The Best of Lester del Rey

Introduction The Magnificent

The unquestioned king of the nighttime air in New York radio is a skinny and sardonic fellow named Long John Nebel. Long John’s marathon talk show runs from midnight till dawn every night of the week, and what it covers is everything. I don’t just mean “everything.” I mean everything. Politics. Religion. Sex. Hying saucers. Bermuda triangles. War. Science fiction. Science. Art. Music. You name it, it has been the subject of a Long John talkfest. And over the years, among his chosen nuclear guest family who join him after midnight to chew over the topic of the day, one voice has stood out. Whatever the subject, he has an opinion, and insights and facts to back it up. He has done the show 400 times at least, not counting reruns on tape, and he is so well known to the insomniacs of New York (and most other states) that he is usually introduced only as The Magnificent. He doesn’t need to be given a name, because the listeners know him so well. But he has one. It is Lester del Rey.

Of course, there are countless thousands of people who have known Lester del Rey very well for a long time who have never heard him on Long John’s show. They are people like you and me: science-fiction readers. We’ve known Lester for forty years, or even longer if we remember those polemical letters in Astounding’s “Brass Tacks” department in the ’30s.

Like most sf writers, Lester came to the field as a reader. He liked what he read. After some thought, he concluded that he would like writing it, too. He had never written a science-fiction story at the time. That didn’t seem to matter. He reasoned that if he thought of an idea no one else had thought of before, and told it concisely and literately, with some attention to interesting characters and colorful backgrounds, John Campbell would buy it. So he did. And so John did; it was called “The Faithful.” That was the first story Lester sold John Campbell. It certainly wasn’t the last. The Golden Age of Astounding was all the more lustrous for “Nerves,” “Helen O’Loy,” and all those others from his hard-driven typewriter.

Once he had formed the habit, Lester did not stop with Astounding. He wrote for all the other magazines, too, and when a few years later a couple of publishers took all their courage in their hands and began to experiment with science-fiction books, Lester was one of the first to get his sf nicely packaged in hard covers. He wrote a couple, then a flood, of novels especially for the book publishers. There are grown men (and grown women, too) all over the country who cut their literary wisdom teeth on sf juveniles by Philip St. John, Erik Van Lhin, and Kenneth Wright—all of whom were, in fact, Lester del Rey. Scott Meredith, then a young (but obviously canny) literary agent, grabbed Lester as a client, and shortly thereafter as an employee, and as Meredith’s Number One assistant, Lester guided the careers of scores of other writers. When the science-fiction magazine market mushroomed in the early 1950s Lester became the editor of one of the most interesting—strike that; of four of the most interesting—magazines around. He did most of that pseudony-mously, too. On Tuesdays and Thursdays, he was Philip St. John, editor of Science Fiction Adventures. On Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays he was Wade Kaempf ert, editing Rocket Stories; and then he had the whole weekend to himself, under his own name, to edit Space Science Fiction and Fantasy Fiction Magazine.

I first met Lester del Rey when both of us were impossibly apple-cheeked youngsters. I was editing two cut-rate science-fiction magazines for Popular Publications, and Lester, on one of his rare visits to New York, brought to my office a couple of stories that John Campbell had had the unwisdom to turn down. In my youthful foolishness, I did the same. Well, you can excuse Campbell, because he had everybody in the field clamoring to get into his magazines. Maybe you can forgive me, too, because I was inexperienced. But how can you excuse Lester for what he did then? Since two editors had declined the stories, he figured there was something wrong with them. He put them aside—and now, four decades later, they’re still aside, in fact lost irretrievably.

A war came along, scattering us all for a while. And then, in 1947, there was a world science-fiction convention in Philadelphia. We all saw each other again, met new friends, had a fine time. All in all it was a fine weekend; and Lester and I liked it so well that we conceived the idea of making it permanent.

Lester was living in New York City by then, and so was I, and we got ourselves and a coterie of friends together and created The Hydra Club, New York’s longest-lived sf writers’ chowder-and-marching society. Long after both Lester and I had left the city and stopped attending, the club carried on of its own momentum. One of the leading lights of Hydra was the late Fletcher Pratt, a marvelous, lovable, feisty man who had once been a bantamweight prize fighter and converted himself into the writer who produced the best one-volume history of the Civil War ever in print (among very much else that is noteworthy). Fletcher and Inga Pratt owned a great old monster of a house on the New Jersey shore. Lester and I (and our wives) were frequent weekend guests, and grew fond of the Monmouth County area. In 1951 I moved to Red Bank. In 1954 the del Reys came out to visit the Pohls for a weekend. They stayed seventeen years.

Oh, it wasn’t roses, roses all the way! Science-fiction writers are thorny people, given to obstinacy and adrenalin, and Lester is an archetypal science-fiction writer. He has sometimes been described as fulminate of mercury with a beard. I am not at all like that, of course, but nevertheless we had some rousers. We fought like wombats over astrophysics, horticulture, and whether the Bruch violin concerto deserves to be mentioned in the same breath with the Mendelssohn. (Lester was wrong about that, though I must admit the Bruch is still very good.) In the days before baseball teams treacherously deserted their God-given home turfs to dally in California, Lester was misguidedly a partisan of the New York Giants, while I, of course, loyally supported the best team in the history of baseball, the Brooklyn Dodgers. That caused a lot of trouble. Perhaps you remember hearing about Bobby Thomson’s home run that cost Brooklyn a pennant? That was the closest I ever came to punching Lester out. He chortled.

