Day of the Giants

Lester Del Rey Day of the Giants (1959)
Firstly, the flying saucers shown destroying a city with rays of some description on the cover appear nowhere in the novel. Weirdly, I find this sort of inattention to detail on the part of a publisher often serves to indicate that something truly special is to be found behind the wildly misleading painting; and so it is here. I can't say anything I've read by Lester Del Rey ever truly blew my nuts off, but there was always, I felt, a lot of promise, enough so as to suggest there might be a genuine classic hidden somewhere in the back catalogue. It might be this one.

Our story transports an average farmhand and his twin brother to Asgard, realm of the Norse Gods of legend. Ragnarok is approaching and so the Gods are recruiting, and the twin brother has the makings of a hero. Unfortunately our guy was caught up by accident, and being as Asgard doesn't take kindly to non-heroic types, he strives to make himself useful so as to avoid the wrath of his hosts. This he does by teaching them about gunpowder, how to make hand grenades, uranium-235, and other martial innovations which had never occurred to them, Asgard being a stubbornly traditional society. He also undertakes some pruning and restores Yggdrasil, the world tree, to full health; and his advanced weaponry aids in the defeat of the frost giants at the end.

It probably doesn't sound like much, aside from predating Marvel's similarly urbane version of Asgard by a few years, and the story approximately distills Lord of the Rings down to a snappier 128 pages - unassuming rustic type travels far to battle terrible power and so on and so forth; but the telling seals the deal. Where the one about how the chess club loser defeats the thickies, so beloved of Asimov and others, is almost a genre in its own right, Del Rey writes something which almost feels like Simak in its good natured understatement - no lecturing, no speechifying, and Leif Svensen really is just a regular guy, as distinct from the former star of the Charles Atlas adverts created in revenge for some high school wedgie which Isaac the author can neither forgive nor forget. Asgardian magic is explained, or at least accounted for, without any stretching of points or ill-fitting lectures about protons, and most of the book is simply our man titting about in Asgard, making sense of things, and teaching dwarves about firearms. There's no hint of questing, nor of any attempt to get the reader's pulse racing, and it's funny without telling jokes. I particularly enjoyed the portrayal of Loki as amiable and witty, but long-suffering given most of his peers being mainly about the mead and fighting; and by the time he nips back to Earth to bring back cartons of fags for Leif and his twin, I was sold. It's fantasy without the hey nonny no, or science-fiction which remembers that it also has to tell a story, which it does before delivering a lesson about conservatism, tradition, and the importance of taking chances; so it's a great story, well told, and it even has something to say. Wonderful.

I always suspected he had one like this hidden away somewhere.