(We've already read the first four stories in The Early Del Rey; today's stories are the fifth through eighth.)
"The Smallest God" is the title story of the Spanish translation of The Early Del Rey: Volume 1. It is a somewhat silly story about artificial life and academic rivalries that includes a large cadre of comic relief minor characters, among them a foreigner with a goofy accent, a vapid boy-chasing teenage girl, an Irish cop and a superstitious drunken Irishwoman. Ay, begorrah!
The two scientists are now friends, and collaborate, finding that radioactive potassium does indeed bring the synthetic man to life, but only to unthinking life, a sort of vegetative state--the perfect male body's heart pumps and lungs breathe, but it doesn't think or make voluntary movements. As we readers have sort of been expecting, the heroic blob gets himself installed in the brain of the perfect man and entertains hopes he will win the favor of the physicist's daughter. The operation works, the blob is now practically human, but, alas, that girl has just got married to a more reputable tall guy than that felonious nephew! But don't worry about the telepathic blob in the perfect male body--the physicist has another daughter, and she may only be eight years old, but the blob is willing to wait ten years before having his way with her.
Here we have an Astounding cover story whose title and the cover illo with which it is associated have got me looking forward to some space adventure with space suits and all that sort of thing. In his autobiographical remarks before "The Stars Look Down," del Rey promises action scenes, his somewhat petulant response to editor Campbell's telling him his real ability lay in characters, not action scenes and gimmicks.
"The Stars Look Down" is quite mediocre, but it wasn't boring or offensively bad, so I'll say it is barely acceptable. In the autobiographical material after the story, del Rey admits there are a lot of things wrong with the story and focuses on the caricatured way the Chinese characters are presented and on some science errors he made and Campbell didn't catch. (Science fiction writers in the 1930s and '40s really thought part of their job was teaching science to people, or at least getting people excited about science, something easy to forget when the most popular SF of the post-war period has been Star Wars type adventure stories, twist-ending social commentary like The Twilight Zone, or a combination of the two like Star Trek.)
In this collection's autobiographical matter, del Rey tells us repeatedly that he really likes writing fantasy, and here we have one of his fantasy stories, a sequel to a story that appeared in Unknown's September '39 ish, "Coppersmith." (I'll read "Coppersmith" if I ever read The Best of Lester del Rey.)
Boyd is a young scientist, working on an experimental nuclear reactor with an older established scientist. He's also got a pretty girlfriend, Joan, who loves science. One day something needs to be investigated, so Boyd and his mentor suit up and go into the reactor--Joan also wants to come, but of course Boyd insists she not. There's an explosion and Boyd's body is totally wrecked--however, his brain and spine are more or less intact! A German scientist is able to implant Boyd's nervous system into a robotic body, and over many months Boyd learns to use this body, and finds it is in many ways superior to the 100% natural organic body he was born with--he's stronger, his reflexes are faster, he has telescopic and microscopic vision, he's immune to disease, he need never sleep, etc. (Looks like sex and children are out the window, though.)
Del Rey does a good job of describing what it might be like to have your brain installed in a mechanical body, and the ending is a little sappy but still kinda heart-warming; "Reincarnate" is a sort of wish-fulfillment fantasy for those who fear death, dream of superpowers and of having a love relationship that is based on such elevated sentiments as intellectual compatibility and enduring shared interest instead of base and perhaps short-lived mutual physical lust. "Reincarnate" is the best of the four stories we are reading today whether we are judging by style, content, structure or ideas. Thumbs up!
"The Smallest God" (1940)
Two rival scientists at the University are working on creating artificial life. The biochemist has created in a tank a perfect adult human male body, but it lacks life. A physicist resents the biochemist, because he and the biochemist are always competing over funds, and scoffs at the biochemist's attempt to create an artificial man--he knows that the secret of life is radioactive potassium. He has artificially created some radioactive potassium himself, and is confident that if this material was added to the lifeless body that it would spring to life, though he jealously keeps this a secret from the biochemist.
There's another radioactive substance the physicist has come up with, the product of a failed experiment, a kind of thick rigid tar; the physicist considers this gunk useless and doesn't even know the exact proportions of its ingredients. Among the detritus of this guy's cluttered and disorderly lab is a rubber cast of a six-inch-tall statue of Hermes he bought for his daughter but decided not to give her--hollow, this statue is quite light and keeps falling over. To give it some heft so it will sit still when he is banging on the table or whatever, the physicist softens that useless tar with alcohol and fills the hollow Hermes with the now pliable substance.
Now that it has been softened by alcohol, the goop comes to life! The tar is very intelligent, and telepathic--it can read the minds of others and even into them words and images! Perhaps the best parts of this story are del Rey's descriptions of the minds of a cat and of a dog as perceived by this artificial creature.
(In the autobiographical section following "The Smallest God," del Rey suggests that he made the cat in this story too selfish and cold, that nowadays he is aware of how affectionate cats can be.)