But when the chips were down, when there was trouble—and there was grave trouble now and then for both of us—what Lester was was a friend. In 1970 Evelyn del Rey was killed hi a car crash. After that, Lester did not want to live in their house any more. He moved to New York, and so in a short time Carol and I had lost not only Ewie, but Lester as well. It was a somber time.

But time passed; and then, when we now and then saw Lester on a visit, it was clear that somehow he was finding joy again. By and by it became clear that the joy had a name, and her name was Judy-Lynn Benjamin. I wholly approved. For one thing, I would not have dared not to; I had introduced them, when Lester was editing one of the magazines at the Galaxy complex and Judy-Lynn was the brand-new, fresh-out-of-college junior editor who saw that everything got done for us. They were married a few months later; and that, my children, is the story of how Del Rey Books got its name.

So I am not very objective about Lester del Rey, either as a writer or as a friend. As a writer, his awards speak for his standing in his field, but they don’t have to. The stories speak for themselves, and what I can tell you in this short note cannot say as much for his writing as any of the works that follow. So let me talk about him in other ways. As the person who dyed his beard green in silent protest when his wife changed the color of her hair. As the tinkerer who redesigned the keyboard of his typewriter to economize on finger movements. As the man who taught me so wickedly addictive a form of solitaire that I have never since been able to play any other. As the coach, mentor, and advocate of a hundred newer writers, some of them now in the top rank of science fiction.

Lester has spent a great deal of his time in passing on the writers’ tribal lore to newcomers. One of them was a brash young Ohio fan named Harlan Ellison. When Harlan heard I was writing these notes, he demanded equal time.

This is what he said:

I arrived in New York in late 1955; I was notable for two qualities: a relentless determination to be a professional writer, and squeaky-clean poverty. I had no place to live. Lester and his wonderful wife, the late Evelyn del Rey, took me in for a couple of weeks till I could find digs in the city. Sitting at the del Keys’ dining room table, using the bartered Royal portable that had been virtually the only thing I’d salvaged when I’d been kicked out of Ohio State University a few months previous, I wrote my first story. Lester was unfailingly helpful. He would walk up behind me, read what I’d typed, see it was syntactically crippled, and bat me across the back of the head. “Not who, dummy! Whoml” He provided auctorial tips, he showed me how to cobble up the extrapolative science that would make my specious concepts work, he edited the manuscript. Ewie fed me.

After Algis Budrys and Andre Norton, who were the first writers to take an interest in me, Lester was the one who got me started thinking and writing as a professional. He wasn’t kind, he was murderous; and that is a brutal treasure more valuable than all the strokes given by well-intentioned and inept amateurs who do not perceive one one-millionth as clearly as Lester did that writing is a killing craft, and only the tough survive and prevail.

For that savaging, I will always love and honor Lester.

A decade or so ago, Lester and I were comparing notes in the ril-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours way writers have when they suspect they may be up for the same prize.

Each year the World Science Fiction Convention selects some figure from the field to be its official Guest of Honor. Neither Lester nor I had ever been. The convention that would vote on it was coming up. The committee for the city that gets the convention picks its GoH, and they keep it secret until, and unless, they win the bid.

And it turned out that, in fact, we were competing for the honor that year. What I told Lester at the tune was true: I surely would enjoy being it. But if I had to lose, there wasn’t anybody in the field I’d rather lose to.

Of course, I confess, I felt pretty easy at being generous about it. The odds were on my side. Several cities were bidding for the convention. Two of them had asked me to be their Guest of Honor, and only one had asked Lester.

The trouble with betting with the odds is that the odds don’t always pay off. Lester’s people won. He got the honor, and I had to skulk in darkness for several more years before emerging into glory in Los Angeles. But that’s Lester for you. He makes a liar of the odds-layers every time.

He beat the odds for his own life some years back, against all the wisdom of medical science. The name of what happened to him is thromboeytopenia purpura. It is a disease, and an uncommon one. When it happens at all, it happens to tiny babies. When babies do develop it, the victims are usually female. I will attempt to describe this for you, if you will pardon the use of technical medical terms: For some reason or other, all the platelets in the blood say, “Ah, screw it,” at once. They stop clotting. The victim bleeds to death.

When grown male Lester del Rey’s platelets did this he was in his forties, and the local doctors competed vigorously for the chance to attend this medical marvel—right away, because they didn’t think a lot of his chances of surviving. They said, “Don’t cut yourself, don’t bump yourself, and, above all, for God’s sake, don’t sneeze.” Lester humored them to that extent. He didn’t sneeze. But he didn’t die, either. He was one of the vanishingly small number of male adults who contract the disease in the first place, and the even tinier number who survive it to make a full recovery. Doctors don’t know how he managed this, but I do. It was his stubbornness. He just didn’t feel like dying then.

Let me give you an example of what a person like Lester can do against the odds when he sets his mind to it. I swear every word of this is true.

You know that the Apollo Project, which put the first man on the Moon, began shortly after the inauguration of President John Kennedy in 1961.

Well, there is a novel by Lester del Rey (under his penname Philip St. John) called Rocket Jockey. It was published in 1951.

The space program had hardly begun when he was writing it, and Commander Neil Armstrong, who was to take that first great step for mankind a few years later, was still just another Navy pilot with the hope of someday sailing space. More than that. Sputnik and Vostok had made the American space program look pretty silly, and as far as anyone could tell, when that first man did walk on the Moon it was likely that the first message he would radio home might be in Russian.

Nevertheless—

Nevertheless the first sentence of that novel is fascinating. Many science-fiction stories have predicted future events. Few have been as uncannily exact,[1] even to names, as this opening sentence:

“The first spaceship landed on the Moon, and Commander Armstrong stepped out.”

Now do you understand why they call him The Magnificent?