Lester del Rey: "The One-Eyed Man," "And the Darkness," and "Shadows of Empire"

Let's read three more stories and another series of autobiographical passages from the 1975 Lester del Rey collection The Early del Rey.  Feel free to refresh your memory of previous installments of this ongoing series here at MPorcius Fiction Log by clicking the following links:

"The Faithful," "Anything" and "Habit"

"The Smallest God," "The Stars Look Down," "Doubled in Brass," and "Reincarnate"
"Carillon of Skulls," "Done Without Eagles," and "My Name is Legion"
"Though Poppies Grow," "Lunar Landing," and "Fifth Freedom"

"Whom the Gods Love," "Though Dreamers Die," and "Fool's Errand"

"The One-Eyed Man" (1945)

In the short passage between "Fool's Errand" and "The One-Eyed Man," del Rey tells us he based this story on some press accounts of the work of Felix Ehrenhaft on magnetism and of Aleksander Bogolomets on life extension.   John W. Campbell, Jr. published "The One-Eyed Man" in Astounding under the Philip St. John pseudonym.

This is a very fast-paced story of palace intrigue and brain science--and peeps getting blown away by ray guns--with a somewhat convoluted plot that reminded me of A. E. van Vogt's work.  I think I can marginally recommend it, but it has not, it appears, ever been anthologized.

It is the 42nd century.  The New World is ruled by a dictatorship, though the Dictator has to contend with a Senate full of ambitious conniving creeps.  The form of the current society is determined by the inventions of the current dictator's ancestor, a genius scientist, Aaron Bard, who came up with startling, game-changing, innovations in the disparate fields of medicine, psychology, atomic energy, electronics, and  beyond.  A world war erupted and Bard's son used his father's inventions to win the war and make himself Dictator; the inventor Bard died in some kind of accident.  Today, nobody knows the science that makes many of Bard's inventions work, though technicians can still operate them.  The secrets of some other of Bard's inventions, like atomic ray guns and techniques to render matter permeable and then impermeable again, are totally lost.

The most important invention in use today is the machine that feeds info right into your brain.  When you are twelve, government lackeys hook you up to this device and it fills your noggin with all you need to know and you thereafter are an adult and are given an adult job.  The process is a little stressful, and turns like ten percent of people into zombies, who now form a slave class of manual laborers and house servants.  Even worse, the current education system has degraded society.  Twelve-year-old kids, as del Rey tells it, are like self-obsessed savages with no sense of morality or decency.  This machine system of education gives people no chance to mature, and so nearly everybody in the society is a selfish jerk, just like a 12-year-old brat, but with the knowledge and positions of responsibility that enable them to make life for everyone around them a nightmare!

Our protagonist is the current Dictator's son, Jim, who I guess is like 20.  The Dictator had a hunch that Jimmy would be zombified by the education process, and because he is the Dictator, he had his kid exempted from the normal education process.  Jim thus has grown up more or less normally, and has a sense of decency and justice.  He has also managed to figure out how to use his ancestor's permeable matter technique, which gives him access to the labyrinth of secret passages and spyholes which riddles the castle where live and work the Dictator and the Senate.  Thus, Jim knows all the dirty secrets of the various Senators, most of whom are plotting to overthrow his Dad and/or are in league with Eurasia, the enemy of the New World.

The Dictator knows that a war with Eurasia is brewing and that some Senators are trying to do him in, so he decides that to maintain any credibility with the public he has to finally let Jim go under the learning machine.  The very day that Jim is to risk zombification, he unexpectedly runs into an old man in the secret passages Jim thought nobody else alive knew about--amazingly, it is Aaron Bard, revived from the dead by a cabal of Senators who tried to force the inventor to divulge to them some of his science secrets!  The undead Bard escaped those traitors and makes common cause with his young descendent Jim.  Most of the story follows these two as they outwit the conspirators and make Jim Dictator so the New World can defeat or deter the Eurasians, achieve stability in government and usher in a new golden age by restricting use of the teaching machine to people in their 20s.

This is like a novel's worth of plot that is conveyed to the reader in the space of a short story by leaving out any kind of fancy writing or character personality or emotional content--it feels like it is moving at breakneck speed.  The plot and setting are cool enough that the story works. 

"And the Darkness" (1950)

Between "The One-Eyed Man," and "And the Darkness," del Rey talks about his career life and love life in 1945 and 1946, when he took time off writing and managed a location of the chain restaurant White Tower, a chain which I had never heard of that I am told was an imitator of White Castle.  There's a level of braggadocio to del Rey's memoirs, and he explains how he did a stellar job managing this restaurant.  But its not all happy memories--he broke up with his girlfriend, perhaps because  she as a office worker looked down on the work he was doing.  But shed no tears for del Rey, who eventually racked up four marriages--he got a new girlfriend, a waitress, and married her.  Then he was unjustly dismissed by White Tower and took up writing again.  Among the first of his new products was "And the Darkness."

