Lester del Rey (1915–1993)

This was better than I expected and not as satirical as the C. M. Kornbluth’s and Pohl’s collaboration The Space Merchants.

It was, of course, the advertising industry that dominated the world in that novel. Here it’s an insurance company, simply called the Company. As Pohl explains in his afterword, “The Art and Agony of Collaboration”, Pohl’s conceptual inspiration for the story is that, rightly or wrongly, money guides peoples’ behavior. What if you had a system where someone made a profit mitigating the evils of life?

The Company is that someone, a single insurance company that came to dominate the world after the Short War (seemingly a nuclear exchange between the US and USSR). It not only writes policies for life insurance. It has food and medical policies too. And, as our hero Tom Willis would be happy to tell you, it’s eliminated war and want.

At least that’s what he’d say if you asked him when he arrives in Naples, Italy in the wake of a local war fought between that city and Sicily. The world has balkanized under the Company and only America has maintained something like its old size.

Willis is something of an unusual convert to the Company. And convert is the right word. He regards the Company as something like a sacred institution that has solved the worlds problems, run by incorruptible men including its sainted founder Carmody. Willis even has Company scripture he carries about, the Adjustor’s Handbook. But Willis didn’t always feel that way. In fact, after the early death from disease of his wife Marianna back in America, he publicly denounced the Company, vandalized some of its property, and was jailed only to be bailed out by one of Marianna’s relatives, Defoe who is the Company’s Chief Underwriter.

On arriving in Naples, Willis will meet Zorchi, a strange man who will play a prominent role in the story and who has become wealthy by staging grisly accidents that maim him so he can collect the insurance. He’ll also meet Rena dell’Angela, a beautiful local girl whom he will fall in love with.

Willis will learn, after meeting his new boss who heads the Naples office, that Company officials aren’t all creatures of virtue, competence, and incorruptibility. And he’ll also meet, through Rena (deemed uninsurable), anti-Company rebels who point out that not only has war not ceased under the Company’s rule but medical research and social mobility has stagnated.

That’s crazy talk as far as Willis is concerned, but he wants to talk the beautiful Rena out of her ideas before she comes to real harm. And, so, Willis finds himself embedded with the rebels in a story that will take us into the ancient catacombs under Rome to a gun battle in the ruins of Pompeii to the new medical catacombs, where the Company parks people with the promise to revive them at a future date when they can be cured,.

Pohl and del Rey don’t rig the political perspectives of the story. There are benefits to Company rule as well as downsides. Some of the rebels have crazy, dangerous plans. And those plans aren’t going to work out as expected. But then neither are the Company’s.

The novel ends on a rumination that no system of government is perfect, that eternal revolution seems to be humanity’s lot.

To be sure, at least one major plot twist was predictable, but, for the most part, this story takes some unexpected turns in both character and plot, a quick and enjoyable read

In Pohl’s and del Rey’s afterword, “Risk, But Not Preferred”, they talk about how their friendship survived their collaboration and how they annoyed each other with their very opposite approaches to writing. Del Rey liked to plot everything in advance, and Pohl liked to make it up as he went along.

They also talk about how a novelette they gave to H. L. Gold became this novel. Gold was running a novel contest for the magazine Beyond Fantasy Fiction. The deadline had passed, and Gold didn’t like any of the entries, so he proposed Pohl and del Rey turn their novelette into this novel. It was a guaranteed winner. It would become the one and only publication credit for Edson McCann.… (more)

An OK entry in the Winston juvenile series, written by Lester del Rey under a pseudonym, very much like his Attack from Atlantis, but much more focused and a bit more plausible. Very much a boy's adventure. A mom and sister are referenced briefly but this is primarily a trek story as the teen protagonist and an aged prospector make a long difficult journey over the Mercurial landscape in the twilight region, to try and get a radio message sent to get help for their village before a solar storm strikes. No surprises, except for one minor early element where a minor character that normally fills the annoying not-quite-villain role is given a bit more humanity in a natural way.

Recommended if you're a fan of the Winston series and aware of their limitations.… (more)