Disposable Lit Reviews

Ballantine Books, 1976
335 pp.
0-345-25111-3
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To most readers of my generation, “Del Rey” isn’t a person; it’s the name of Ballantine’s science fiction publishing arm, and if the name “Lester Del Rey” means anything, it’s as the editor of said line, along with his wife. So it’s worth remembering that Lester Del Rey started as a writer, one of the disciples of John W. Campbell at Astounding Stories along with Isaac Asimov and other luminaries whose names have extended beyond the genre walls.

This collection is doubly interesting because it’s more than a simple collection of Del Rey’s stories; it’s also a chronicle of Del Rey’s pre-professional years, a semi-autobiography, with each story presented in chronological order, with explanatory mini-essays before and after commenting on Del Rey’s life at that time, his whereabouts, the inspiration for the story and the writing of it, and Campbell’s reaction to it (Del Rey submitting almost exclusively to Campbell at that time).

Volume 2 covers 1942 through 1950, which means that World War 2 was all around. Del Rey never did get called up (which may have been explained in Volume 1, which I don’t have), but he did work in aircraft construction, and the wartime fervor invades almost every story. Even though Lester Del Rey had never been an author of “military SF,” there’s no way he could have avoided the cultural gestalt. Thus, “Fifth Freedom” deals with conscientious objectors in a future war (complete with a nuclear strike); “Whom the Gods Love” takes place in the war-torn Pacific; “And the Darkness” deals with the few survivors hundreds of years after radiation has practically sterilized everything below the Arctic Circle; “Shadows of Empire” deals with the politics behind military mobilizations; and “Conditioned Reflex” concerns the seeds of a new society after a full-blown armageddon.

This also includes that short era in which the entire concept of the atomic bomb had been figured out by science fiction writers (so much so that certain issues of science fiction magazines were treated as classified materials on military bases, even though they could be bought on the newsstand), but before it had actually been tested. Nuclear weapons show up in several stories, but like most of the writers of the time, Del Rey drastically underestimated the incredible power and destruction that an exploding A-bomb would actually release.

The stories themselves are fair-to-middling; Del Rey, while a serviceable writer (and better than many of his contemporary contributors), seems like a slightly lesser version of Asimov, probably a result of the same tutoring from John W. Campbell which molded both their styles. On top of that, unlike Asimov, Del Rey never felt “driven” to write, though he went on to make his full-time living at it; in fact, while gainfully employed as the night manager of a diner in New York city, he went almost three years without writing a lick (and without an ounce of the guilt that the oft-repeated dictum “Writers write!” inculcates nowadays).

Plus, this anthology skips some of Del Rey’s most popular stories, they being anthologized in many other places (including “Nerves,” which he later expanded into a novel). On the plus side, we’re also spared the stories which he so quickly lost affection for that no manuscript still exists. But even the stories that are missing are alluded to and described, so that the text as a whole becomes a writing memoir studded with stories like an especially chippy chocolate chip cookie. (And a useful chart at the back shows all stories written in this time period, including where they’ve been anthologized.)

In fact, the tale behind the story’s production is sometimes more entertaining than the story itself. Most notable in this regard is the first story in the collection, “Lunar Landing,” in which a miscommunication between Campbell and Del Rey resulted in Del Rey having roughly twelve hours to think up a 20,000 word story, bang out the whole thing on his “rough draft” manual typewriter, and re-type it on his “fine copy” manual typewriter. (Have I mentioned how grateful I am for word processors?)

It’s not a collection which will satisfy most casual readers, but SF fans tend to be more interested in the history and behind-the-scenes of their chosen genre, and it’s to those aficionados that this volume will most appeal.

A final, timely thought: Del Rey noted the following in his afterward to “Whom the Gods Love,” an unabashedly anti-Japanese story:

It’s hard now to reconstruct the feelings most of us had against the Japanese during the war. I remember realizing that we were being irrational; it would have made far more sense to vent our hatred on the Nazis and their genocidal horrors. But irrational or not, I was caught up in what must have been a hatred based more on color than on deeds.
. . . Given the right provocation, we’re all racist bigots, I fear. And war is always the extreme level of provocation. (pp. 103-104)

Writing this in the latter part of September 2001, with the nation again reeling in shock and anger trying to find a target, I hope I’m not the only one who sees the echoes of the present in this description of the past.

Nathan Shumate