"Delusion Drive"

"Delusion Drive" was one of three John D MacDonald stories published in the April 1949 issue of the science fiction pulp Super Science Stories. This was MacDonald's first appearance in the magazine that would eventually publish eighteen of his tales, and he started with a bang, penning more entries in this issue than any other other author. Still, as one can see from the cover, he wasn't an established name in the s-f community as yet and only received a name blurb: no cover art, no title copy. His novella titled "Death Quotient" was the only story to bear his real name, as the other two were assigned house names: "All Our Yesterdays" was credited to "John Wade Farrell" and "Delusion Drive" was supposedly written by Peter Reed.

Super Science Stories has a rather fractured publishing history, and it probably should be considered two separate pulp magazines. It began in 1940 (six years before MacDonald started writing) as a fairly standard science fiction adventure pulp with writer Frederik Pohl serving as the initial editor. Pohl used his position to publish much of his own work, but also was responsible for publishing early stories by Isaac Asimov, James Blish (his first), Ray Bradbury (his first paid piece) and L. Sprague De Camp, whose collaboration with P. Schuyler Miller -- Genus Homo -- has been routinely considered the magazine's finest moment. This first incarnation of the magazine lasted only 16 issues and ended with the May 1943 issue. (To further confuse matters, three of the 16 issues were titled Super Science Novels.) 

In January 1949 the publisher (Popular Publications' subsidiary Fictioneers, Inc.) launched a second version of the magazine, continuing the same numbering system for volumes and issues. Now edited by Ejler Jakobsson (with author Damon Knight serving as assistant editor), the pulp published 15 more issues before expiring for good with the August 1951 issue. And although the second incarnation of Super Science Stories began in January, its second issue wasn't published until April, the issue featuring these three JDM stories. Another gap followed until the third issue was published in July, when it settled down to a bi-monthly schedule. Then again, in 1951, there was a gap between January and April before sputtering off with its final two issues.

MacDonald's contributions to Super Science Stories seem more impressive when taking into account this sporadic publishing history. Of the second version's 15 issues, MacDonald stories appeared in ten of them, and of those ten, seven featured more than one JDM story. Pretty impressive for an author who was only dabbling in the world of science fiction.

"Delusion Drive" is easily the weakest of the the three MacDonald stories appearing in the April issue, although it isn't a bad effort. It takes a fairly standard plot that had been used in countless seafaring stories and puts it into space. What makes "Delusion Drive" interesting -- and what obviously made it interesting for the author -- is how the issue of long-distance space travel is dealt with, that ageless problem for both author and scientist alike, faster-than-light travel (FTL). Here MacDonald calls it "Space Rip."

The protagonist of "Delusion Drive" is named Bill Torrance, an eighteen-year-old would-be "space rat" whose outer space travels have been limited to the "VEM run." (I assume that's Venus-Earth-Mars.) He's signed on to the Leandor, "one of the middle-sized freighters of the Troy Line" as a cook's helper. Torrance walks with an affected swagger, a ruse he hopes will convince his fellow crewmates that he is a "hardened space rat," not a novice.

"I wanted them to think I'd been outside the [solar] system and knew all about Space Rip, which was the way the Leandor traveled."

But as he is unpacking his bags near his bunk, he carelessly asks his roommate Jameson about "the Rip," and Jameson immediately tags him as a "greeny." "You'll know it when it starts, Greeny," he tells him contemptuously. 

"He had a nasty, superior way about him and I didn't answer. But I saw that he kept licking his lips and that he was afraid."

As the two await the jump to FTL, Torrance lies in his bunk, wishing he hadn't said anything.

"My remark had been stupid. I'd read enough about Space Rip to know that nobody has been able to explain the feeling... I grabbed the bunk stanchion to brace myself, but it wasn't that kind of a jar, the sort that you can brace yourself against. It felt as if I had been swatted by a huge club, and yet instead of a club it was made of sharp knives set close together. The knives were 'so sharp that my body offered no resistance and so the big club passed right through me, leaving me ... sort of misty and vague. Apart at the seams. I noticed the greyness then. All colors gone. Everything was a shade of grey and everything had a slight, almost noticeable flicker about it, like the old movies in the museum. All feeling of movement was gone."

