calvin stories; until someone pointed me in the general direction of the good stuff, or what seemed to be the good stuff, and thus was my opinion revised, or at least modified. Yet reading Nightfall now, it too seems horribly clunky - an admittedly nice big idea somewhat lost beneath thirty pages of dreary conversation amounting to a couple of one-dimensional characters describing the story to us.

Protons, you say? So what kind of properties might one of those have?

Anyway, I picked this from the shelf thinking I could hardly go wrong given the names on the cover, but ultimately, aside from a half decent Leinster, an averagely pleasant - and conspicuously well written Simak - and A.E. van Vogt's eye-wateringly peculiar Vault of the Beast, it's all a little underwhelming. Possibly excepting the slog of Nightfall, there's nothing terrible here, but it fails to live up to the promise of Paul Lehr's wonderful cover painting, and dammit - this collection really should have been better.

Outpost of Jupiter

Lester Del Rey Outpost of Jupiter (1963)
Lester Del Rey isn't an author whose work I'd actively seek out, but I don't like to see his books sat on the clearance shelf waiting to be pulped, so that's how I came by this one. It's the third I've read by him, and another juvie aimed squarely at teenagers - as distinct from the raging maturity of all those books Isaac Asimov wrote for fully grown men who'd done it with a lady and everything. Anyway, my last two Del Rey juvies were fairly decent so here I am again.

Del Rey doesn't talk down, but peppers his narrative with all the edumacational stuff about mathematics, thrust ratios, and the challenges of terraforming - just like Isaac - with concessions made to the age of his target audience through it being the story of a fifteen-year old kid who goes into space with his dad and has realistic adventures. Del Rey grew up on a farm in Minnesota in the twenties and you can sort of tell.

Mrs. McCarthy was a short, plump woman with a red face and a beaming smile. She dried her hands on her apron and greeted Bob warmly. Her voice was soft and seemed filled with the sheer joy of living and cooking and watching her family eat. 'Sit down,' she told them. 'You must be starved after all those space rations. Bob, you sit right there. And Penny, you let him alone, you hear?'

In many ways it reads as though someone has novelised the art of Chesley Bonestell, which would be great but for the fact that Outpost of Jupiter reads at least a little like it was Hank Hill doing the novelising, I tell you what. It's not that it's dull, but given the narrative occurring on one of Jupiter's moons and encompassing contact with an alien race, a little bit of wonder wouldn't have been out of place amongst all the discussions of Bob's immune system and space horticulture.

Likeable but surprisingly dry.

Lost in Space

George O. Smith Lost in Space (1960)
Sorry - Will Robinson isn't in any danger here. It's no relation, despite the title. This is another that found its way onto my shelves by virtue of being an Ace Double and therefore Siamese twin to something I wanted to read. Here's the lowdown from the inside front cover:

Commodore Ted Wilson's intuition told him right! He should never have let his fianceé, Alice Hemingway, take off on Space Liner 79—the flight that fate had singled out to change the destiny of the galaxy!

Once out in deep space the ship's engines failed and Alice found herself stranded in a tiny lifeship with two amorous men. Besides this, there was no way for Wilson to find them except by combing the light-years of all space for tiny craft.

'I'm guessing that probably wasn't written by a woman,' my wife observed as I read it out loud to her, and of course she's right. I don't know much about George O. Smith beyond that he wasn't a woman, had quite a lot of stuff published in Astounding Science Fiction, and was a member of a men-only literary banqueting club alongside Isaac Asimov and Lester del Rey, according to Wikipedia. Additionally, I'm inclined to wonder whether he may have served in either the army, navy or air force. This I deduce from the slightly stilted social interaction of his jet-setting characters, even if a few of them may occasionally have the top button undone with the cap set at a jaunty angle.

