Who Goes There?

Lester del Rey was one of several young writers who came about in the late ’30s, just in time for John W. Campbell to take over Astounding Science Fiction and reshape it to his liking. Along with Theodore Sturgeon, del Rey was a sentimentalist who right away made a reputation for “human” stories, some of which, like “The Faithful,” “Helen O’Loy,” and “The Day Is Done,” were very popular at the time. Del Rey started out as sort of a humanist, but, maybe because he got more accustomed to the cutthroat and low-paying nature of the industry, both the man himself and his fiction became a lot more bitter with time. Eventually he would marry Judy-Lynn del Rey, who proved to be one of the most talented editors of her time, sadly gone too soon. The del Reys’ most lasting impact might be in their founding of Del Rey Books, which persists to this day.

In the early ’50s, apparently to capitalize on a boom in the market, del Rey got to edit several new SFF magazines—all of them unfortunately short-lived. One of these is Space Science Fiction, and to inaugurate this new magazine del Rey decided to employ his favorite writer: himself. “Pursuit” is considerably more hard-boiled than early del Rey, and it’s a curious choice for introducing the magazine even if it’s far from the best.

Placing Coordinates

First published in the May 1952 issue of Space Science Fiction, which is on the Archive. It was then collected in Gods and Golems alongside other novellas and long novelettes. If you’re curious you can read it for free on Project Gutenberg, and actually running the Gutenberg text through a word processor convinced me it’s of novella length—about 18,000 words. ISFDB incorrectly lists it as a novelette.

Enhancing Image

Wilbur Hawkes is an assistant math professor and recent divorcee, which normally would make him the protagonist of a Saul Bellow novel if not for the fact that he can’t remember anything from the past seven months. He wakes up one day and finds he’s taken up smoking, a habit he did not have before, and that through circumstantial evidence he finds there’s a seven-month gap in his memory. He remembers granting his ex-wife a divorce and getting a letter from a certain Dr. Meinzer, but after that it’s a blank. Quickly things go amiss when he finds he’s being watched by somebody, who probably knows more than he does, probably G-men who look to take him in for some purpose. Or it could be one big misunderstanding. Much of the ensuing plot is Hawkes a) recovering what had happened during those seven months, and b) trying to evade men who perhaps wanna do him harm. Weird things start happening. A subway entrance collapses. A cat, miraculously and horrifying, gets turned inside out. Something either supernatural or super-scientific is going on, Hawkes is gonna find out.

I don’t have a lot to say with this one, for a couple reasons. It’s a short novella, true, and fast-paced, but it’s also a victim of its own sense of economy. Del Rey runs into a major storytelling problem here, which is the “and then” school of plotting. Much of “Pursuit” can be summed up as “And then Hawkes went to this place, and then this happened, and then this happened” a few times over until we slow down a bit. There is no B-plot so it’s a straight line from Hawkes’s apartment to when he meets Ellen, at which point the chase slows down and we’re allowed some backstory, if not enough to stop the chase from continuing. Ellen is a childhood friend of Hawkes’s, although the two have not met in many years—at least from Hawkes’s perspective. Ellen, for her part, knows a lot more than she lets on at first. The two clearly have chemistry and they hit it off in what would normally be hasty circumstances, but these would not be so hasty for Ellen. I have issues with the characters, or rather the lack of characters, but to give del Rey some credit his inserting of a romance plot could be less convincing.

“Pursuit” is not very good, but it does have a few points of interest. For one there’s a barely offscreen sex scene between people who are not married that I was surprised to read; must’ve been rather titillating for what would’ve been a puritanical SF readership. Indeed there’s a level of violence and sexuality prevalent here that would’ve kept this story out of the pages of Astounding, not to mention a persistent (if also rudimentary at best) harking to Freudian psychology. The unconscious keeps being called “unconsciousness,” and it’s a good thing del Rey’s been dead for thirty years or else I would kill him over that. The central conflict of “Pursuit” is between Hawkes’s conscious and unconscious mind, but the way it’s phrased makes it sounds like he’s fighting between being awake and being asleep. Anyway, it’s too racy for Astounding but also too unrefined for Galaxy, which I suppose means it’s a good thing the magazine market was oversaturated in the early ’50s. Del Rey seemed to be playing with the boundary between SF and detective fiction here, something he would apparently try again in Police Your Planet.

There Be Spoilers Here

The big twist of “Pursuit” is one I saw coming a mile away, which is that Hawkes had, prior to the story’s beginning, agreed to an experiment with psi powers and in the process became a kind of superman; all of the crazy shit that happens in the story is his own doing, or rather the doing of his unconscious mind. Hawkes is so powerful in fact that the men pursuing him are no serious threat to him, and even when he tries to kill himself (for what he thinks is the good of everyone) he physically can’t. It’s at the point where Hawkes realizes he’s stuck with his psi powers and that the cat’s out of the bag, so to speak, that del Rey makes it clear he’s not really talking about psi powers—he’s talking about nuclear weapons. I wonder if readers were already sick of nuclear allegories by 1952. Also, del Rey runs into the problem of how one would inject a story with conflict if it’s about a superman; there are several ways one can tackle this issue. A. E. van Vogt basically made a career out of justifying plots around characters who are nigh invincible, most famously in Slan where the solution was to make the superman a child in a world where there are adults, both normal and super, who wanna eat him for lunch. In the case of “Pursuit” del Rey “solves” the issue by giving his superman a case of amnesia. Success…?

A Step Farther Out

I was unsure at first if I would have a review out on time today, partly because of outside circumstances but also I have to admit I was dragging my feet on this one. Sure, it’s short and it goes by quickly, but I found so little to chew on. Those who read “Pursuit” might be reminded of early van Vogt, or even Philip K. Dick’s “Paycheck,” but this story is not up to the standard of either good van Vogt or good Dick for a multitude of reasons, not the least of these being its lack of human character. It’s almost a pure action narrative wherein the stakes turn out to be miniscule, even if del Rey tries to make a point at the end. That “Pursuit” probably wouldn’t have gotten published in a magazine del Rey wasn’t editing goes to show that as a writer your worst choice for an editor is yourself.

See you next time.