It’s not often you get to see how a writer begins his or her career. The exception is in wonderful books like The Early Del Rey (1975), where the author lays it all out for you. In Lester’s case he began in protest. This is not an unusual thing. H. Rider Haggard wrote King Solomon’s Mines (1885) because he thought Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island (1882) was not as great as everybody thought. Haggard was challenged by his brother to do better. Whether he did or not is a matter of opinion but King Solomon’s Mines has taken its proud place beside Stevenson in the Adventure Classics section.
Lester Del Rey (born Leonard Knapp) had a similar experience. Having finished the January 1938 issue of Astounding, he was so incensed by a story he threw his magazine on the floor. (Now to SF collectors and fans, you know it’s serious if you would throw a magazine at all. We keep things in little bags and would not crease or blemish them in anyway!) The story that caused this tempest-in-a-teapot was Manly Wade Wellman’s “Pithecanthropus Rejectus”. Del Rey casts aspersions on the story, though he is fairly vague about why in his introduction in The Early Del Rey: “I suspect my dislike was at the unsuccessful part of the idea.” He doesn’t illuminate us as to what this failure is.
This would imply that “Pithecanthropus Rejectus” is a poor item. This is simply not true. If you need proof, consider Damon Knight, an editor and writer of high standards, selected the story for Science Fiction of the 1930s (1976), a volume in which he tried to prove that not all stories written before John W. Campbell’s Golden Age were crap. The story has been anthologized at least six times.
The tale concerns an ape called Congo who has mental and physical changes performed upon him by a scientist he calls “Doctor”. The doctor’s wife is “Mother” and she is Congo’s only real family as the ruthless scientist treats Congo as a mere experiment. Eventually, the super ape is sold into show business and eventually his fame increases so much he becomes a Shakespearean actor in The Tempest, playing Caliban. At one point, Congo travels to Africa, escapes and finds his old tribe. They reject him and he goes back to his human owners. The story ends when after all his fame and success, Doctor returns to Congo to tell him that he is going to create a multitude of ape slaves for humanity. Congo kills his creator before surrendering to authorities. Knowing that Congo can not be tried as a human, they decide to put him down. Asked if he has any last requests, Congo pleads for a pencil and paper and enough time to write the narrative you have just read.
“Pithecanthropus Rejectus” has plenty of pathos and I fail to see why Del Rey hated it. Wellmen does many wonderful things in the story including retelling Caliban’s story, suggesting the first kernel of what will one day be Conquest of the Planet of the Apes (1972) as well as revisits the memory of the Angolian jungle where Wellman was raised as a child with his missionary parents. Perhaps most important, he tells the story from Congo’s point-of-view. This may seem trivial today but Science Fiction fans made quite a deal of Eando Binder telling a robot story from the machine’s POV in 1939 when he wrote “I, Robot”. Is telling the story from the monster’s POV so much different? (Think of all the novels that have been written in the last thirty plus years from Frankenstein’s monster’s or Dracula’s POV.) Where did Wellman get the idea to write “Pithecanthropus Rejectus” this way?
He had actually tried the idea ten years earlier in his writing premiere, a Weird Tales short called “Back to the Beast” (November 1927) about a scientist who turns back evolution. He is trapped in the body of his ape ancestor and can feel himself losing his human control as primitive emotions take over. Wellman does not use this technique in “Pithecanthropus Rejectus”, having Congo tell the story in one voice alone. It is interesting though that Daniel Keyes would use the idea of changing narrator intelligence in his most famous work “Flowers for Algernon” (1958). Wellman had done the same thing on a lesser scale back in 1927.
That brings us back to 1938 and Lester Del Rey. Complaining about the story an unnamed girlfriend challenges Lester to do better. Could he write a story? Who was he to criticize a published author? With that Haggard-style challenge, Del Rey set his sights on selling a story to the same magazine, John W. Campbell’s Astounding, the top SF magazine of the day. The story he wrote was called “The Faithful” (Astounding Science Fiction, April 1938) and it won him the bet. Campbell bought it for forty dollars.
“The Faithful” tells the story of scientifically-altered dogs that survive an apocalypse, first war then a plague. All the humans are dead except for one, a scientist named Paul Kenyon. With Kenyon’s help, the Dog-people retrieve much of man’s technology but still lack opposable thumbs. Kenyon comes up with a plan to find the Ape-people, who were also surgically altered, in Africa and have them become the companions of the dogs. This quest goes off without much difficulty and the dogs and apes are together when Kenyon dies, leaving them the Earth, rung in with Kenyon’s dying words.
Sam Moskowitz claimed that Lester Del Rey’s work is sentimental, calling him in Seekers of Tomorrow (1965)” …an author whose reputation had been built on tear-jerkers threaded with passages of somewhat purplish prose that verged on poetry.” This is evident in “The Faithful” as the dogs love Humankind with almost religious reverence. (The apes are little more realistic, liking us for our cigarettes.) Plotwise, there is no real conflict in this story. The dogs want to carry on man’s civilization (without war) and proceed to do so. The idea that dogs worship us and would want to become us would not sit well today with groups like P.E.T.A. The whole thing is pretty naïve and in my own opinion far less interesting than Wellman’s “Pithecanthropus Rejectus”.
Del Rey does make one true statement in his complaint: “…Wellman had used an ape, so I chose dogs as my hopefuls. So far as I could remember, few science fiction stories had used dogs, though a lot had messed around with the apes.” Early Science Fiction covers are well known for their apes. Whether it was covers from Weird Tales or “Manape the Mighty” (Astounding, June 1931) by Arthur J. Burks or “The Return of the Whispering Gorilla” by David V. Reed (Fantastic Adventures, February 1943) or “The War of the Giant Apes” by Alexander Blade (Fantastic Adventures, April 1949), you get the idea. Later, Julius Schwartz would take the gorilla cover into comics. At DC, Schwartz believed any Superhero cover that featured an ape would sell better than other issues.
As poor as “The Faithful” is, after Del Rey came the very famous City (1952) by Clifford D. Simak, in which dogs inherit the earth. The story is framed in dog history that the reader can see is flawed and sometimes confused. There is no human survivor here but the robot Jenkins does serve a similar focal point like Kenyon in Del Rey’s tale. City is actually a collection of stories, the first being “City” (Astounding, May 1944) but the intelligent dogs don’t show up until “Hobbies” (November 1946) and all the dog history
framework was created in the final novel form in 1952. Another story that may hang from this same tree is Edmond Hamilton’s “Day of Judgment” (Weird Tales, September 1946) in which evolved animals hold the earth until a spaceship full of humans returns. Was Del Rey’s story an inspiration to Simak and Hamilton? I can’t find any statement by either author to this effect but del Rey does get credit for being first. Also to be noted is John W. Campbell’s presence here, being the editor who worked with Wellman, Del Rey and Simak. (Hamilton wrote one story for Campbell but found him too time-consuming to deal with.)