When Torrance is called to the galley to begin work, he engages in a long, somewhat philosophical conversation with the cook about the mechanics -- as they understand it -- of Space Rip. In its most basic terms, the Rip changes the ship into "something that isn't physical and then it reassembles it on the other end." When the cook tells him that what they have been changed into is "a concept," things get deep, and MacDonald veers off into ideas and theories that stop the narrative dead in its tracks. It's not as bad as the mind-numbing "science" in his "Escape to Chaos," but it's pretty close.

Then, as the journey is about to end, the story resumes and we get guns, knives and all sorts of unexpected excitement. And an ending that could have come out of any adventure pulp of the day.

As MacDonald famously wrote in his afterword to Other Times, Other Worlds, "One must be able to sustain one's own belief in order to write believable fiction." He was referring specifically to how "the merciless mathematics of Einstein and Fitzgerald" kept FTL technology from ever being feasible. He claimed that even the simple act of writing about it was "cruel" and "counterproductive to the races of man."(!) Well... MacDonald could certainly be a superior-sounding prig when he wanted to, but it is clear from "Delusion Drive" that he thought something like Space Rip somewhat possible, even back in 1949. Besides, the world of science fiction would be nothing without some means to travel to the stars relatively quickly, and writers have given us many different variations on the idea, from Star Trek's warp drive, to Star Wars' Hyper Space, to the neatest of all (at least from a fictional point of view), Battlestar Galactica's instant FTL "jumps." All of these methods originated in science fiction pulp writing and became especially prevalent in the post-atomic age. From more and more powerful rocket fuels, to atomic motors, to warp drives, hyperspace, wormholes and stargates, s-f authors continually came up with new, sometimes novel ways to transverse the impossibly huge distances of outer space. MacDonald's Space Rip seems to have been inspired by the "space warp" school of thought, one seen sporadically in fiction before 1949 and which gained household name recognition with the creation of Star Trek. MacDonald even gave his Space Rip theory an algebraic equation, calling it "Dakeon's Formula" (For all you would-be inventors, here it is: The square root of the distance in light years equals the cube of the trip time in weeks. Please get back to me if the thing really works.)

"Delusion Drive" is currently available in eBook format, included in the Wonder Audiobooks JDM anthology Death Quotient and Other Stories, which you can find on Amazon or any similar online book store for under five bucks.

"All Our Yesterdays"

"One man sat in his death cell, hoping for the miracle he knew would never come. Another watched him, owl-eyed, across the abyss of time; and neither dreamed that their lives were bound up together—that of these two, who were separated by centuries, one must die for the other!"

"All Our Yesterdays" is a John D MacDonald time travel story, a work of science fiction that originally appeared in the April 1949 issue of Super Science Stories under the house name of John Wade Farrell. The pseudonym was necessary since MacDonald had another story -- "Death Quotient" -- in that same issue under his own name, and pulp editors rarely if ever allowed two stories to appear with the same author's name. In addition, MacDonald had a third story in that same issue, "Delusion Drive," under yet another house name, Peter Reed. And one wonders why the exact number of JDM stories is still a subject for debate...

The subject of time travel was an immensely popular one in the science fiction pulps of the forties and fifties, although MacDonald doesn't seem to have employed it often. His use of it in "All Our Yesterdays" falls more into the category of "time paradox," that subcategory of time travel where careless actions while in the past reshape those of the present and future. Its most notable example is perhaps Ray Bradbury's 1952 story "A Sound of Thunder," where the mere act of killing a butterfly in the Mesozoic Era causes subtle-but-major changes in the present, much to the horror of the perpetrator. And although "All Our Yesterdays" predates Bradbury's tale by three years, the time-paradox trick had been around since at least 1938 with Jack Williamson's The Legion of Time, and I'm sure the s-f expert could cite earlier examples. MacDonald's perhaps-unique approach to the subject involves a futuristic initiate class who are permitted to observe the past, not by travelling themselves, but by sending some sort of unseen camera and microphone back so that they can look but not interfere.

