Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

He started life as a writer of true confession stories for women's magazines, but once he found his
fictional métier he stuck to it and with only one exception, the rest of his enormous output was solidly
science fiction. The one exception was a novel called The Violent Man, a contemporary novel about the
attempted brainwashing of Westerners by the communist Chinese.
Should it really be the case that there must exist one library book for every letter of the writer's name, I
would imagine that librarians the world over give thanks every day for the fact that Ramon Felipe San
Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Harcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez-del Rey y de los Verdes chose to write
under the pseudonym of Lester Del Rey instead of insisting on his birthright. I suspect that publishers
and printers are rather pleased as well. Imagine trying to fit all that on the spine of a book! Of course,
given the incredible page count of modern blockbusters, with the concomitant increase of available
space on the spine, it might not be such a problem today as it was back then.
Del Rey actually published under several names of which the most interesting is Erik Van Lhin. As Van
Lhin, he wrote a novel called Police Your Planet which was originally published as a magazine serial in
Science Fiction Adventures (beginning in March 1953). That magazine was edited by Lester Del Rey
himself, hence the necessity for a pseudonym, lest he be accused of self-nepotism (if I may neologise).
When the story was eventually published as a book, the name on the by-line was Lester Del Rey and Erik
Van Lhin, thus guaranteeing at least four copies in every library. Doubtless both authors made a
fortune. As far as I am aware, SF is the only field in which writers are known to collaborate with
themselves. It has happened at least twice -- the other incident known to me is The Outward Urge by
John Wyndham and Lucas Parkes, both of whom were, of course, the same person.
In The Early Del Rey the eponymous author interspersed the stories with a lot of autobiographical
material (thus confirming the trend I mentioned above) and this partly accounts for the fact that the
collection ran into two very large volumes. However I must admit that the stories had their attractions as
well. Del Rey's early successes as a writer were far eclipsed by his later successes as an editor, which is
a shame because, in all seriousness, he was a very good writer indeed, and in common with many such
he now seems to be almost completely out of print. I suggest you haunt the second hand bookshops.
Look particularly for Pstalemate, one of my favourites among his many novels. (Del Rey was also
Edson Mcann, who was one half of Frederik Pohl in the novel Preferred Risk which was a satire of the
insurance industry. Not a memorable name, but certainly an odd one, and the book isn't bad too).
Charles V. de Vet and Katherine Maclean have never written an autobiography and are therefore
considerably less than famous. But they have written a novel together and it is called Cosmic
Checkmate. It concerns an earthman who is sent to investigate a planet whose inhabitants' social and
political status depends on their proficiency in a chess-like game. I have to confess that it is not a
commonly seen book (though I have read it in at least two separate incarnations). Maclean is perhaps
better known for a short story called The Snowball Effect in which the ladies of the Watashaw Sewing
Circle take over the world. Whether or not they make a good job of it I will leave you to judge. Charles V.
de Vet is less well known and there is a persistent rumour that Maclean actually wrote Cosmic
Checkmate herself and shared the by line with de Vet (her husband) in order to give his career a
boost. If so, I think she was less than successful.
Given the tenor of this discussion you could be forgiven for thinking that the oddly named are purely an
historical phenomenon from the Golden Age of science fiction. Today we are more sophisticated and
such things are beneath us. Well perhaps so, but don't forget that very few of the oddly named are
pseudonymous.
Ursula K. Le Guin as yet has not autobiographised. However she certainly belongs to the oddly named
and must therefore be famous and she is. (See! It works). Lately though I have taken to wondering how
deserved her fame might be. It is more than quarter of a century since she last produced anything
memorable and to me she appears to be coasting on her reputation and many of her books give the
impression that she was not really concentrating on the job at hand. I hate to say this, but I don't recall
enjoying very much beyond the original Earthsea trilogy, the absolutely stunning Left Hand of
Darkness and the utterly fascinating and absorbing The Dispossessed. Mind you, that is enough for