Three centuries ago an anti-matter meteor blew up the moon and the Earth was showered with radioactive fragments, killing all of humanity but a thousand people in such places as a mine in Alaska in a valley.  Today there are like a dozen human beings left alive, and thanks to all the radiation, they have evolved superpowers.  But these superpowers can't stave off the inevitable doom of our noble race--there are no more young women and only one young man!

Del Rey spends like half the story on an abortive period of hope, triggered by somebody thinking he saw a young woman living among some wolves.  This is a false alarm--the creature is a mutant wolf who has intelligence comparable to a human and a body sort of like a human female.  Some of the twelve surviving humans, having lost hope, decide to commit suicide.  But then an aircraft appears.  On the ship are furry six-limbed people--Martians!  And they have a tale to tell!

Right before the Earth was wrecked, an Earth rocket was sent to Mars crewed by a married couple.  On Mars they met the relatively primitive natives and the Martians treated them as gods.  The human astronauts' knowledge, leadership and the equipment they brought led to a technological revolution on Mars, and today the Martians have their own space ships and other high technology.  As for the astronauts, the man suffered some kind of genetic damage from the radiation from the meteor that hit the moon and could only father girls.  So all his children and grandchildren et al have been female.  The Martians preserved his semen and used to impregnate his children, grandchildren, etc., (Gross!) but the supply today has run out.  Today there are eight young women on Mars.  The last young man on Earth is given the job of going to Mars to have sex with these eight women and perpetuate the human race.  Nice work if you can get it!  

This story is alright; a major problem is that the wolf story and the Mars story are pretty divorced from each other, are practically separate stories.  I also feel like we have a lot of superfluous characters.  Campbell rejected "And the Darkness" and in the autobiographical text after the story del Rey discusses the flaws in the story and points out some ways he could have improved the tale.  "And the Darkness" was eventually published in Donald Wollheim's Out of this World, a short-lived periodical that included behind its women-in-peril covers not only SF stories but 32 pages of comics, including work by major comics creators Joe Kubert, John Giunta and Gardner Fox.  Like "The One-Eyed Man," "And the Darkness" was never anthologized.  (The stories in The Early del Rey are mostly ones that had not been anthologized or collected before 1975 and are thus not his most popular or critically acclaimed work.)

"Shadows of Empire" (1950)           

This one reminds me of Poul Anderson, with its musings on the cycles of history and focus on national character-- "Shadows of Empire" prominently features a Slavic character, and del Rey suggests Slavs are "gloomy." 

It is the future of space empire, with Earth having colonized much of the solar system.  This empire is ruled by an Emperor and a bunch of nobles.  Our narrator is a noncommissioned officer in a garrison on Mars.  Mars is covered with the ruins of the mighty native race whose advanced civilization fell before Earth people arrived; the red planet is still inhabited by nomadic desert barbarians--the civilized Martian race may have died out, but the barbarians they were always fighting have endured and fought many battles with the Terrans.

We get many clues that the Earth empire is in severe decline.  The narrator's unit, I guess we would call them mechanized infantry, leaves the frontier of human settlement on Mars and drives across the desert to the more thickly settled areas and finally to the spaceport.  The Terran army on Mars is returning to Earth, leaving the human settlers to the tender mercies of the Martian barbarians, because there is some kind of civil war brewing on Earth, one which may be cataclysmic.  

One of men in the narrator's unit is a Slav who is always quoting Ecclesiastes and sometimes Kipling and is known to be a pessimist.  This guy is also working on a book.  Just before the narrator's unit and the rest of the army on Mars blast off for Earth this Slav gives his book to the narrator and then disappears.  The next day the general of the narrator's outfit reveals that the Slav was in fact a previous emperor, travelling in disguise after faking his own assassination.  The book is a major work of historical importance that will have to be hidden from the current Imperial authorities.  The story ends on a note of optimism as well as pessimism--the incognito emperor asserts that empires and civilizations inevitably fall, but civilization always rises up from the wreckage, like a phoenix.

Del Rey reports that Campbell rejected "Shadow of Empire" because it was a mood piece, and he had run some mood pieces recently and readers had not been crazy about them.  I have to sympathize with Campbell--Shadow of Empire" has little plot and I would judge it merely acceptable.  There are lots of images that are meant to convey feeling to the reader--the ruins of the high Martian race, the barbarians in the distance, the soldiers singing as they ride their tracked vehicles across the desert, the response to the rolling army of the civilians they pass, etc.--but the narrator doesn't face challenges or make decisions.  And the story feels repetitive, del Rey and the characters banging on about the same stuff over and over, words like "gloomy" and "pessimism" and "phoenix" popping up again and again. 

Damon Knight took a look at "Shadows of Empire" and was even more dismissive than Campbell, but Robert Lowndes printed it in Future; the story has not been anthologized. 

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Not exactly blockbusters, but not bad, either.  When we finish The Early del Rey we'll read some of del Rey's more celebrated work, maybe in a "best of" collection of some kind.  But we've got a lot of other projects here at MPorcius Fiction Log, so that might be pretty far in the future.