A lot of stuff in this story beggars belief--would a real scientist take some weird substance he cooked up and just use it as ballast in a decoration? Even more incredibly, the artificial substance (which has no eyes but can see by detecting "vibrations"--these vibrations include infrared and UV light) sees the physicist's daughter and falls in love with her. Would a sexless blob fall in love with a human woman? It is bad enough when in SF stories Terrans fall in love with cat people or whatever, but at least both humans and felines have gonads--this thing is just a uniform handful of goo! Incomprehensible.
The artificial creature has numerous adventures as it seeks out more alcohol, gets tossed in the garbage when its efforts to communicate with the physicist give the scientist the heebie-jeebies, learns to move and makes the flexible rubber statue walk around and even manipulate objects with its hands as if it were a real (six-inch tall) person, is perceived as one of the "the Little Folk" by the aforementioned inebriated Irishwoman, and stalks the physicist's sexy teenaged daughter. This chick has seven dates a week with four different guys, and all four of them are six feet or taller; the blob in the rubber Hermes statue becomes determined to somehow grow tall enough to meet her stringent height requirements.
The unliving artificial body in the biochemist's lab disappears, and the biochemist accuses the physicist of stealing it--innocent, the physicist accuses the biochemist of trying to frame him. The creature in the Hermes statue saves the day, revealing itself to the feuding scientists and explaining that it can read their minds and knows both are innocent. Having paved the way for them to reconcile, the weird creature then finds the synthetic body, which was stolen and is being held for ransom by the biochemist's scoundrel of a nephew, who was one of the physicist's daughter's four boyfriends.
This story is kind of ridiculous, and its treatment of women is pretty dismissive, but I like artificial life stories and unrequited love stories and "The Smallest God" is never boring, so I'm going to say it is acceptable. Terry Carr included this odd piece of work in his 1978 anthology Classic Science Fiction: The First Golden Age, but otherwise it has only ever reappeared in del Rey collections.
(Early del Rey seems to consist of stories by del Rey which didn't exactly set the world on fire; they were all collected for the first time in this volume, and there doesn't seem to be any overlap between the contents of this book and 1978's The Best of Lester del Rey. If reading Early del Rey continues to be a worthwhile experience maybe I'll read The Best of Lester del Rey. Anyway, I bring this up because I want to note that none of the three remaining stories we are reading today have ever been anthologized, as far as I can tell.)
"The Stars Look Down" (1940)
More rivalry between top scientists! Edwin Morse was born into a wealthy family. Gregory Stewart is a child of the streets who didn't know where his next meal was coming from! But both dream of conquering space! They met in college, where they became frenemies whose tempestuous relationship is characterized by their many disagreements. For one thing, they were both after the same girl. For another, each has his own theory on how to escape Earth's gravity. Morse believes that nuclear power and ion engines are the path to the stars. Stewart puts his confidence in refinements of conventional explosives and rocket fuels.
Today, as businessowners in late middle-age, each has purchased an island off the Atlantic coast and been competing to construct Mankind's first space ship. Stewart has grown fantastically rich and acquired considerable political influence by selling munitions to the government during the war torn middle of the 20th century, and in his race for space with Morse he doesn't play by Marquess of Queensbury rules. He engages in lawfare--even getting Morse convicted of negligent homicide and imprisoned for four years over the death of Morse's son in an accident (Morse should have got Alec Baldwin's lawyers!)--and in sabotage--even hiring thugs to firebomb Morse's facilities from an aircraft (lucky those blueprints were in fireproof filing cabinets!)
Much of that stuff is described in exposition, as the narrative begins as sixty-year-old Morse gets out of prison and finds his employees are on the brink of success, having just sent a small remote-controlled rocket to photograph the far side of the moon and then successfully landed it back on the island. The Morse team--which includes Stewart's estranged son--finishes a full-sized nuclear-powered ship, overcoming Stewart's legislative efforts to ground it and then an actual paramilitary assault led by Stewart's right hand man Russell, who is killed in the fighting. Morse pushes himself hard, working long days and keeping a secret from everybody that he has a weak heart and is putting his health in danger in pursuit of mankind's destiny in space (and of course beating the unscrupulous Stewart.)
Morse in his nuclear-powered ship and Stewart in his fueled rocket blast off on their maiden voyages at the same time. Morse reaches space and then brings his vessel back safely, having a heart attack just as he lands, but don't worry--he recovers, though the sawbones forbid him to ever fly again. Stewart's fueled rocket fails, but he is one of the survivors of the crash. In a dramatic scene of reconciliation, Morse and Stewart, in front of a bunch of reporters, realize Mankind has only one working space ship and one pilot healthy enough to fly, and join forces--Stewart will fly the nuclear ship so Man's quest for the stars need not be delayed long enough to train new pilots.
