The Best of Lester del Rey

Author’s Afterword

Memory is an artist, not a historian. Old scenes are never seen with the unchanging eye of the camera. Rather they are painted over, refurbished, given style and composition, sometimes highlighted, often obscured. Many become palimpsests. And perhaps it is better so.

Thus Harlan Ellison remembers a kindness far greater than I could ever have done him with my rough red-penciling of his manuscript. My old friend Frederik Pohl paints my being called the Magnificent as a tribute, rather than the jeering sarcasm meant when first applied. And he quotes a prophecy by adding depth to a few words—not quite what was really written. His artist memory has made a far better tale than truth would offer.

My memory plays similar tricks, of course. In 1969, when Sam Moskowitz mentioned that I’d named Armstrong as first on the Moon, I had to look through my books to realize it was—more or less—true. But then as time passed, I added my own color, until I began to believe that I’d indeed written the opening lines of Rocket Jockey about as Pohl quoted. But alas, when I checked his quotation, the printed page remained unswayed by memory: “When Major Armstrong landed on the moon in 1964…” Only that, and nothing more.

The year was wrong—though if Wernher von Braun had been given the chance, it might not have been. Armstrong wasn’t a major, though my belief when writing the novel (1952) that the missions would be backed by the military proved correct. And while I meant this as the first trip to the Moon, I failed to say so. All that remains is the name—and I can’t remember why I chose that.

So much for prophecy—which has never been the business of science fiction, anyhow. We tell of all possible futures, not of what will be.

And so much for memory, on which I must draw, across the veil of forty years, for recollections concerning the stories in this collection. What I say about them must be taken as the thoughts of a man writing of his favorite children—since brain children are enshrined hi the heart almost as tenderly as are real offspring.

Best beloved of all—since I do have favorites—is “Helen O’Loy.” This was the second story I sold, proving I was not a one-story author. It came easily, taking up only one pleasant afternoon of work and needing almost no rewriting; hi fact, even the first paragraph came without effort, which is unusual for me. And out in the world, Helen has always brought me more than I could expect. After almost forty years, she still earns more than a dozen times annually what I was paid for her initial appearance, which indicates others also share my love for her. Her spirit remains unquenched, and I am well-pleased with the lady, to say the least.

In those days of long ago, any sale to John W. Campbell was something of a triumph. His magazines were considered tops in the field, and he was gathering a stable of writers who have remained leaders down to the present. In my opinion then and now, he was one of the three greatest magazine editors of all time. I wrote as much for his approval as for payment; and I rarely thought of submitting my work to anyone else. To be considered one of his regulars was the ultimate achievement.

Thus when he chose me to receive two of the ideas he thought might be turned into stories, it was something like being knighted by the king. (Campbell was responsible for many more stories, by me and by other writers. And he taught us all much of what we eventually learned of writing. With or without suggestions, his letters were as real a reward for writing as were his checks.)

Those two first ideas from him appear here as “The Day Is Done” and “The Coppersmith.” Both developed easily from the sentence-or-two description of the idea Campbell sent, but I worked far harder over these two than I would have done over stories derived from my own ideas. Perhaps the care spent on them is responsible for the fact that I still place them high on my list of favorites.

Years after “The Day Is Done” was published, Isaac Asimov told me of first reading the story on a subway and breaking into tears, greatly to his embarrassment. Of course, Isaac was very young then, and his reaction was only what I had probably desired. But Isaac and I had by then developed friendly verbal byplay into a quest for one-upmanship over one another. So I used his story against him to further his embarrassment, disregarding his usual feeble retorts.

Finally, he saw a chance to get even. He included the story in an anthology, Where Do We Go from Here?—then followed it with a discussion, pointing out that the story was scientifically invalid, since I’d used the hoary idea that Neanderthaler man couldn’t speak, whereas real science no longer believed that. (Actually, I never indicated Hwoogh couldn’t speak; I straddled the issue by not having him speak to Cro-Magnon man.)