Ghan the younger is a "tenth-level" crime-seeker on future Earth, a relatively high-level initiate whose job it is to observe crimes taking place in the past on a three-dimensional screen in his home. The focus of this effort is to view instances where justice has miscarried and Ghan's favorite era is mid-twentieth century United States. The powers that be are well aware of the dangers of attempting to manipulate the past, which is why only tenth-level mentalities are permitted to use the machines. While the devices they use do not permit a body to actually travel to the past, with the proper nudging of the controls one could bring the camera so close that it would be observed and even felt. Their reasoning is spelled out in the story's brief preface:

"It is more than a problem of focus. It is more than a question of intellectual curiosity. Though the tendency is for divergence to swing back to norm, it is recognized that objective interference in any case may have a long range effect sufficient to cause objective alterations in present society. Thus, the entertainment quotient of Crime-seeking is perforce limited to those tenth-level mentalities where, due to knowledge, thalamic motivations can be recognized as such, and discounted. Any attempt by a tenth-level mentality to indoctrinate any lesser mentality in Crime-seeking procedure will result in social isolation for an indefinite period. The clearest analogy of the danger of objective interference is that of the primitive man who, clinging to a limb, saws it off between his body and the trunk of the tree."

But Ghan the younger has a problem: he's fallen in love with a "lesser mentality," an eighth level hottie named Luria, "of the cobalt eyes, the honey flesh, the rounded warm arms and soft lips." The couple has been enjoying secret assignations in Ghan's home for a while now, and the only thing he worries more about than being discovered is the possibility that Luria is secretly seeing another eighth level, "a hulking brute of a man" named Powell. The trick then is to keep her happy and occupied, but when Ghan refuses to allow her to see the time machine in action, her first reaction is to threaten to return to Powell. Ghan can't allow that and keep his sanity, so he reluctantly agrees to allow her one viewing. He pulls out a book on twentieth century crime and Luria points at random to a particular name: John Homrik. Homrik was a resident of Kingston, New York back in 1948 and was executed for murdering his child bride Anna, and then faking it to make it appear she had hung herself in the kitchen of their apartment. Ghan adjusts the camera to reveal the death row section of the prison where Homrik is held and it follows him down the green mile as he is strapped into the electric chair and executed. 

Luria is transfixed, not only at how realistic the three dimensional images are, but at how different men appeared back in that dim past, "...strong and... like a man. In these days there are no men like that." Luria immediately asks Ghan to allow her to see the actual crime committed, and having agreed once, he agrees again. They witness the couple at home after an incident of infidelity on Anna's part. Anna is deeply guilty and abject, while John does his best to try and convince her that she is forgiven. They make love and afterward, while John is sleeping, Anna is observed sneaking out of bed, walking into the kitchen and hanging herself. It's a miscarriage of justice, just the type of thing Ghan is trained to look for and he makes a mental note to tell his associates about this particular case. But Luria wants more. Luria wants to prevent the suicide, to prevent Homrik's unjust execution. While Ghan attempts to explain why such an action could change everything they know, Luria climbs onto his lap, chews on his ear and begs him to let her see the suicide just one more time...

"All Our Yesterdays" is a neat but predictable tale, an interesting exercise in plotting and character that allows MacDonald to play the Great Moralizer on a grand scale. It's inclusion in the recent eBook anthology Death Quotient and Other Stories allows the modern reader a chance to enjoy this fable for the first time in sixty years, but unfortunately the story suffers from the same sloppy editing that mars the other inclusions in that collection. Here the editors begin the text with the Super Science Stories promotional blurb (included above) as the first paragraph of the story, complete with exclamation mark! Since that is a grammatical immaturity MacDonald never practiced, it's error is obvious. The blurb is immediately followed by the introductory preface quoted earlier, making the lurch into the actual narrative jarring indeed. I was an early purchaser of this eBook, and I bought the Acrobat version, so perhaps these errors are not present in other formats, or they have hopefully since been corrected.

"Death Quotient"

"Death Quotient" is a John D MacDonald science fiction novella that was originally published in the April 1949 issue of Super Science Stories. It appeared alongside two other MacDonald stories, "All Our Yesterdays" and "Delusion Drive" and as was the custom at the time, the latter two tales were printed under "house names." God forbid that someone should see JDM's name more than once in the same issue. It was simpler, I suppose, to trick the reader.

