Lester del Rey (1915–1993)

In 1978, Lester Del Rey assembled this volume of what he considered his choicest short fiction, characterizing the pieces as his "favorite children." Terry Brooks and Frederik Pohl contributed introductions, and Del Rey's own afterword replies to both of these and comments on each of the sixteen stories in the book. They are arranged in chronological order of first publication from 1938 to 1964.

They are mostly science fiction stories, although some lean to the fantastic, and a couple are show more just weird fiction with a contemporary setting. Some of the diction is a little antiquated in the earlier stories. For example, pretty much all spacecraft are "rockets," including unlikely interstellar ones. There are a lot of robot stories. But Del Rey was more interested in imagining than prognosticating, and the stories definitely reflect that choice.

The first story of the book is the one that Del Rey also claimed was his favorite. "Helen O'Loy" was pretty prescient for the early twentieth century, but strangely innocent now that we've started to see how perverse human-machine socialization can become. It's also an amusing tell that the preliminary human love interests don't even get proper names in the tale, whereas even the faulty domestic robot merits "Lena."

At least one of these stories I had read before, although I didn't realize it until the book's afterword. "The Day Is Done" was included in Asimov's multi-author anthology Where Do We Go from Here?, which I read on loan from my public library as a schoolkid. This story about the twilight of Neanderthaler humanity didn't make a big conscious impression on me back then, but I'm sure it prepared me to appreciate tales of atavistic resurgence like Williamson's Darker Than You Think and Lafferty's The Devil Is Dead. And it signals a recurring theme in the book of the demise of a species, usually humans.

The time travel story "And It Comes Out Here" was fun, but didn't seem like much of an improvement on Heinlein's much earlier "By His Bootstraps." I appreciated Del Rey's experimental use of the second person narrative voice and future tense, and I wished he had been persistent about it instead of relaxing into a more familiar style.

There is a notable vein of anti-racism running through stories involving aliens, like "The Wings of Night" and "Superstition." The latter story also does a great job of maintaining an enigma for the reader over the course of a longer tale, and like a number of others in the book it involves some poking at the reader's likely metaphysical suppositions, as well as straining those of the characters.

The story that takes the cake on the count of theological imagination is the longest in the book, and one which Del Rey claimed to have grown "from some of my own philosophy, instead of being pure story" (292). "For I Am a Jealous People" is a tale of a church minister while extraterrestrials are invading to exterminate humanity, and it has a couple of deft twists. This one was probably my favorite of the book. But it gets some competition from "The Seat of Judgment," a very capable piece of planetary romance in the vein of Leigh Brackett, and somewhat anticipating the ways that Frank Herbert would later speculate about religion in Dune.

The last story of the book, like the first, centers on a robot. Despite a significant difference in tone, "Vengeance Is Mine" reminded me a little bit of Bradbury's earlier "There Will Come Soft Rains," which similarly stood at the end of the old edition of The Martian Chronicles I read. It's not the only post-apocalyptic robot story of the the book, nor is it the only one to try to stand received values on their heads and see some benefit in error and ill intent. But that topical rhyming provides some satisfaction in having it as the closing piece of the collection. show less

Old-fashioned young adult in the Winston Juvenile series. The strength of the Winston series was using real SF writers, so the science fiction was typically more than decoration, and there was usually a foreword emphasizing the science bits.. The weakness was the hero had to be a teen, which probably worked for the target audience but made the stories pretty implausible for adults. This is a very typical entry, about a new form of nuclear submarine that runs afoul of an offshoot of humanity show more that lives in special bubbles at bottom of the ocean floor. The first half with the submarine repeatedly being trapped by the Atlanteans is above average. The second half, where the crew is captured and taken to the underground city is much weaker. On the plus side, it's made clear that they're not from the legendary Atlantis. Del Rey tries to work out a scheme by which a fairly backwards city could have such a sophisticated technology. But on the minus side, the plot to escape and prevent the surface world falling into nuclear war over the loss of the submarine is completely unconvincing, especially when it eventually depends on the Atlanteans thinking the dog -- an implausibility for a submarine story to begin with -- is a god.

