Lester del Rey: "Though Poppies Grow," "Lunar Landing," and "Fifth Freedom"

It has been a month since we have talked about Lester del Rey, but we haven't forgotten about him.  Let's today continue reading 1975's Early del Rey, a book of short stories and autobiographical reflections about del Rey's career and relationships with other SF figures, in particular the editor of Astounding and Unknown, John W. Campbell, Jr.

"Though Poppies Grow" (1942)

In introductory passages, Del Rey talks about how he tried to come up with a story responding to American participation to World War II and produced this story, which he had to alter to get Campbell to publish it in Unknown, and how it is "dated...and the world can no longer react properly" to it.  Well, let's see if we can agree with Campbell's criticisms of and/or del Rey's belief that 1975 people wouldn't know how to respond to "Though Poppies Grow."

A man in a worn World War I uniform finds himself in Washington, D. C.  He has vivid memories of the horrors of the trenches, particularly of a friend being caught on the wire and begging to be put out of his misery by his comrades, but after that he has no memories--he doesn't even know his own name!  He walks around, marveling at how fashion and technology have changed, contrasting the public's attitude about the current war with the war in which he served.  He feels an urge to do something, as if he is on a mission, but he doesn't know what that mission could be.

He goes to a restaurant and meets an attractive young woman who is kind to him.  Then he wanders around town, trying to join up to fight again, but he is rejected because the doctor who gives him his physical can't find any pulse or heartbeat.  Our hero realizes he is dead, a ghost or an animated corpse or something; he can make contact with physical objects and even eat, but doesn't actually need to eat or breathe.  He tries to get a job so he can free up another man to go fight but can't find one because he has no skills.  (This story has some plot holes like this--couldn't he get a job as a janitor or farmhand or something?)

The dead soldier reads a newspaper editorial that argues the US shouldn't sink its resources into an offensive because the British don't deserve our help and we need to conserve our men and material to defend ourselves from the god damned.  The soldier, who has only been in the 1940s one day but already has strong opinions about foreign policy barges into the newspaper office to curse out the writer of this editorial.  Then it is back to wandering the streets.  Our guy finds himself near the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier.

The young woman finds him; she has with her a general (she has friends in high places.)  She shows our guy a newspaper--the writer whom he confronted has changed his tune, writing an editorial admitting he lied and the Communists are our buddies and anybody who says different is a traitor to America.  The general thinks the dead soldier came out of the Tomb (he can touch objects and people normally but also pass through stone, I guess--you know, whatever the plot requires) and also has the magic power to persuade anyone of anything.  The government can use him to travel the country and use his powers to persuade anybody who questions government policy to toe the line and obey Washington like a good American should.  Then the dead soldier and the young woman walk off together to begin a wonderful new life.

Each individual sentence of this story is well-written, but the story is long and slow and kind of boring and has those little plot holes, and of course I'm not crazy about the government using necromancy to get us all to mindlessly go along with whatever FDR and his lackeys want to do.  We're calling "Though Poppies Grow" barely acceptable.

One of Campbell's two big complaints about the earlier draft was that the dead soldier didn't actually much of a contribution to the war effort--apparently in that first version the dead soldier took the job of guarding the Tomb so that those soldiers guarding it could go to the front.  This is a good criticism with which del Rey agreed; a long story in which a miracle gives life to a dead man and the dead man goes on to do some penny ante thing is pretty lame.  And in fact the story still mostly consists of the main character being a sort of spectator who does little purposeful but is instead pushed around by other people and forces.  Campbell's other significant criticism was that readers would find an implied sexual liaison between a living human being and some kind of animated corpse "horrible."  Del Rey disagreed and while he dutifully made this implication a little less in-your-face in this version, it is still there.

What about del Rey's suspicion that people in 1975 wouldn't "react properly" to "Though Poppies Grow"?  Well, the story is very patriotic, and very pro-government, and by 1975 the leftist intelligentsia had taken over all the cultural institutions but hadn't yet captured every level of government, so the loudest segments of the educated public in 1975 would no doubt see a patriotic story which praised government policy as totally square if not ridiculous and disgusting, especially a story focused on foreign policy, seeing as the US government's foreign policy for the last few decades had revolved around trying, however incompetently, to obstruct the operations of the left-wing intellectuals' heroes like Che Guevara, Ho Chi Minh and Mao Zedong.  So, yeah, I can see del Rey assuming "Though Poppies Grow" might not receive a warm reception in 1975.

This mediocre story guaranteed to piss most people off with its flag-waving, or its sympathy for the USSR, or its glorification of the stifling of dissent, or its necrophilia has not been reprinted very often, though you can find it in the 2010 NESFA collection Robots and Magic.

