Early Del Rey by Lester Del Rey (book review)
‘The Early Del Rey’ is another big book in Doubleday’s series of collections by Golden Age Science Fiction writers of their first works, with autobiographical notes in between the stories. Isaac Asimov, Frank Belknap Long, Jack Williamson and Fred Pohl did it. Here is Lester Del Rey’s version.
Del Rey is not a compulsive writer and began his career almost by accident. A compulsive reader, he kept up with all the Science Fiction magazines and one day threw one to the floor in disgust at the low quality of a story. His girlfriend challenged him to write a better one and he discovered a lucrative side hustle, as we would call it nowadays.
‘The Faithful’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, April 1938), written for the challenge, has first-person narration by Hungor Beowulf XIV, one of many dogs bred for intelligence who can also talk. Humanity has almost killed itself off and the dogs are just about surviving but the lack of hands makes it difficult and they miss humans. This is a bit silly but not bad for a first story and John Campbell, editor of ‘Astounding’, accepted it with a cheque for $40, launching a career. Del Rey admits that he wasn’t coming to writing stone cold because he’d read many magazines, including ‘Writer’s Digest’, and had written fan letters, too. Campbell might have recognised his name, which didn’t hurt.
His next couple of stories were rejected, so he gave up, not too bothered. Campbell wrote asking for more and he sent in ‘Helen O’Loy’, a classic robot story often reprinted. Back on track, he decided to try another market but, in general, he stuck with Campbell through the 1940s. ‘Cross Of Fire’ (‘Weird Tales’, April 1939) is about a man who has forgotten he’s a vampire and can’t figure out why everyone behaves so oddly around him. It’s well handled but nothing exceptional.
‘Anything’ (‘Unknown’, October 1939) is a jaded look at small-town America narrated in the first person by Luke Short, editor of the local paper. A man in a brown suit turns up looking for work and will do anything just for some bread and milk. He seems to be brilliant at everything. This disrupts the local economy.
‘Habit’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, November 1939) is about a rocket race from Mars to Jupiter and back with big prize money. It’s entertaining but, in the notes, Del Rey regrets the inaccuracy of his ballistics, one giant error that made the story impossible. Non-scientists wouldn’t care then or later. In much of Science Fiction, ships zoom all over the galaxy with little plausibility, but a few craftsmen did prefer to get it right. Heinlein once spent days calculating a rocket manoeuvre for one of his juvenile novels.
‘The Smallest God’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, January 1940) is more fantasy than Science Fiction if you ask me. Dr. Arlington Brugh has a little rubber figure of the god Hermes on his desk as a lucky mascot. One day, he fills it with radioactive potassium chloride to stop it from being knocked over so easily and it comes to life. Telepathic contact with a nearby cat and dog helps it make sense of the world and the subsequent adventures of Hermes are well-handled, even if the premise is a bit daft.
‘The Stars Look Down’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, August 1940) is a very American story of rugged individualism, entrepreneurship and criminality in service of a great vision. Erin Morse and Gregory Stewart are rivals who both dream of taking humankind into space. Erin is a nice guy who inherited a fortune and spends it on the project. Gregory is from the wrong side of the tracks but made a fortune in munitions, now controls many key industries and is not afraid to use gunmen to get his way. He’s also disgruntled because the woman he loved married Erin, then died giving birth to a son. The rivalry reminded me somewhat of Robert Silverberg’s ‘To Live Again’, but I found Erin’s continued friendship with Stewart unrealistic, given the villain’s actions.
‘Doubled In Brass’ (‘Unknown’, January 1940) is a sequel to ‘Coppersmith’, a story not in this book, about Ellowan Coppersmith, a metalworking elf who mingles with humans. Here, he gets mixed up in a young romance, making sure a girl chooses the right boy. Girls like a bad boy, they tell me.
‘Reincarnate’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, April 1940) has Thorne Boyd assisting old physicist Allan Moss in building a nuclear power generator for financier John Abbott. Boyd is all set to marry Abbott’s daughter, Joan, when a terrible accident leaves him in a robot body. That’s a bit of a spoiler. The difficulties of relationships with other humans when you’re made of heavy metal are superbly handled because Del Rey is good at characters. In the afterword, he dismisses the ending as corny. I thought it was rather sweet.
‘Carillion Of Skulls’ (‘Unknown’, February 1941) is a spooky horror story set in an abandoned park that used to have a theatre and amusements. Four bodies have been found on Saturday mornings with their heads removed. The culprit might be a nisse, but the protagonist is a woman named Ann Muller who keeps losing her memory. I found it all rather obscure.
‘Done Without Eagles’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, August 1940) concerns a passenger trip to Mars on the Kickapoo in which Captain Lee Rogers is subject to inspection and general bothering by the previous heroic captain, Court Perry, and his four-armed super-genius mutant son. A solid story about men at work.
‘My Name Is Legion’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, June 1942) is a thinly disguised story of Hitler trying to sneak away as Germany crumbled at the end of the war and being ‘helped’ by a genius scientist with an incredible device that can make multiple duplicates of the Leader. There’s a catch. A clever gimmick. Del Rey says he wanted to resist the idea that men like Hitler are depraved or clowns or fools. No. They are simply driven by the lust for power. Still relevant today but the readers at the time, perhaps caught up in war fever, didn’t take to it much.
‘Though Poppies Grow’ (‘Unknown Worlds’, August 1942) is a fantasy about a soldier from World War One somehow coming back to life in Washington in 1942 and wondering why. It was okay and of its time.
