PhilPaine.com

Most of these sto­ries, writ­ten between 1948 and 1955, have worn out with time. The title sto­ry, for instance, is a para­ble to teach racial tol­er­ance that now just seems corny, though I’m sure it had an impact when it was writ­ten. But the sec­ond last sto­ry, “Dear Dev­il” still holds up well. I read it when I was a child, got intense plea­sure from it, and nev­er for­got its details. It takes place on an Earth long after a nuclear war, where a few humans strug­gle to sur­vive. An alien poet, who is strand­ed on Earth, befriends a human boy, and helps him find hope and mean­ing in life. Rus­sell rose above his usu­al pulp style to write this, and the emo­tional end­ing is superb. You can see this sto­ry as the prin­ci­ple inspi­ra­tion for Edgar Pangborn’s lat­er A Mir­ror For Observers (1954) and Davy (1964), which employ some of the same ele­ments, and have the same mood and atti­tude. There is also some resem­b­lence to George R. Stuart’s Earth Abides, pub­lished a year before. All these sto­ries share the same con­cerns, and the same human­is­tic impulse to find some sort of bal­ance between youth and age, free­dom and respon­si­bil­ity, cyn­i­cism and hope. “Dear Dev­il” was often anthol­o­gized, so if you can’t find this old Ace col­lec­tion of Russell’s work, you should be able to dig it up in some the­matic or “best of” anthol­ogy. Make the effort.

con­tains:

14900. [2] (Eric Frank Rus­sell) Some­where A Voice [sto­ry
14901. [2] (Eric Frank Rus­sell) U‑Turn [sto­ry]
14902. [2] (Eric Frank Rus­sell) Seat of Obliv­ion [sto­ry]
14903. [2] (Eric Frank Rus­sell) Tieline [sto­ry]
14904. [2] (Eric Frank Rus­sell) Dis­placed Per­son [sto­ry]
14905. [2] (Eric Frank Rus­sell) Dear Dev­il [sto­ry]
14906. [2] (Eric Frank Rus­sell) I Am Noth­ing [sto­ry]