Book Review: Nerves by Lester Del Rey

 

Nerves by Lester Del Rey

153 pages, Paperback

Novel First published June, 1956 Novelette September 1942.

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Recently recorded a podcast for my Science Fiction Hall of Fame series on the classic story by Lester Del Rey Helen O’Loy. I have to admit before reading that story I have not read any work by the famous Golden Age author. I was familiar sure, when I was a young Science Fiction reader Del Rey's books were a mark of quality to me. I didn’t realize at the time that there were two people behind that name who had built that brand. (that is another column)

Podcast on Helen O'Loy and Del Rey

When preparing for the podcast I pulled this book off the shelf that I had there for a few years now waiting to be read. Lester Del Rey is an interesting character in Science Fiction who grew up in rural southeastern Minnesota unlike the New York Futurians he was alone and invented some hilarious mythologies about himself, and how he got his famous pen name. Leonard Knapp chose to live as Lester Del Rey and that is that.

In the late 30s like many young writers in that era, he was writing to please and sell to Astounding editor John W. Campbell. Once Del Rey had relocated to New York City and was a part of the community he became one of the authors that Campbell gave seeds of ideas to authors. As Issac Asimov’s Foundation became a loosely adapted AppleTV the world of Harry Seldon and the Galactic empire began with Campbell giving Asimov one of those seeds.

This novel Nerves is often cited as an example of predictive SF appears to have started with Campbell’s fascination with Nuclear power several years before the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. According to Alec Nevala- Lee’s biography of Campbel Astounding “Del Rey’s Masterpiece was ‘Nerves,’ a thriller about a nuclear accident that the editor pitched “not merely as an idea, but as to the viewpoint and the technique that made it possible.”  And that was what interested me. To write a novella about a Chernobyl-type meltdown in the early days of WW II is an excellent piece of speculative writing. The nuclear stories were enough to cause government agents to show and question Campbell, who would have told you it was reading scientific journals.

The Novella of Nerves first appeared in the September 1942 issue of Astounding. It is a great issue of the magazine The issue opens with a time travel novella by Anthony Boucher (six years before starting his Berkeley SF classes), Fredric Brown who was known for bringing humor to SF in the golden era, and Lewis Padgett the joint pseudonym of the science fiction authors Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. 

The novel published in 1956 is called an expansion or fix-up but it is different. It is the same idea and characters just written with a narrative structure. While the novelette version was overseen by Campbell as editor, Fredrick Pohl who was serving as Del Rey’s agent in 1956 oversaw the novel, enough that Del Rey dedicated it to him. This story coming from 1956 is a little less impressive but the Obninsk Nuclear Power Plant, in the Soviet Union had been going for two years. Still, the short story was 12 years before that.

The story is centered around Doctor Ferrel the lead medical personnel working in the atomic planet in Missouri. It is not stated in the story what year this is, but it is implied that the country has been using atomic energy for a few decades. We are introduced to the Doctor when he is on-call and breaks back to the plant to deal with an emergency. Del Rey (or Campbell) was smart to use the angle of the medical staff. It puts one of Campbell's beloved competent heroes in the story but the medical doctor doesn’t have to have to knowledge of atomics that an expert would.

The politics of the plant and where it was placed in the world were very curious to me. Del Rey plays with the idea that neighborhoods were built around the plant but over time people didn’t want to keep living close to it. The retro nature of this story is right on the surface once the crisis starts there is a scene when they try to find the scientist from the plant and they are calling restaurants and nightclubs around town. Del Rey didn’t envision a future when a cell phone or even a pager existed. But the paper printout on 1940s spaceships is one of the reasons we read the old stuff right?

Through the eyes of the doctor much of the action and suspense centers around the burns and damage to the workers. Even though the theme is in the title, it is often overlooked the role of fear of what could happen.

“Nerves! Jorgenson had his blocked out, but Ferrel wondered if the rest of them weren’t in as bad a state. Probably somewhere well within their grasp, there was a solution that was being held back because the nerves of everyone in the plant were blocked by fear and pressure that defeated its own purpose.”

The idea that fear and nerves are caused by working so close to powers so great is much of the building of terror and suspense. In some ways, the shorter more compact novelette from 1942 sells this better. The art of terror-filled faces certainly didn’t hurt.

Nerves is a better artifact than a novel, like CM Kornbluth’s Takeoff of a Moonshot written 17 years before humans made it there. It is interesting to explore. I enjoyed reading this novel but if you don’t find the out-of-date stuff charming and interesting it may not work for you. Is this canon for the genre? Who am I to say but I think the way it predicted stuff is important and interesting so in that sense yes.  I consider this canon, of course, that is just my opinion but that is what I am here for. Nerves offers much to study and understand. It teaches us what the speculation of a nuclear accident was like. We now have three real-life accidents to compare it to. To many the events in the real world only added to its power.