Lester del Rey: "The Faithful," "Anything" and "Habit"

In the infancy of this blog of mine I read the version of Lester del Rey's "Nerves" found in the Science Fiction Hall of Fame and was not impressed by it and so put del Rey on the back burner.  But recently, while pursuing my quest to read at least one story from each issue of Weird Tales published in the 1930s, I was impressed by del Rey's 1939 contribution to the unique magazine, "Cross of Fire," as well as the autobiographical matter that accompanied that story's appearance in the 1975 collection Early del Rey.  So I have decided to read more from Early del Rey; today we check out the first, third and fourth stories in the volume, "Cross of Fire" being the second.

"The Faithful" (1938)

The Early del Rey begins with a charming account from del Rey about his youth and his early exposure to literature and how he came to start submitting stories to SF magazines.  Del Rey makes somewhat slighting references to Manly Wade Wellman and Sam Moskowitz in this introductory matter; in contrast, John W. Campbell, Jr., fares well in this book; Early del Rey is dedicated to him, the man who bought del Rey's first published story, "The Faithful," for Astounding and then, as we learn in the autobiographical material that comes after "The Faithful," requested more work from del Rey. 

"The Faithful" is more like the description of a setting or a bit of history from a fictional world than a conventional story with character and plot.  Our narrator is a dog living several thousand years in the future.  For centuries, the human race eugenically bred and genetically modified dogs until man's best friend could talk and use tools; dogs even developed their own culture, a society parallel but intimately linked to that of the human beings they adored.  Then a war erupted between two human nations, a world war in which dogs fought beside man, and in which the narrator flew an attack aircraft and bombed the enemy.  This war involved the use of atomic, chemical, and biological weapons, and after the war was finally over a Plague swept across the globe and killed all (or almost all!) of humanity.  The narrator became a leader of the dogs, guiding them in their ultimately successful efforts to survive and eventually thrive in the post-apocalyptic landscape.

After the dogs have restarted Chicago's nuclear reactors and food machines and got the lights working a man appears--the last man on Earth!  He recognizes the narrator--this guy was a scientist before the war who was experimenting with immortality treatments, and the narrator was one of his guinea pigs.  This scientist is the only human survivor of the plague because he also used himself as a guinea pig and the longevity treatments provided him some resistance to the deadly plague.

The scientist provides aid to the new dog civilization.  The dogs have two big problems.  For one thing, they lack hands and so many machines are impossible for them to operate.  For another, they miss humanity--since caveman days, human and dog have lived side by side, supporting each other, and the dogs are sad that they have to go it alone.  The scientist points out that the solution to these problems lies in Africa!  Before the war, mankind was working on the great apes, increasing their intelligence as they had with doggies.  The apes are not as smart as the dogs yet, but they can follow instructions.  The dogs travel to Africa, find some intelligent apes who survived the war, and as the story ends we have every reason to believe that the apes will operate the machinery in Chicago under the direction of the dogs, and the dogs will selectively breed and mutate the apes into a second human race that like the first will serve as a senior partner to dogkind and then undertake the conquest of the stars!

An engaging little diversion that indulges in both apocalyptic laments about the dark side of science and technology and human nature and sense-of-wonder optimism about the promise of man's ability to manipulate the universe.  "The Faithful" has been anthologized many times by big name editors like Damon Knight, James Gunn, Frederik Pohl, and the team of Asimov, Waugh and Greenberg.      

"Anything" (1939)

The autobiographical material following "Cross of Fire" talks about how Campbell was a very creative editor who often fed ideas to his writers--del Rey estimates that something like half of the stories in Astounding were based on ideas Campbell came up with.  Del Rey also tells us that he has always preferred "real fantasy" to horror, the weird and science fiction, and was excited to submit to Campbell's fantasy magazine, Unknown.  "Anything" is one of del Rey's stories that appeared in Unknown; Campbell liked it so much he included it in the 1948 anthology of stories from Unknown, From Unknown Worlds.

It is pretty common for 20th-century speculative fiction creators to take a well-known supernatural creature or villain--for example, the vampire, the witch, or the gremlin--and update it so it either makes more scientific sense or better fits into the time period in which the artist is living and working, or both.  In "Anything," del Rey updates the brownie.  In this story, at least, brownies, of which one character says, "You might call them [brownies] Scotch elves," are short little guys who earnestly perform work for people--out of their sight and at an incredible pace and efficiency--and request as payment not money, but food (no meat!) and lodging.  If a brownie is annoyed, however, it can wreak havoc on human communities.

Del Rey plops a brownie down in small town Midwestern America, of which del Rey paints a pretty sneering portrait.  Our narrator is a journalist, managing the two-man operation that is the local newspaper of a tiny little town where all the people are jerks--the women are gossipy closed-minded busybodies, the men are pettily greedy and selfish small-scale businessmen.  A strange man clad in brown clothes drifts into town and offers to do work of any kind in return for milk, bread, and a place to sleep.  Everyone in town wonders where he is from and what his name is and so on, but some mysterious force prevents them from asking these questions.  The stranger excels at every kind of skilled or unskilled labor, proving capable of doing anything from fixing a roof to curing a sickened farm animal to writing, copyediting and typesetting the newspaper better than can the narrator, and he performs these jobs with amazing speed--all out of sight of anybody, mind you.