Incidentally, this is the last story in the first part of The Early del Rey, and in the first volume of the two volume paperback publication of the collection.  This part of the book ends with a discussion of the story "Nerves," a piece which is well-regarded but which I didn't like when I read it years ago.             

"Lunar Landing" (1942)

As Part Two of Early del Rey begins, the author tells us Campbell had acquired a painting of a rocket sitting on the moon with the sun and Earth in the sky above and suggested del Rey write a story based upon it; "Lunar Landing" is that story. 

Our protagonist Grey is a somewhat unusual character, 80 lbs and 4' 10", suffering amnesia so he doesn't know who his family is.  He calls himself Grey because his hair and eyes are grey--even his skin has a grey look to it.  After waking memoryless,  and learning how to talk and read again, Grey, a man with a mechanical bent, worked in an aircraft factory and then became a skilled pilot.  When the first rocket to the moon, piloted by a Swanson, sent out a distress signal after a crash landing on Luna, Grey was chosen to pilot the rescue rocket, partly because he is so small he wouldn't add much weight to the rocket payload.

Part I of this longish (35 pages in The Early del Rey) story covers the trip to Luna and includes character backgrounds and a lot of banter among the crew that is characterized by sexual tension--there is a lot of cigarette smoking, for one thing (there was a lot of cigarette smoking with an erotic undertone in "Though Poppies Grow" as well), and when the rocket motors start malfunctioning the co-pilot, a red-headed young woman, in her fear, embraces Grey even though they have a very combative relationship.  There is another such odd couple among the crew who have a simmering inchoate sexual relationship.

Part II is on Luna after the crashlanding of Grey's rocket--these rockets seem to have a flaw that was not recognized on Earth.  The man who designed the vessels is among the crew on this ship, and this guy also has an acrimonious relationship with Grey.  

One of the distracting artistic choices del Rey makes in "Lunar Landing" is having the mysterious private entity who is sending these rockets to Luna fail to establish a chain-of-command or hierarchy among the crew of the ships--nobody aboard is formally recognized as captain and so there is a power struggle, with Grey coming out on top.  Adventure stories often feature these sorts of contests for authority, but it seems ridiculous to send a rocket to the moon--ostensibly only the second ever--without a designated captain.

Grey leads the majority of the crew (the designer stays behind to examine the engine) across the lunar surface towards what they think is the wreck of the first expedition.  The explorers discover native flora and fauna, and there are hints in the text that Grey, and/or other Earthers, have been to the moon before.  Sure enough, the rescue party finds not Swanson's wrecked ship but a third space ship!  An old woman among the crew, Alice Benson, tells the story of how she worked on this ship thirty years ago and has kept it a secret all these years; it was flown to Luna by her husband Bill.  It turns out she is the owner of the mysterious company organizing these expeditions.  The party returns to their ship only to find the designer has vanished.

Part III introduces a new conflict among the crew--Grey and Mrs. Benson are devoted to space travel out of a sense of romance, but another member of the crew is interested in exploring Luna in order to make money, and is even planning on exploiting the (as yet undiscovered) intelligent natives.  Grey and the redhead share their first kiss, and immediately afterwards share a cigarette.  From the nose of the rocket somebody, finally, spots Swanson's ship, and the sympathetic characters head for it, leaving the nasty money-grubbing imperialist behind.

Besides hoping to fin Swanson and his crew alive, the astronauts had hoped to find spare parts for their own engines, and are disappointed to find that the Swanson ship's motor has been removed--there is also no sign of Swanson, though the log describes the death of one of his two comrades and the disappearance of the other.  (Grey finds two unused cartons of cigarettes, so the sortie is not a total loss.)  When Grey and company get back to their own ship they find the imperialist is missing and the designer is back, but in a deep sleep.  When briefly roused he can't remember anything that has happened since he started a nap back on Earth!           

In Part IV Grey investigates the thirty-year old ship Benson ship--its rocket motors have also been stolen.  Whoever kidnapped the imperialist brings him back--like the designer he is in a deep sleep.  Grey and the redhead go up to the nose of their ship to spend a lot of time flirting and talking about cigarettes, which I guess is the thing they have in common that builds a bond between them.  They also spot a hole in the side of a cliff, and go investigate it with Mrs. Benson, figuring it will lead to the lair of whoever has been kidnapping their colleagues and seizing their rocket motors.

