The Best of L. Sprague de Camp

L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP — ENGINEER AND SORCERER

AS A STUDENT of the myriad ways of man, L. Sprague de Camp has from time to time looked upon his own society with the same objective eye he uses on peoples whom geography or history make strange to most of us. He himself does not seem to find them very alien—and he has encountered many at first hand. Though he knows more about cultural differences than most professional anthropologists, his basic judgment appears to be that human beings everywhere and everywhen are much the same at heart: limited, fallible, tragi-comic, yet endlessly interesting. So in the civilizations of antiquity or among more recent "primitives" he sees engineers and politicians not unlike ours, while among us he discovers taboos and tribal rites not unlike theirs. The insight has directly inspired at least one story and added philosophical depth as well as occasional piquant ironies to most of the others.

Therefore I wonder what he thinks of this curious custom we have of prefacing a collection of one writer's work with the remarks of a colleague. It strikes me as especially odd when the former is senior to the latter, and senior in far more than years. That is, I was a boy when L. Sprague de Camp's first stories were published; I spent a decade being awed by his erudition and captivated by his ability to tell a story, none of which has changed since. When I began to write professionally myself, it became clear, once I was hitting my stride, that there was a considerable de Camp influence on me, though I will never match him in any of those areas he has made uniquely his own. In short, what the deuce am I doing introducing him?

The sole rationale that comes to mind is this. De Camp belongs to that generation of writers whom John Campbell inspired to create the golden age of science fiction and fantasy, beginning about 1937 when he took the helm of what was then called Astounding Stories. Critics be damned, it was the golden age in all truth, when people such as Isaac Asimov, Lester del Rey, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, Malcolm Jameson, Henry Kuttner (especially as "Lewis Padgett"), Fritz Leiber, C. L. Moore, Ross Rocklynne, Clifford D. Simak, George O. Smith, Theodore Sturgeon, A. E. van Vogt, Jack Williamson, and more and more either appeared for the first time or, for the first time, really showed what they could do. De Camp stood tall in this race of giants. Gifted new writers have made their considerable marks on the field throughout the years afterward, but the excitement-the sense of utterly green pastures suddenly opened-will never come again. Comparison to the Periclean and Elizabethan periods may strike you as overdrawn, but you might think of jazz in its heyday, or quantum physics in the 1920'S and '30's, or cosmology and molecular biology today.

The era was brief, choked off—though not overnight—by America's entry into World War Two. A number of key creators found that they had more urgent business on hand than writing stories. They included de Camp.

Hostilities having ended for the time being, he returned to his proper business and had much to do with pulling science fiction out of the dismal state into which it had fallen. Besides Astounding as of yore, he was an important contributor to numerous other magazines in the field. The publication of science-fiction books, not as rare oneshots but as a regular thing, was being pioneered then, and his became landmarks. Of all this, more anon.

However, he began increasingly to write other things. These included some grand historical fiction but became primarily nonfiction, with emphasis on science, technology, and the history of these. Factual material, accurately and vividly presented, was not new to him—he had written it from the start of his career—but soon it comprised the overwhelming bulk of his output. I don't know whether to regret this or not. On the one hand, we have doubtless lost a number of marvelous yarns; on the other hand, we do have these perfectly splendid books about elephants and ancient engineers and H. P. Lovecraft and dinosaurs and ...

Luckily for us, of recent years L. Sprague de Camp has from time to time been coming back to storytelling, especially to fantasy. (He is also pleasing aficionados with light verse and familiar essays, but these are of less immediate interest to a reading public starved for honest narratives in which real things happen to persons one can care about.) And thus we arrive at a justification for this foreword: The fact that many younger folk may not be acquainted with his fiction, and in any event will not know what a towering figure he has been—and is—in the field of imaginative literature. The present book, which spans most of his career, ought to remedy that. If you haven't read a de Camp tale before now, you have a treat in store, and I am here to tell you so.

Second, since an anthology can hold but a limited part of an author's work, you might allow me to steer you onto other things, as well. 'What follows will not be a bibliography or a scholarly study, but just a ramble through a few of the good memories, literary and personal, that Sprague has given me. A lot will be omitted; I should not take up space which could be used for an extra story. But perhaps you will get a better idea of his achievement and of what to watch for in bookstores and libraries than you would from something more formal.