Lost in Space reads like a poor cousin to Asimov, although Isaac could usually pull it off with a little more style than this - or at least leave readers feeling as though they've learnt something. Wooden characters go through the motions, and Alice Hemingway keeps her hand securely on her ha'penny whilst marooned in the void with her randy boss and a vaguely dashing spaceliner pilot. The creakier material of this sort alternates with unexpected flourishes of hard science, or possibly firm but slightly pliable science given that all the discussion of particles and infrawaves feel sciency rather than actually informative, and I wouldn't swear that any of it is genuinely based on anything. There's a fairly enjoyable paragraph about the infinite mass achieved at speeds faster than light warping space, but I've a feeling Smith was just making it up. He just isn't the communicator that Asimov was.

While Alice concentrates on not being entered by her fellow castaways, Commodore Ted Wilson discusses search vectors, and the whole thing is observed from afar by a warlike alien space fleet. This is the first time they've encountered humans, and debate rages as to whether they should kill, eat, enslave, or buddy up to their new cosmic neighbours. What's disconcerting is that the debate rages more or less like a bunch of pipe-smoking advertising executives hanging around in a bar, necessitating one of Smith's slightly peculiar asides to explain how he's translated the conversation into terms we readers will understand, because obviously they wouldn't be speaking English, and when using expressions such as top dog or cool cat, the animals to which they refer are simply the closest alien equivalents to those with which we are familiar. No less disconcerting are the fairly frequent references to ancient history. Those future people sure spend a lot of time thinking about how much everything has changed since the fifties.

She decided to drop the discussion as pointless, so headed for the bathroom. A hot shower and a quick tubbing of her underclothing were on her mind. Her garments, of course, would dry instantly. She had to smile a little. To think that a hundred years ago women thought something they called nylon was wonderful because it was fairly quick-drying! Not instantaneous, of course, as was the material of which her lingerie was made.

Yes. Just imagine.

Lost in Space is fairly readable, for all that it accidentally punches itself in the face about once every five pages, and Smith patently wasn't without talent so much as an inability to recognise his own strengths and write to them accordingly; but all the same, I'm glad it wasn't any longer.

Step to the Stars

Lester del Rey Step to the Stars (1954)
I suspect Step to the Stars was written for a juvenile audience; either that or Lester del Rey avoided making too many assumptions about the reading age of his fans. This is not, by the way, either a criticism, faint praise, or necessarily a concern which should inhibit anyone's enjoyment of this book.

Step to the Stars adopted a hard science-fiction approach to describing the construction of the world's first space station back when such ambitious ideas still seemed fresh and practical. Nothing described here was beyond the limits of 1950s technology, although much of the space program proved more difficult and considerably more expensive than del Rey envisioned. For something written during an era of bug-eyed monsters, Step to the Stars is surprisingly restrained and, crucially, perhaps a little more accessible than the likes of Asimov or Heinlein, keeping its physics within the limits of stuff that was probably taught in the average high school science class - centrifugal force, escape velocity, gravity and so on. Most peculiar of all, its subject is essentially a building site in space with astronauts floating around wondering what to do, having the foreman mumble that Hank could use a hand over by the solar panels and so on; and its central character is a promising young engineer called Jim whose talent is recognised when he makes a good job of fixing some important space guy's car. It's implausible in view of what we've learned since, but it's difficult to dislike such an amiable narrative.

Most impressive of all is the time spent proselytising for the good sense of America putting the first orbital station into space so as to leap ahead in the arm's race. As an argument it's absolutely convincing regardless of personal opinion, suggesting the author had a genuine fear of the eastern block and all that other stuff that terrified Americans in the 1950s; yet not once souring the tone with any obvious McCarthyite tendencies. So it's all the more effective when del Rey explains, quite unexpected, that the people of Communist countries are human too, and maybe having great big fuck-off sized missiles pointing at them isn't such a great idea, and perhaps we all need to do some growing up before we take all our political baggage beyond the Earth's atmosphere.

For a kid's book, or at least something that reads like a kid's book, and for a narrative spelt out in primary colours, Step to the Stars carries a surprisingly sophisticated message which remains as relevant now as I'm sure it seemed then. If more children's authors could strike such a fine balance between keeping it breezy without any dumbing down or reducing complex arguments to homilies, maybe we'd have a slightly more literate society.