Defending Del Rey Books: The Misunderstood Hero

A friend just sent me a youtube video "guaranteed to piss me off" (as he says) ... and boy oh boy, was he right.

Now, I don't wanna dunk too hard on a random, passionate, sincere fantasy fan with a youtube channel. Since I'm writing a book on this exact topic, though, it's worth spelling out the myriad things problematic with "This is Why We Never Got Another Lord of the Rings", a 30-minute hit job on Del Rey Books by a young youtuber whose handle is "The Second Story" (hereafter "SS").

First, though, let me state for the record I think SS does a relatively solid job at research, at least for a non-academic. For the most part, she gets historical facts right, and she clearly put some legwork into tracking down sources. (She even briefly screenshots my article on Judy-Lynn, albeit without addressing my arguments.) Nonetheless, how SS interprets her historical facts -- that is, the story she tells -- is what should raise red flags for anyone interested in genre fantasy. 

So, basically, SS promulgates what I call the "standard narrative" of genre fantasy. In the late 1970s and 1980s, a crassly commercial publisher, Del Rey Books, allegedly ruined fantasy with help from an "opportunistic salesman" named Lester del Rey, who created a "fantasy formula" that stifled true creativity and ruined Tolkien's brilliant legacy ... and all for the $$$$. (Direct quote: "the monstrous crime against literature writ large that the Del Reys perpetrated”.) And although SS says her video isn't meant to defend Tolkien primarily, that's clearly a motivating factor. Since it was the del Reys, not Tolkien, who led to "trash" fantasy, folks like Michael Moorock should just shut up about everyone's favorite hobbit-author.

Oh boy. 

*exhales slowly*

All right then ... here's what's wrong with this narrative, in no particular order. The Second Story

• Takes her thesis almost verbatim from editor David G. Hartwell, the much-less-commercially successful (but still highly lauded) competitor to DRB, but she never ponders Hartwell's own biases and blind spots;

• Reduces Lester del Rey to a mere "salesman", but apparently fails to recognize that Lester had over thirty years of prior experience editing SFF before Del Rey Books came along;

• Blasts the del Reys for an "incomprehensible" view of what makes a story good, but doesn't quite realize they were rebelling against avant-garde British SF. (Moreover, when SS later cites Moorcock, I'm not sure she realizes he was the one who started the British New Wave);

• Lets Brooks's The Sword of Shannara represent all DRB, ... but (like virtually everyone) she overlooks how Lester developed his views on fantasy as much from John W. Campbell's magazine Unknown (1939-1943) as from Tolkien. You can't explain books like A Spell for Chameleon or The Dragon and the George without that in mind.

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  Moreover, SS's emphasis on Shannara also falls into a familiar trap. Somehow, everybody forgets that even though the Riddle-Master trilogy didn't reach any bestseller lists, Patricia A. McKillip was a key part to Del Rey's hegemony ... but acknowledging that Del Rey published an award-winning female author with a highly literary style doesn't fit the standard narrative, so McKillip's presence gets swept under the rug. So do various award-winning DRB books like Bridge of Birds, Dragon's Egg, and Frederick Pohl's Gateway.
  

• Refusing to interrogate the literary-vs.-commercial binary, which is more often guided by ideology than anything textually concrete. For example, if you dismiss an entire genre of literature as "trash", usually without reading it, well, that says more about you than the field.

• Knee-jerk, unreflective antipathy toward commercialism. This one often irritates me the most. Literature needs readers, but you can't get readers without selling books. DRB did that better than anybody ... and it's hard to dismiss their achievement without calling their readers mindless drudges, which is exactly what many critics do in a roundabout way.

• Finally, failing to recognize just how monumental the Del Rey achievement was. Almost from scratch, they created a fantasy readership. If you want to dismiss Del Rey, you must also suggest a more literary alternative (however you define "literary") for accomplishing what they did. Most people today can't grasp just how deeply American popular culture despised the fantastic back then.

Again, I don't want to be too hard on some passionate fantasy fan with a youtube channel. The narrative promulgated by Hartwell has influenced quite a few smart people, and formulating my rebuttals required years of researching this topic. Still, given that Second Story's video has garnered 55,000 views in two days, a rebuttal seems appropriate.