Eventually the suspicious and small-mined women of the town turn on this mysterious benefactor.  The leader of the women tries to trip him up, disprove his claim that he can do "anything," by posing him an impossible task--she is fat and asks if he can make her thin.  In the flash of an eye she is rendered scrawny, triggering a panic among the women of the town who suspect the stranger is a witch or agent of Satan.  The narrator is associated with the stranger and the mob of women direct their ire at him as well as at the brownie, forcing him to flee town--thankfully, the brownie uses his magic to get our hero a job at a Chicago paper, fulfilling the narrator's dream of leaving this crummy little town and working in the big city.  As he is leaving he realizes how dirty and decrepit the small town is, and how wretched are its inhabitants--or maybe the brownie is just using his magic to damage the town before he too leaves.

This story is pretty mediocre.  The brownie just explains up front early in the story what he is, rather than making us or the narrator figure it out; his feats of labor are not very exciting; and let's face it--a brownie is not as thrilling an entity as a vampire, a witch or even a gremlin.  Del Rey's depictions of greedy men and fat narrow-minded gossipy women is, I guess, meant to be funny, but comes off as urban elite snobbery; popular fiction is generally wish-fulfillment fantasy, and "Anything" is the fantasy of a person with intellectual pretensions who is stuck in a small town, a dramatization of his dream of having his superiority to everybody in town recognized by a powerful person who then whisks him away to a better life among better people in the big city.  We're calling this one merely acceptable.

"Habit" (1939)

Here in "Habit" we have a traditional science fiction story which attempts to portray in realistic fashion the technology of the future--in this case space flight--and which features a protagonist who exploits his science knowledge and thinks outside the box to overcome the obstacles presented by the plot.  The story illustrates the assertion made in its first paragraph, that mankind has made a habit of developing and refining labor-saving devices, and that the accumulation of these devices is the basic stuff of civilization.  We also have a comic relief character and a sort of celebration of male relationships--sons who are proud of their fathers and seek to emulate them, as well as gentlemanly competition among men who are engaging in a risky sport and pushing the envelope of what science and technology can do.

Our narrator, Masters, is following in his father's footsteps and participating in a rocket race!  This will be the longest rocket race yet, a trip expected to take over eight days!  Masters' Dad, who was killed participating in a recent rocket race, developed a new fuel additive and gave the formula not to his son (whom he didn't want risking his life as a rocket racer) but to a professional gambler, Jimmy Shark, who seeks to get rich by betting on the winner of this latest race.  Jimmy's professed goal in attaining wealth is to become a generous philanthropist; Jimmy is also the aforementioned comic-relief figure and we hear his catchphrase, variations on "it's become a habit to," many times.  To this end, Jimmy has given the fuel additive formula to another racer, Olson, pilot of Tar Baby (oh, boy) and bet all his money on Olson.

The race is from Mars to a beacon part of the way straight towards Jupiter and then back.  Contestants have a lot of leeway on how their craft are constructed and what fuel they use and what course they take.  One of the favorites, McIntyre in Bouncing Betty takes the risk of flying close to the asteroid belt and is forced to abandon the race because his rocket is damaged by a "meteoroid."  Our hero Masters is in second place behind Olson when he has an idea--instead of starting to decelerate halfway to the beacon he will accelerate right past the beacon and fly around Jupiter, letting its massive gravity alter his course and direct him back at Mars; if his calculations are correct, Masters' Umatilla will pass Olson's Tar Baby on their way back to Mars and he will won the race.  (My math is bad, but I guess this works because Olson has to accelerate and decelerate twice, but Masters only once, so his average speed for the entire course is considerably higher, higher enough that he still gets back first even though his path is several million miles longer.)  Back on Mars, winner Masters tells losing gambler Jimmy that sometimes habits have to be broken--for example, the belief that the quickest path between two points is the shortest.  Don't worry about Jimmy, though--he can get rich by selling the formula.

In the biographical material after "Habit," del Rey admits that there is a crippling science error in the story--Jupiter would only turn your ship around if you were going less than 100,000 mph, and Masters was going over seven million mph.)  Oh, well.  Del Rey also talks about reasons why a magazine editor might alter a story for magazine publication (cutting a few sentences so it fits the right number of pages, for example) and says that Campbell made fewer changes to writers' copy than did most other editors.  "Habit" had a few lines pruned for inclusion in Astounding, and del Rey tells us they have been restored for this book printing.

This story is pretty entertaining, and of course I'd never have noticed that science error myself.  After its debut in Astounding, "Habit" was included in Carol and Fred Pohl's 1973 anthology Jupiter.

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These are not bad stories, and the material between them about the life of a SF writer and del Rey's relationship with people like Campbell is quite interesting, so we'll keep reading Early del Rey.  We'll be reading some other guy's SF short stories in our next episode, however.