In Part V all is revealed.  Bill Benson's ship thirty years ago was spotted from Mars and a team from the red planet came to help the guy.  The Martians are experts in psychology, and have scientifically categorized people into two types, the goody goody idealists and the practical types who exploit others, and they can tell what type you are via their technology.  The idealists on Mars are running a secret space program that the exploiters don't know about.  The Martian lunar expedition was happy to find that Bill Benson was an idealist.  Similarly, Swanson and the survivors of his crew are idealists.  The Martians found that the designer and the imperialist were exploiters, and so erased their memories and returned them.  Obviously Mrs. Benson and the redhead are idealists.  As for Grey, he is the artificially created half-son of Bill Benson, a feat of genetic engineering sent to Earth with no memory.

The Martians propose a conspiracy.  Swanson and Mrs. Benson will go to Earth and claim the moon is a death trap with no valuable resources.  Then they will secretly get rich by mining all the valuable minerals on the Moon.  With all this money they will secretly manipulate Earth society so only idealists will have influence--the Martian idealists will do the same on Mars.  Eventually exploiters will have no power on either world.  Grey and the redhead will manage human operations on Luna--the Earth will be told they are dead.  The last line of the story is more flirting centered on cigarettes.

In the autobiographical text del Rey tells us "Lunar Landing" was a rush job and it is not a smooth read; the plot is repetitive and contrived, with too many boring characters and with people and ideas sort of popping up in the middle of the story as if from out of nowhere.  I actually like all the science stuff, the descriptions of space flight and space suits and lunar life and so forth, but all that stuff is just window dressing.  The rank elitism of the plot resolution--we can scientifically distinguish good people from bad people and the good people are allowed to do whatever they want to the bad people--for their own good, of course!--while sort of common in SF is also sort of annoying, and I didn't appreciate the constant gushing about how awesome cigarettes are--is this space program sponsored by Lucky Strike?

"Lunar Landing" hasn't been reprinted outside of del Rey collections, and we're calling it barely acceptable.  For del Rey completists and tobacco enthusiasts only!  

"Fifth Freedom" (1943) 

Here we have another story inspired by America's involvement in the Second World War.  The title of "Though Poppies Grow" is lifted from the famous poem "In Flanders Fields," which is quoted in the story and expresses the story's theme that the dead want us to keep fighting the Hun.  "Fifth Freedom" of course refers to FDR's 1941 speech about four freedoms, but del Rey does not refer to it in the story--it was Campbell who titled the story. 

It is the near future, and Germany is trying to conquer Europe yet again!  American opinion is galvanized into support for the war and there is a broad-based draft and the government seizes control of the economy.  Our protagonist is a conscientious objector and refuses to fight.  This is a science fiction story, so he has no religious rationale for his dissent--he just thinks war is bad!  His father disowns him.  The government sends him to a labor camp where the other laborers shun him--they are here because they are old or crippled or whatever--they are fully behind the war effort!  

Our sensitive hero is an amateur violinist, and on his off hours climbs a hill overlooking the labor camp to scrape away at his fiddle.  On the other side of the hill is a women's labor camp; there is a pretty girl over there, also on break, and the conscientious objector enjoys seeing her and imagining she can hear his music.  One day she actually comes up the hill to join him--she is also a music lover!  It's a love connection!

Our guy makes a friend in the labor camp, a cripple who is nonetheless a good fighter who helps protect our musician from a bully.  Life is looking up!  A girl and a friend!  The Air Force sends a representative to the camp to talk to the musician, who, it turns out, is also an expert pilot--his family was wealthy enough that he could afford a civilian model of one of the new rocket planes and he has like one thousand hours of flight time!  Uncle Sam would love to strap him into a USAAF rocket plane so he can drop bombs on Deutschland like a good American boy should!  Of course, our guy isn't interested in signing up, even after the Germans blow up New York and then Chicago with their radiation bombs!

The violinist, his friend the cripple and the girl are on that hill when the krauts bomb their labor camps.  The girl gets radiation sickness and dies, and, finally, the protagonist decides to enlist with the flyboys, though only after he reflects that America is better than Germany because in Germany the government forces people to fight and in the US the government just tries really really hard to persuade you to fight.

The ideological content and character relationships of "Fifth Freedom" are not very impressive, and the science fiction content is limited, though del Rey brags in the autobiographical section that follows that he is one of the first to stress the danger of radiation from atomic bombs, not just the game-changing volume of blast of such weapons.  Another barely acceptable story.      

**********

Three weak stories in a row.  In fairness to del Rey, he tells us early on in Early del Rey that this volume is going to consist of stories not previously collected, so we have to expect the content of the book to be below his average.  The main draw of Early del Rey's 400 pages is perhaps his reminiscences of his relationship with Campbell and his insights into the SF world of the '30s and '40s.  Probably when I have finished with this book I will read some collections of his more acclaimed work.