‘Lunar Landing’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, October 1942) starts with a realistic depiction of a trip to the moon. Pilot Nemo Grey is four feet ten and weighs eighty pounds and was found on a riverbank with complete amnesia a few years ago. The Moth is on a rescue mission because the previous rocket to the Moon has crash-landed. The plot develops nicely and the characters are well-realised, but it gets a bit silly by the end. Not silly for the time, probably, but from a modern point of view. Good fun, though.
‘Fifth Freedom’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, May 1943) is about the freedom to be a conscientious objector when the rest of the population goes to war. Tommy Dorn, a Conchy, is shunned by most men at workcamp 2013-E, but the new arrival, Jimmy Lake, respects his choice. Jimmy can’t serve because of polio. Then Tommy meets a pretty lady from the women’s work camp next door. Other events conspire to change his mind. The war fever that gripped America was pretty over-whelming and Del Rey admits he was caught up in it, even though he tried to keep a cool, rational outlook.
‘Whom The Gods Love’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, June 1943) features an American pilot who gains super-powers when a bullet lodges in his brain. He can tune in to cosmic forces and manipulate them. Psychic powers were all the rage at the time.
‘Though Dreamers Die’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, February 1944) is a prequel to ‘Robots’ Return’ by Robert Moore Williams, which appeared in the September 1938 ‘Astounding Science Fiction’. Del Rey became friends with Williams, loved the story and had an idea for what came before it. A colonisation ship leaves Earth for the stars with a crew of robots and things don’t turn out as planned. A good yarn. Williams, we are told, wrote mostly for ‘Amazing Stories’ because it was easier to turn out routine stories for them than try to meet Campbell’s high standards. Quite sensible, really.
‘Fool’s Errand’ (‘Science Fiction Quarterly’, November 1951) is a time travel story in which a man goes back to see Nostradamus. This took a while to sell.
‘The One-Eyed Man’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, May 1945) has two eyes. The title is a reference to a story by H.G. Wells, which is made by Aaron Bard, the great inventor and father of the Dictator to his grandson Jimmy. The story involves Psychicompellors, which give a boy an entire education at the age of twelve. Before that, they are allowed to be children. Afterwards, if their brains take it all in, they are adults. If not, they are so-called zombies, all will gone but obedient slaves. A story of family, freedom and treachery.
‘And The Darkness’ (‘Out of This World Adventures’, July 1950) is a post-holocaust story with mutant survivors desperately hoping to preserve the human race, even though there are only eleven left. Hope comes from an unexpected source. The moral is don’t give up.
‘Shadows Of Empire’ (‘Future’ combined with ‘Science Fiction Stories’, July-August 1950) is about Earth forces withdrawing from the Mars colony. I’m not sure what it meant. Campbell rejected it for being too moody, so Del Rey wrote a straight action story, ‘Unreasonable Facsimile’ (‘Future Science Fiction’, July 1952) about an android smuggled in to replace a Martian Councillor in a crucial vote. Campbell rejected it as well, probably because the bitter bit theme was old hat. Editors! No pleasing them. Del Rey managed to offload both stories in the SF magazine boom of the 1950s.
‘Conditioned Reflex’ (‘Future’ combined with ‘Science Fiction Stories’, May 1951) is about a father and son with a difficult relationship in a post-war setting where they’re reduced to scraping a living from the land and digging hopefully in ruined cities to find useful artefacts from the good old days. Another solid yarn.
‘Over The Top’ (‘Astounding Science Fiction’, November 1949) has a three-foot-tall astronaut, Dave Mannen, stuck on Mars because the lining of his rocket tubes gave out just as he landed. He has plenty of food and water but not much air. Martian flora and fauna may help him. Del Rey was a small man himself and seems to have thought or hoped that needing less air, food and water would give a fellow the edge in astronaut selection. It didn’t work out that way.
In ‘Wind Between The Worlds’ (‘Galaxy Science Fiction’, March 1951), a scientist discovers how to transmit matter and Earth is invited to join the Galactic Federation. Our hero, Vic Peters, is a troubleshooter for Teleport Interstellar, which has revolutionised industry and commerce, making winners and losers. Alien races are more advanced than humans, but the rules forbid them from sharing their technology, not least because our physics is already ahead of our sociology, another common SF theme. A catastrophic teleporter accident creates a major crisis for Earth.
It’s a pretty good collection. Why didn’t Lester Del Rey make it into the big time with Asimov, Heinlein, Clark and Bradbury? One reason, I think, is his use of several pseudonyms. Fred Pohl and Henry Kuttner did the same thing, to their detriment. Readers remember writers’ names, but if you change it all the time, you get no brand recognition. Asimov gave his own memorable moniker to all his stories and Heinlein built his brand by mostly using pseudonyms for the weaker stories sold to lesser magazines. Also, writers who want to make a name keep producing stuff. Del Rey admits that he wasn’t obsessed with writing, did other things for a living and often went months or even years without bothering at all. In the end, agent Scott Meredith persuaded him that it was his true vocation and he became a full-time professional. This volume features previously uncollected stories from the first 12 years, when he was finding his way.
The bad thing about these ‘Early’ collections is that they don’t feature the writer’s best stories, which had already been published in other anthologies. The good thing, far outweighing that little glitch, is the autobiographical notes and writing tips that encourage young wannabes. Moreover, a brilliant story puts a tyro off trying because he can’t possibly match it. Early stories that are a little bit ordinary make you think you can do it, too, and maybe you can.
Eamonn Murphy
May 2026
(pub: Doubleday and Company, 1975. 424 page hardback. Price: varies. ISBN: 978-0-38502-740-3)