Thanks to the recent eBook publication of Death Quotient and Other Stories, all three are available again for the first time in 60 years.

The setting for "Death Quotient" is near-future Earth, probably the late 1950's or early Sixties. It's year three of World War III and the two sides are at a kind of stalemate, although "the invader" has managed to secure a beachhead on American soil. MacDonald sets the background nicely in a few brief, early paragraphs:

"The atomic bomb had proven to be an almost perfect weapon during the first two weeks of the war. Millions had died. But human courage and resources had rendered obsolete the vast, white flare, the mushroom cloud.

"In the first weeks of war, every center of industrial production in the United States had been wiped out, along with an estimated forty-five million people.But from the secret launching stations that were undamaged, the retaliatory rockets had smashed the vast resources of the potential invader.

"There followed a lull of almost a year, while each participant licked wounds, decentralized, made a national inventory of tools and resources, and established new production facilities in deep places in the earth.

"Having suffered the least damage, the invader was able to equip a fleet and, after almost crippling losses, establish a beachhead on the New England coast. Six months later the expanded beachhead reached to within eighteen miles of where the city of Albany had once stood, and north to the eastern shore of Hudson Bay.

"And for a year and a half the lines had remained practically static. It was vicious war, without principal, without mercy. Due to the decentralization of facilities and the use of vast underground defensive networks, the usefulness of the atomic bomb had become much like that of a sledge hammer for driving a tack...

"For a year and a half it had been a war of knife and pistol and bare hands...

"In the end, both sides had learned that the weapon which would win would be brave men, armed with portable weapons, who could kill other brave men at close quarters."

Second Lieutenant Martin Rhode, stationed somewhere in the Chemung Valley, is the hero of this tale. He's been detached from his usual job of conducting surreptitious raids behind enemy lines in order to lead a truck convoy of much needed supplies to a point near the town of Oneonta. But halfway down Route 17 in the dead of night, the convoy is stopped by "a perfectly straight bolt of lightning, thicker than any lightning flash ... ever seen, driving straight down from the cloudless heavens to bury itself in the earth with a thick, chunking noise that seemed to shake the road." With the huge hole directly in the middle of the road, Martin orders the convoy to go around it while he investigates. The hole is two hundred feet in diameter and the cut along the side looks as if it were sliced cleanly with a knife. He climbs down to find that the path takes a sharp right turn parallel with the ground surface. Then, toward the end of the tunnel, he sees light.

Meanwhile, outside troops have arrived and have discovered an invisible wall surrounding the hole, reaching up into the sky as high as any of their aircraft can climb. It is invulnerable to any attempt to penetrate it. A weird, hypersonic noise emanates from the area causing severe depression to anyone within earshot. The military believes the hole is the work of some new enemy weapon and begins working to try and penetrate the wall. Rhode is assumed to be dead.

But the enemy is just as perplexed. They have sent ten missiles to try and destroy it, but all of them have crashed into the towering, invisible wall and have been obliterated.

And of course Rhode is not dead. Trapped beneath the surface he discovers a huge metallic thing and two alien beings who immobilize him and who communicate telepathically. Their appearance causes a deep-seated fear in him:

"The thing on the floor was a vast, pulpy, obscene caricature of a man. Naked and gray. Eyes with faceted prisms protruding from the face, a tiny furred orifice below the eyes, and a wide lemon-yellow gash that was a mouth. Ten feet tall if standing, he guessed. The arms were oddly jointed and there was something horribly wrong about the hands and fingers, the fingers curling to the outside of where the wrists should be, rather than in toward the body."

They are members of a warrior race, far advanced, who have been fighting the members of another planet for thousands of years. Their ship has crashed on Earth and they are going to use their misfortune to advantage: they plan to lure a number of enemy ships to their location and then destroy them... by blowing up the planet!

