Nerves

© 1956 by Lester Del Rey



Forgive me, but I hated this book. And I was so looking forward to it, based on some rave reviews I read in an SF encyclopedia-of-sorts. Taut! Tense! A story about a meltdown at a nuclear power plant entitled Nerves has got to be an edge-of-your-seat thriller, right? I envisioned some high-tech (for the 50s, that is) hard science and perhaps a demented madman bent on sabotage. Something Cusslerian or Clancyish, combined with the slick psychological melodrama of, maybe, Koontz?

Not so, not so.

My first warning: the SF cliche of having a character named “Doc.” In this case, the main character. The only author who gets a pass here is Robert Heinlein, who seemingly puts a Doc in every other novel and short story. And for some reason, “Doc” in Nerves planted himself visually in my mind as crotchety old Uncle Lewis from Christmas Vacation. How’s that for a novel’s hero, huh?

Nerves takes place in what’s labeled an “atomic power plant.” Not an atomic power plant as we know it, i.e., a nuclear power plant. No, here they manufacture heavy isotopes that do not occur in nature. Why do we need heavy isotopes that do not occur in nature? Well, the only application Del Rey gives is for killing boll weevils. Though some military purpose (rocket fuel, perhaps?) may have been casually mentioned; I don’t recall. I had a hard time concentrating on the story, so flimsy details vaguely tossed out at me may not have been picked up.

No details of the setting are given. Imagine reading a ten-page story about two nondescript chaps shooting the breeze in a “room,” where the “room” is mentioned or referenced two or three times a page. After a while, wouldn’t you want to know something – anything! – about this room? Size, shape, purpose, decor, etc, etc? Well, change “ten-page story” to “180-page novel” and “room” to “atomic power plant” and you’ll see where I’m going.

The suspense is stated, violating the “show don’t tell” fundamental theorem of creative writing. Apparently, what's at risk is a multi-megaton nuclear explosion that can happen “in a billionth of a second”, effectively cratering the entire middle third of the United States. That’s okay, I guess, but I was thinking that maybe vividly detailing a smaller-scale explosion in the past or during the storyline might be more effective than every other character informing us that at any moment there might be a multi-megaton nuclear explosion that can happen “in a billionth of a second.”

The science is sketchy at best. To be fair, the story was originally published in 1942 in the pulp mags, before the Manhattan Project was even formed. So I suppose a lot of it had to be made up on the fly. Which is okay, not that big a sin, but the story was rewritten into novel form in 1956, and the paperback I read was printed in 1977. If I was the author of this piece, I’d have tightened up the science a bit over that span of 35 years. Just sayin’.

The MacGuffin in Nerves is Isotope R, which explodes (yes, in a billionth of a second) when it transforms into Mahler’s Isotope. What causes the trigger? I don’t know. What exactly is Isotope R? I don’t know. What exactly is Mahler’s Isotope? Again, I don’t know. But after the vague production process goes awry, we’re told there’s magma flowing through the plant. Cool, I can deal with “magma” to refer to this runaway isotope. But: how much? where is it? is it moving? is it still being created? I don’t know the answers to any of this. So while I’m reading through pages and pages of Doc and whiz-kid Jenkins navel-gazing about their “nerves,” all I’m thinking about are all these unanswered questions.

Now, I’m no scientist, and I have only a layman’s grasp of radiation sickness, but do doctors give victims curare? You know, the jungle toxin that paralyzes muscles? And do they cut out “radiation” from the victim’s body, i.e., cells and tissues that have become saturated with “radiation”? Can a man whose ribs have been roughly sawed off so his heart can by physically massaged by four pairs of hands over forty minutes help out with “equations” an hour or two later?

Listen, this review gives me no pleasure. But since I subjected myself to finishing this book over the course of seven hours in the hope of some redemption, I’m going to tell it like it is. The book stunk. Maybe it’s me, maybe I missed the mark, maybe I couldn’t connect with Lester Del Rey. It’s happened before to me with a Golden Age SF writer (Damon Knight comes immediately to mind). I’ve never read Del Rey before, and the only way I really know him is from Asimov’s oft-witty and always personal vignettes in his short story anthologies. But I gotta say, based on Nerves, I’m going to wait a good long while before spending more time with this writer.

Grade: D