As I have remarked, he began writing nonfiction early on. Indeed, his very first published work was an important book, still in print and once cited in a Supreme Court decision, whose self-explanatory title is Inventions, Patents, and Their Management. Not being an inventor of anything except occasional recipes, I must confess to never having read this. However, in my teens I was delighted and enlightened by the articles he wrote for Astounding, pieces like "The LongTailed Huns" (on urban wildlife), "The Sea King's Armored Division" (on Hellenistic science and engineering), and "Get Out and Get Under" (on the history of military vehicles). The subjects demonstrate the range and depth of his interests; the titles indicate the humor with which he made the facts sparkle.

That humor became an emblem of his in science fiction, doubly welcome because it has always been in short supply there, and in fantasy, where it matched the funniest things ever done in a field which has nurtured a lot of sprightliness. His humor was often called "wacky," but I think that's the wrong word. De Camp constructed his stories every bit as carefully, with the same respect for fact and logic, as he did his nonfiction. (He still does, of course.) Much of the laughter came from the meticulously detailed working out of the consequences of a bizarre assumption.

For instance, in the short novel Divide and Rule, extraterrestrial conquerors have imposed a neo-medieval culture on Earth as a way of keeping the human race from uniting to overthrow them. The story opens with Sir Howard van Slyck, second son of the Duke of Poughkeepsie, riding along in chrome-nickel armor, puffing his pipe, near the tracks of the elephant-powered New York Central. Upon his plastron he bears the family arms—which he calls a trademark—-consisting of a red maple leaf in a white circle with the motto "Give 'em the works."

In another short novel, Solomon's Stone, there is a parallel universe in which Earth is inhabited by those people whom we daydream of ourselves as being. The mind of the shy, bookish hero is transferred to the body of the alter ego he had always supposed was purely imaginary, a French cavalier like d'Artagnan. Practically every man is big, muscular, and handsome; every woman ravishingly beautiful. New York is a wild conglomeration of ethnic types, ranging from the Siegfrieds in Yorkville to a Middle Eastern sultan complete with harem (who in our world is really a bachelor clerk at the YMCA). With so many aggressively macho toughs around, society is pretty chaotic, though a government of sorts does exist and even maintains a small army, which consists almost entirely of generals and is commanded by the only private it has.

In the classic Harold Shea stories, written in collaboration with the late Fletcher Pratt, we are taken to a whole series of universes where various myths or literary works are strictly true. For example, in "The Mathematics of Magic," Shea finds himself in the world of Spenser's The Faerie Queen. At one point, traveling through a forest with the virginal Beiphebe, he encounters the Blatant Beast, a monster that will devour them unless it is given a poem it has not heard before—and in such an emergency, the single poem he can think of is the luridly gross "The Ballad of Eskimo Nell." Magic works here, by strict rules of its own, and at another point Shea seeks to conjure up a unicorn for a steed-but he doesn't phrase the spell quite clearly enough, and gets a rhinoceros instead. I needn't go on, for happily the first three of these stores are again available, collected together as The Compleat Enchanter.

Nor does space permit me to give more examples of this particular source of de Campian humor. It isn't necessary anyway; you can find plenty for yourself in the stories gathered here, in which you will also note an equally important source of humor, character.

De Camp's people are never stereotypes. They are unique and often think and act in ways that are funny. Like Molière or Holberg, de Camp observes them with a slightly ironic, basically sympathetic detachment, and then tells us what he has seen. We laugh, but all too often we recognize ourselves in them.

The humor, and oftimes the pathos, of character became particularly evident in the postwar "Gavagan's Bar" stories, also written in partnership with Pratt. Gavagan's Bar is a friendly kind of neighborhood place, whose steady customers all know one another, and the genial bartender, Mr. Cohan (Cohan, if you please), does his best to keep it that way. But people do come in who have the strangest tales to tell, and sometimes a breath of that strangeness blows through the establishment itself. "These little whiskey fantasies," as Groff Conklin called them, usually evoke very gentle laughter.

Indeed, offhand the postwar stories of de Camp's seem rather different from the prewar ones: more serious, frequently downright somber. However, this is not true. There has been a shift of emphasis, as might be expected of a writer who is not content to repeat himself endlessly but, instead, keeps experimenting and developing. Yet recent stories have had their wit, and early stories had their gravity.

His first major piece of fiction, the novel Genus Homo, in collaboration with the late P. Schuyler Miller, contains comic moments but is essentially a straightforward tale of a busload of travelers—the believably ordinary kind you meet on a Greyhound—who end up in the far future, when mankind is long extinct save for them, and apes have evolved to intelligence. Though the conclusion is hopeful, the narrative does not pretend that the opening situation is anything but catastrophic, and tragedies as well as triumphs occur.