Of course there is an obligatory paragraph making all of the necessary comparisons to the violence of humanity:

"In the beginning tribe fights tribe, then city fights city, then nation fights nation, then continent fights continent. That is your present stage. Should you survive this stage, you will find planet fighting planet, then solar system fighting foreign solar system, and at last galaxy warring with galaxy. Who can tell? Possibly beyond that is universe making war with universe, or dimension against dimension. In each step there is always the possibility of mutual extermination, and with that, the peace that living things can find. Only in death is there peace, and death is the final step."

In the end Rhode figures out a way to warn humanity of this collective threat, and mankind reacts accordingly.

Whenever I come across a JDM science fiction story that the author elected not to include in his 1978 anthology Other Times, Other Worlds, I am immediately curious as to why. With "Death Quotient" it's pretty obvious. It's a basic pulp tale, lacking in much depth or sub-text, and the ending is a variation on an old s-f device that probably had whiskers on it even back in 1949. It's been used many times since, most notably (and imaginatively) in the 1963 Outer Limits episode "The Architects of Fear." MacDonald had nothing to be ashamed of in "Death Quotient," and it is an enjoyable read, but he adds little to the vocabulary of science fiction here and the story possesses none of the characteristic JDM "voice."

It's nice to have it available again, but be warned that the eBook version is marred by numerous spelling mistakes, typographical errors and formatting problems. The errors are at times infuriating, especially the lack of the author's characteristic double-spaced scene shifts that cause the reader to have to stop dead in their tracks in order to get their bearings. Had such a sloppy product been released in JDM's lifetime it likely would have been the last eBook he ever authorized.

"The Great Stone Death"

When John D MacDonald was asked by Stephen King to write an Introduction for his 1978 collection of short stories Night Shift, MacDonald responded with an interesting, at times belligerent piece about the mechanics of writing. While praising King and deploring the large majority of popular authors -- "...household names who have never really bothered to learn their craft" -- he made two observations about the field of writing King specialized in. His first was a kind of backhanded compliment toward King which disparaged the horror field:

"... I do not give a diddly-whoop what Stephen King chooses as an area in which to write. The fact that he presently enjoys writing in a field of spooks and spells and slitherings in the cellar is to me the least important and useful fact about the man anyone can relate."

The second was a more direct aphorism about the field in general:

"Two of the most difficult areas to write in are humor and the occult. In clumsy hands the humor turns to dirge and the occult turns funny."

MacDonald does not reveal that he himself once tried writing horror, way back at the beginning of his career when he was churning out short stories for the pulps. He had two tales printed in the most famous of all horror pulps, Weird Tales, both published in early 1949 and both largely forgotten. The first of those stories, "The Great Stone Death," originally published in the January 1949 issue, has recently been anthologized in the 2010 eBook Death Quotient and Other Stories, and using MacDonald's own rules as outlined in the Night Shift Introduction, we can be thankful that it was not a field the author pursued afterward.

The story reads like any tale a reader could have easily found in one of the pre-code horror comic books of the era (I was particularly reminded of "The Thing With the Golden Hair."). Two men on horseback are riding along a trail deep in the wilderness of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains. John Logan has been persuaded by his companion Steve Fowler to take this camping trip in order to have John "learn the country." He's recently relocated to the American Southwest because of a lung problem, but has spent most of his time in a hotel bar, gazing out at the mountains with "a kind of sneering look." This bothered Steve, a local who has spent a lot of time in the mountains, and he eventually convinces Logan to make the trip.

Logan is regretting his decision. His horse has thrown him once already and he has a perpetual feeling of unease about the wilderness, "...as though some grim spirit crouched back in the blue shadows and silently watched their progress with an enigmatic smile." He is a city boy and takes comfort in the safety of a place "where he could protect himself." He views Steve as a guileless simpleton with no imagination. When the two make camp for the night, Logan reveals his fears to Steve, who laughs them off.

Logan: "There are thousands of square miles that have never been seen by man. Actually, they are the same as they were back in the dawn of history. Who knows what you might run across up in these hills."

Steve: "The great stone lizard, maybe?"

Logan: "What's that?"

Steve: "Oh, foolish Indian talk. Their old men talk about some great stone lizard that lives up above the timberline. Been up here for centuries, the way they tell it."