Only completists would want to read this. show less

This story, about an accident at an atomic industrial site was written in 1942, which was well before the general public had any idea how nuclear reactors worked, let alone what kind of accidents they could cause. This was one of those great predictive stories, where the details are very wrong, but the basic ideas were frighteningly predictive. And it's a great action packed story. However, as someone who has lived through three major nuclear accidents, and lives in a place that is pretty show more much surrounded by nuclear accidents waiting to happen, I found I was unable to suspend my disbelief enough to actually engage with the story in a meaningful way. Some science fiction just doesn't age well, and I'm afraid this must be included in the list.

A really good touch for the time is the addition of an extremely competent female nurse-practitioner who the older male doctor readily accepted as an equal colleague. show less

This was better than I expected and not as satirical as the C. M. Kornbluth’s and Pohl’s collaboration The Space Merchants.

It was, of course, the advertising industry that dominated the world in that novel. Here it’s an insurance company, simply called the Company. As Pohl explains in his afterword, “The Art and Agony of Collaboration”, Pohl’s conceptual inspiration for the story is that, rightly or wrongly, money guides peoples’ behavior. What if you had a system where show more someone made a profit mitigating the evils of life?

The Company is that someone, a single insurance company that came to dominate the world after the Short War (seemingly a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR). It not only writes policies for life insurance. It has food and medical policies too. And, as our hero Tom Willis would be happy to tell you, it’s eliminated war and want.

At least that’s what he’d say if you asked him when he arrives in Naples, Italy in the wake of a local war fought between that city and Sicily. The world has balkanized under the Company and only America has maintained something like its old size.

Willis is something of an unusual convert to the Company. And convert is the right word. He regards the Company as something like a sacred institution that has solved the worlds problems, run by incorruptible men including its sainted founder Carmody. Willis even has Company scripture he carries about, the Adjustor’s Handbook. But Willis didn’t always feel that way. In fact, after the early death from disease of his wife Marianna back in America, he publicly denounced the Company, vandalized some of its property, and was jailed only to be bailed out by one of Marianna’s relatives, Defoe who is the Company’s Chief Underwriter.

On arriving in Naples, Willis will meet Zorchi, a strange man who will play a prominent role in the story and who has become wealthy by staging grisly accidents that maim him so he can collect the insurance. He’ll also meet Rena dell’Angela, a beautiful local girl whom he will fall in love with.

Willis will learn, after meeting his new boss who heads the Naples office, that Company officials aren’t all creatures of virtue, competence, and incorruptibility. And he’ll also meet, through Rena (deemed uninsurable), anti-Company rebels who point out that not only has war not ceased under the Company’s rule but medical research and social mobility has stagnated.

That’s crazy talk as far as Willis is concerned, but he wants to talk the beautiful Rena out of her ideas before she comes to real harm. And, so, Willis finds himself embedded with the rebels in a story that will take us into the ancient catacombs under Rome to a gun battle in the ruins of Pompeii to the new medical catacombs, where the Company parks people with the promise to revive them at a future date when they can be cured,.

Pohl and del Rey don’t rig the political perspectives of the story. There are benefits to Company rule as well as downsides. Some of the rebels have crazy, dangerous plans. And those plans aren’t going to work out as expected. But then neither are the Company’s.

The novel ends on a rumination that no system of government is perfect, that eternal revolution seems to be humanity’s lot.

To be sure, at least one major plot twist was predictable, but, for the most part, this story takes some unexpected turns in both character and plot, a quick and enjoyable read

In Pohl’s and del Rey’s afterword, “Risk, But Not Preferred”, they talk about how their friendship survived their collaboration and how they annoyed each other with their very opposite approaches to writing. Del Rey liked to plot everything in advance, and Pohl liked to make it up as he went along.

They also talk about how a novelette they gave to H. L. Gold became this novel. Gold was running a novel contest for the magazine Beyond Fantasy Fiction. The deadline had passed, and Gold didn’t like any of the entries, so he proposed Pohl and del Rey turn their novelette into this novel. It was a guaranteed winner. It would become the one and only publication credit for Edson McCann. show less