One week after Isaac’s book was published, The New York Times printed an article in which a real scientist explained that new evidence indicated Neanderthaler could not speak! Naturally, I immediately called Isaac on the phone to ask whether he’d seen the Times that day. Sadly, he answered: “I saw it. I was just hoping you hadn’t seen it.”

I suspect he cried a little while reading the article. If so, he’s never admitted it.

“Hereafter, Inc.” comes from another idea suggested by Campbell. As a matter of fact, he suggested the same basic idea to several goiters, all of whom wrote quite different stories^ b| my case, it took a couple of years before the story came into focus. When I delivered it, he approved, but obviously didn’t notice that the idea was really his. I pointed that out, and he smiled. “That’s probably why I bought it,” he told me. “You made it your own.”

“The Wings of Night” was my own idea, but it stemmed from something that occurred to me when creating the old Neanderthaler in “The Day Is Done.” Somehow, there is an automatic element of drama and strong feeling attached to the last of a kind, or sometimes the first. I had played with the idea of the last man in the Moon for a couple of years. Then one day, the plot came to mind and began to nag at me. I was busy with other rush work, but I had to sit down and write the story. Strange—I can’t remember now what really important work I abandoned to write this story for which I didn’t need money at the time. But the tale remains, far more important to me now than when I wrote it.

“Into Thy Hands” was hardly a joy to write. The idea was one I liked—that machines, no doubt including thinking machines, are very literal “minded.” (Computer men can assure you of that from much experience.) But the story was meant to be a long novelette, and Campbell was short of space. With great effort, I replotted it from twenty to eleven thousand words—and Campbell told me it had to be no longer than seven thousand! I learned a great deal about writing and story-telling as I sweated it down to length. And today, I’m delighted that market necessities forced me to sharpen its point, to turn a so-so novelette into a much better short story. Ever so often, the ill luck of early days becomes the memory of bright fortune later.

The second story I ever wrote, after selling the first one, was “And It Comes Out Here.” It amuses me now to see science fiction discovering “experimentation” and trying to write in present tense—necessarily badly most of the tune, when there is no reason for the breaking of custom. Forty years ago, flushed with the success of a single sale, I sat down brashly to construct a story that had to be told in second person and in future tense—altered to present tense to simplify, with the future understood.

Campbell rejected the story—not for the method of Celling, which he didn’t mind back in those “pulp writing” days, but because it went round and round and never came out of its circle. So it languished for a dozen years, with the original manuscript lost in the meantime. Then a discovery of notes and samples from my preliminary work enabled me to write it again, certainly almost exactly as it had been written at first. I’m glad the story eventually found a market in one of the magazines that had finally appeared to rival Campbell’s hi prestige. By then, the endless circle story had been done a number of times, so the idea no longer had the same novelty; but I hope and believe the story can stand on its own without the need of such novelty, which is never a substitute for story-telling.

“The Monster” was written one night as warm-up exercise for a novelette that was overdue. It was intended for a fly-by-night mystery magazine that wanted to experiment with some science fiction. By the time the story was received, the night had passed and the magazine had flown out of existence. That was my good fortune, since the story then sold to a “slick” market that paid ten times as much and gave the tale a much better showcase.

Back in 1950, there was a big flap hi science fiction over something called Dianetics, which I rather vigorously opposed as being handiman psychotherapy without a trained therapist, but with all kinds of wild claims. John Campbell was one of the advocates of the so-called “science of the mind,” and word soon reached me that he resented my stand and would never buy another story of mine.

I knew him better than that, but I wanted proof. I had written a short story called “The Years Draw Nigh” rather hastily. So I dug it out, thought about it as I could then only think when aiming a story at Campbell, and rewrote it as it should have been in the first place. I also had an idea about jsome robots (and in case no one has noticed, I :Jc«S| robots and have written a great many stories about’ them) which I wrote up as “Instinct.”