"The Stars Look Down" isn't very good. It includes all the plot elements of melodrama--the love triangle, class conflict, bitter competition between onetime friends, conflict between father and son, death in the family, over-the-top demonstrations of loyalty, prodigies of self-sacrifice, betrayal, redemption, bloody violence. But del Rey doesn't wring much entertainment or emotion out of any of these elements, failing to provide enough room for them and granting enough attention to them for them to have any effect on the reader. Instead of picking one or two or three melodramatic elements and developing them as major themes, he includes like ten of them and deals with each one in a cursory fashion. There are lots of characters but they are almost interchangeable, even though del Rey tries to give each a defining character trait--one guy is fat, one guy is skinny, one guy is Chinese and has a wacky accent, etc. (I think all four of today's stories have characters with allegedly funny dialects. Yoicks!) The fight scene del Rey brigs attention to in his preamble is neither very believable nor thrilling, even though del Rey in the autobiographical material brags that he has been more deeply involved in sports and participated in more fights than most SF writers. "The Stars Look Down" also lacks a structure that builds to a climax, instead being just a series, almost a list, of events, of obstacles that quickly pop up out of nowhere and are just as quickly overcome and forgotten.
In the quite entertaining autobiographical passages, del Rey also praises Virgil Finlay and tells an interesting story about Finlay's cover for the August 1939 Astounding; brags about how great a photographer he is (at least technically, at judging distances and light levels by eye so he can produce clear sharp photos--del Rey admits he can't compose compelling pictures); and tells us he made a pile of money writing confession stories, which he reports are easier to write and pay more than does SF.
"The Stars Look Down" was included in the 1948 del Rey collection ...And Some Were Human.
"Doubled in Brass" (1940)
"Doubled in Brass" isn't one of those fantasies in which a sexy princess helps a barbarian escape from a dungeon so he can fight an evil wizard, but one of those fantasies in which a three-foot-tall elf who wears bells on his shoes talks to rabbits and disguises himself as a midget so he can get a job in a 20th-century human town repairing car parts with his magic brazier and offer sage advice to the humies. The plot of "Doubled in Brass" is like a Bertie Wooster sort of thing. The elf's boss at the car mechanic shop has a son. Son is in love with a girl. (Le sigh, it happens to the best of us.) But girl's family is in financial trouble so she is dating an overweight rich jerk. The elf uses his magic to make sure the kids marry each other and have enough money and that the fat rich guy gets humiliated. Good grief.
Maybe this story is supposed to be light-hearted and cute and distract you from the current world crisis or something, and I suppose it is competent, but it is not what I want to read by any means. Gotta give "Doubled in Brass" a thumbs down.
"Reincarnate" (1940)
"Reincarnate" actually begins when Boyd wakes up after the explosion, and we learn how he was maimed through what amounts to a flashback. Del Rey spends quite a bit of time describing how the new robot body works and how Boyd has to be trained to use it. I find the idea of having my brain put into a robot body fascinating, and enjoyed all this material; del Rey succeeds in making it all pretty interesting and even emotionally affecting. Once he is able to walk around and get back to work on the reactor, Boyd has to face the fact that he is one of a kind, all alone in the world, perhaps unable to have any kind of comradely human relationship with his fellow scientists and engineers, he now being so different than they.
"Reincarnate," however, has a happy ending that del Rey in the autobiographical material that follows the story admits is kind of corny. For one thing, Boyd succeeds in building healthy relationships with his fellow workers. But more important is the twist ending. Boyd has to go back into the reactor to solve the problem that got him blown to pieces in the first place--with his new armored body with super reflexes, probably he can resolve the issue. But the people who own the project (as in "The Stars Look Down," the history-making operation at the center of the story is managed by private enterprise, not big government) send somebody into the danger zone with him to help him--another disembodied brain in a robot body! Boyd assumes it is his mentor--he was told that guy had died, and Boyd thinks they must have just been keeping this second medical miracle a secret from him! The two cyborg-Americans fix the reactor, and then robot person number 2 drops a bombshell--she is Joan, Boyd's girlfriend! Boyd thought she was avoiding him all this time because how could a flesh and blood woman and a sexless robot man make a life together? You see, Joan sneaked into the reactor on the black day of the explosion and she was also blasted to pieces and then installed into a superior mechanical body! The two of them can now spend their (very very long) lives together, pursuing their mutual passion for science and engineering side by side, the two toughest and fastest eggheads in the world.
"Reincarnate" debuted in the same issue of Astounding as the first installment of the L. Ron Hubbard novel Final Blackout, which we read back in 2014, and A. E. van Vogt's "Repetition," AKA "The Gryb," a story I read before I started this blog and should reread someday in its various magazine, fix-up, anthology and collection versions.
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If we put aside the fairy-tale romcom of "Doubled in Brass," we've got three stories that address endlessly compelling classic science fiction themes--artificial life, the heroic quest to conquer space, immortality, disembodied brains and the intersection of man and machine. Now, it is true that in "The Smallest God" and "The Stars Look Down" that del Rey makes mistakes when it comes to storytelling, but he doesn't make the biggest mistake a fiction writer can make--that of boring the reader. And "Reincarnate" actually works. So, over all, not a bad batch of stories from Campbell's famous magazines published early in World War II. Expect to hear me talking about three or four more stories from Early del Rey soon.
Lester Del Rey had a long career so there are a lot of ups and downs in his work across the decades. Some critics consider Del Rey's work in the 1950s to be the high point of his career.
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