Logan: "It could be."

Steve: "Hell, man! You beginning to sound like the Indians."

When Steve compares his own feelings about New York City to Logan's fear of the wilderness, the uneasiness subsides, but only until Steve drifts off to sleep. Then Logan lies there awake:

"... he looked up at the unwinking stars and the roar of the stream seemed to be whispering something to him in hoarse, damp words. Words he couldn't quite understand. He huddled down deeper in the bedroll and licked dry lips. Far off in the pine forest something screamed in distant, futile horror. The sound sent feathers of ice crawling up his spine. Deadly is the long night."

By morning his fears had lessened and the two enjoy breakfast before heading out again... to a place far up above the timberline...

"The Great Stone Death" is a relatively short work of 3,600 words that is as predictable as it is derivative. MacDonald obviously has no love or appreciation of of the horror genre and the tale reads like a well-done pastiche, which it probably was. It is usually classified along with his other science fiction works simply because something impossible happens, but it reads with a kind of detached air that tells me the author really wasn't interested in what he was doing. It's not poorly written or uninteresting, it just doesn't leave the reader with the sense of wonder and place that his other s-f stories do.

Yet the JDM fan should be happy to see it republished, even if it's only in eBook form. Unfortunately I'm discovering that Death Quotient and Other Stories is marred by more than a few typographical errors, usually the kind that pass a spell-check but are actually the wrong words. Nowhere is this more unfortunate than in "The Great Stone Death," where the last word in the story is almost certainly in error and possibly spoils a surprise ending. Having no access to the original, I can only speculate.

Death Quotient and Other Stories

A new John D MacDonald book has been published!

Twenty-three years after the author's death we get to add one more title to the JDM oeuvre. It's a science fiction anthology called Death Quotient and Other Stories and it contains seven previously-published works of short fiction, primarily from two issues of the old Super Science Stories pulp. The great news is that five of these stories have never been anthologized before, meaning they are available again for the first time since 1949. Two of the new pieces are novellas and one of the shorter works is an ultra-rare JDM experiment in horror from Weird Tales. The price is an incredibly-low $4.49 and it can be purchased and read right now without leaving your chair.

And that's the catch: it's not a hardcover or paperback, it's available only as an ebook from Wonder eBooks.

One doesn't need a Kindle or any special eBook device to be able to read it, though. I purchased a copy in the PDF format and was able to read it on my Acrobat Reader. The purchase allows you to save a copy and share it on a limited number of other compatible devices, but you won't be able to print it. It's not hard to get... if an Internet moron like me can purchase and read a copy, anyone can.

Here's what is included:

From the April 1949 issue of Super Science Stories:

"Death Quotient"

A 14,000-word novella.

"All Our Yesterdays"

A short story originally published under the "house name" of John Wade Farrell

"Delusion Drive"

A 2,400- word short story originally published under the house name of Peter Reed

From the September 1949 issue of Super Science Stories:

"Minion of Chaos"

A 15,500-word novella

"The Miniature"

A 4,500-word short story originally published under the house name of Peter Reed and previously anthologized in MacDonald's Other Times, Other Worlds

From the July 1951 issue of Galaxy:

"Common Denominator"

A 4,000-word short story that was previously anthologized in MacDonald's Other Times, Other Worlds

From the January 1949 issue of Weird Tales:

"The Great Stone Death"

A 3,600-word short story

I will be the first to admit that I have zero experience with eBooks. I don't own a specifically-dedicated reading device, and this is the first eBook I've ever purchased. But a review of the other titles available from Wonder eBooks -- an incredible assortment of rare old pulp, including MacDonald's novel A Bullet for Cinderella -- makes me hopeful that this may be the way to obtain and finally read a lot of old JDM that has never been reprinted. It would be especially wonderful if some of his old mystery short stories found their way back into the world. The format is not without its problems -- I don't particularly enjoy reading a book on my computer, and I spotted two typos in the one story I read last night -- but this seems to be the future in a world where reading is becoming more and more marginalized.

Incidentally, the cover is taken from the original cover of the September 1949 issue of Super Science Stories.

To check it out and purchase a copy, click here.