Another early novel, Lest Darkness Fall, illustrates this combination of qualities still better. It is, in a way, de Camp's answer to Mark Twain, whose Connecticut Yankee started modern technology going in Arthurian Britain with the greatest of ease. Martin Padway is scholarly, even a little timid, but a highly knowledgeable man. This much was necessary for the author to postulate, else his protagonist would soon have died a messy death, after being hurled back to Ostrogothic Italy of the sixth century A.D. Nevertheless, Padway has a terrible time as he struggles to introduce a few things like printing, which may stave off the Dark Ages he knows will otherwise come. He never does manage to make gunpowder that goes Bang! instead of Fizz-zz. His most successful innovations are the simplest, like double-entry bookkeeping or an information-carrying line of semaphores. Here de Camp was at his most rigorously logical.

The book is full of hilarious scenes. For instance, when Padway catches a bad cold, his main problem is how to avoid the weird remedies that well-meaning friends try to apply to him. Yet when war breaks out, its horrors are quietly described; we are not spared.

Thus the stories of later years represent no mutation, but rather a steady evolution.

The tales of the Viagens Interplanetarias are, in fact, quite like their predecessors. These are straight science fiction—so much so that de Camp does not permit his characters to exceed the speed of light through "hyperspace" or any similar incantation, but confines them to the laws of relativistic physics and the nearer stars. That, though, gives the same scope for exotic settings and exciting adventures that Haggard found in the then unmapped parts of Africa. The humorous possibilities are fully realized; an example in the present collection is "The Inspector's Teeth." Likewise realized are the possibilities of derring-do—and, occasionally, pain and bitterness.

The historical novels show the same meticulous care throughout and the same general line of development, from the comparatively light-hearted An Elephant for Aristotle and The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate (my personal favorite) to The Golden Wind, which holds a poignant depiction of, what age can do to a man and how the spirit can rise above that.

As I have said, de Camp came more and more to specialize in nonfiction, fine stuff and highly recommended but outside the purview of this essay. It may have been Conan the Cimmerian who finally lured him back to a reasonable productivity of stories. If that is true, we have much to thank Robert E. Howard for, over and above the entertainment he gave us in his own right.

The creator of the original Mighty Barbarian died, he left behind him a heap of unfinished manuscripts, some involving Conan and some which could be adapted to the series. Perhaps mostly for enjoyment, de Camp undertook to complete the work with collaborators Bjorn Nyberg and Lin Carter. The enthusiastic rediscovery of Conan by the reading public may have surprised him. I don't know. What I do know, and what matters, is that since then he has increasingly been writing original fantasy. You'll find a few of the shorter pieces here. The Goblin Tower and The Clocks of Iraz are two rather recent novels. Let us hope for many more.

I have already admitted that this foreword is not going to be anything like a proper survey of the de Camp canoi. Still, I would like to mention anew certain of his incidental writings—essays, reviews and criticisms, verse, aphorisms—which have appeared over the years in such places as the magazine Amra or his anthology Scribblings, to the pleasure of smaller audiences than they deserve. Unless a major publisher has the sense to gather these together, you may never see them; but they should be mentioned as showing yet another dimension of his versatility.

In person, L. (for Lyon) Sprague de Camp is a tall, trim man of aristocratic appearance and bearing—aristocratic in the best sense, gracious and kindly as well as impressive. More than one woman has confided to me that she tends to swoon over him, but he remains content with his lovely wife of many years, Catherine, with whom he has collaborated on books as well as children.

Born in New York in 1907, he studied at Caltech, MIT, and Stevens Institute of Technology, and held down a variety of jobs until he went into full-time writing. As a Navy reservist, he was called up in World War Two and did research and development (alongside Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein), which was a substantial contribution to the Allied cause.

His vast fund of information comes not only from omnivorous reading but from extensive traveling. This isn't just through the tourist circuits, but into strange places hard to reach. He doesn't brag about it, but if you can get him to reminisce, it makes great reading or listening.

By the time this is in print, he will be past his seventieth birthday, but he doesn't look or act it—and, what the hell, Goethe wrote the second part of Faust in his eighties. Long may L. Sprague de Camp go on, to the joy of us all.

Poul Anderson

Orinda, California

June, 1977