I took both stories in to Campbell. We barely mentioned Dianetics, had a pleasant lunch together, and talked. It had been a couple of years since we’d gotten together, but nothing had changed. Campbell bought both stories at his maximum rate. But for a year after that, I was still being told he was through with me.

“Superstition” and “For I Am a Jealous People” are also connected, in a way. Frederik Pohl was putting together an original anthology for Ballantine Books called Star Short Novels and felt he had to have one outstanding novel with which to end the book. He came to me, and I wrote “Superstition” for him, figuring that the idea of total superstition being absolute fact was a good one. But the story wasn’t strong enough for him. (Campbell bought it almost instantly.) He wanted a controversial story.

Well, I’d had an idea for a long time that couldn’t have been sold to any magazine at the time. And I was pretty sure Pohl wouldn’t take it, either, since it involved setting the God of the Bible—at least the Old Testament—against man. I made the idea sound as controversial as I could in outlining it—and he simply said, “Write it.” So the story that I never expected to write got on paper.

Actually, “Jealous People” is one of the few stories that grew from some of my own philosophy, instead of being pure story. I’d speculated on the responsibility of a man who served both God and Mankind, and who found them in violent opposition. To me, the answer was obvious. So was the result. But for that, I had to put my real ending in a “quotation” from a spurious book of the Bible as a heading for the last chapter.

“Superstition,” incidentally, is one of the few far-future, far-space stories I’ve written. To me, the real drama of a story lies within the characters, and the reality must lie within some reasonable distance of what we know. Beyond that distance, chaos rises to remove the order from drama.

“The Keepers of the House” was a trick story—one without any real surface plot or truly sentient character. I wrote it on a wager to prove that Campbell couldn’t be fooled by writing skill—and he rightly rejected it as having no plot. But so much went into making the trick work that I’ve always felt the final story conveyed far more than if I’d given all the plot and background behind it—which I do know in great detail, incidentally.

“Little Jimmy” was the result of a different kind of challenge. Tony Boucher was a fine editor, who had a stronger requirement for literary flavor than other magazine editors. I’d never sold him anything—nor, in fact, written anything for him. But finally I decided I would and could write something he couldn’t resist. So I took a simple idea and wrote it up in the style I’d previously used under a penname to sell a few slick stories. I wound up very pleased with the result, as was Boucher. I probably should have written others for him, but I never did.

As to “The Seat of Judgment,” it came about as a result of spending too much tune at the bar with Robert Mills, while he was an editor of Venture, a short-lived but excellent magazine. He kept demanding a story when I didn’t really want to do one. Finally, I picked a verse from the Bible and told him I’d only write a story around it, which I knew wasn’t what he wanted. But he bought the story on the spot, and I had to write it—much to my pleasure, as it turned out. There’s a bitter and rather blasphemous ending to the story—beyond the words I’ve written—which is clearly possible and perhaps can be guessed by anyone who cares to think about it.

And finally, there’s “Vengeance is Mine.” It came to be written as many stories were—I needed some money. I wanted to go to a Science Fiction Convention, but didn’t have the cash on hand; and for such things, I always insisted on having money I could safely spare. So Fred Pohl agreed to get me quick payment, and I wrote the story pretty much overnight. As happens with most of the stories I like best in retrospect, this one came very easily, if.

But behind if; of course, lay ideas which were important enough to me to add to my feeling for the story. I’ve studied a lot of history, and I never saw that the so-called positive emotions and ideas ever accomplished more than the “negative” ones. Love did very little for mankind throughout history; and while hate and envy and rage produced much to deplore, often the muse of history could bend such motives to shape the course of advancement and good. God, if you like, can use the Adversary—and usually does.

Judgment, like memory, is prone to color personal things hi ways which may not always stand the test of reality. And these are only the stories which I judge to be my best—for whatever best that may be.

But though there are many others I like (and many I wish I had never written), I am willing to be judged by the ones I have selected for this collection. Look on my works—and I hope you don’t despak!