He said he never bothered with a pseudonym, because his own name was such that people assumed it was one. He was the author of the second sf book I ever laid my little hands on – LEST DARKNESS FALL. It was I believe written as rational scientist’s ‘response’ to Twain’s A CONNECTICUT YANKEE IN KING ARTHUR’S COURT. Me, I had not read it, and LEST DARKNESS FALL shaped my thinking enormously. It does show how those early reads can really have an impact on a kid. For those of you who haven’t read it, the book was my first alternate history (and the foundation of much of the sub-genre)- but that meant nothing as a precocious ?9 year old.
No, the magic was in that it was a problem-solving book, where the small, physically weak but clever hero faced and beat the odds by sheer knowledge and ingenuity. Courage and determination too, but really… he thought his way out of problems.
De Camp and Fletcher Pratt also wrote THE COMPLEAT ENCHANTER – to which you owe PYRAMID SCHEME – as Eric and I were talking about the original, and said how much fun it would be to construct a universe in which we too could play with myths.
Anyway, this last week something got me thinking about his Viagens novels (The guy wrote over 100 novels- very little of which is available on Kindle) – where Brazil has become the dominant Earth power, after war crippled the US and destroyed Russia. I had only read a couple, and thought I might chase some more. A Portuguese governed Space-opera universe (considering that I have a couple of Portuguese-origin author friends) seemed an amusing idea. Sadly, there is not much available. That got me onto wanting to re-read THE FALLIBLE FIEND – (a very moral demon – by his own standards – which are not human standards) which I got to read as brand-new half-book in a pulp magazine in 1972… and never tracked down the other half of for 20 years. This too had a huge effect on my thinking – and I realize shapes my use of non-human characters to look, through their eyes, at human morality and behavior.
It’s kind of weird to think how one author shaped my writing and indeed, my life (yes, I have spent far too much of my life trying to out-brain the powerful-but-stupid. I wish I was half as good at it as Mouse Padway).
Anyway – long story short, very few of these books are available in electronic form. A few re-issued by Baen. What has happened to them? What will happen to your books, when you die? And if he could write a hundred books, maybe I need to write a few more…
Mad Genius Club 
17 responses to “L.(Lyon) Sprague De Camp”
I loved ‘Lest Darkness Fall’ and I had forgotten he was the one who wrote ‘Gun for a Dinosaur’, though I certainly haven’t forgotten the story!
His stories were so much fun. Finding a new one in my old man’s enormous book pile always felt like such a treat.
When I was a kid I really enjoyed <i>A Connecticut Yankee</i>, but having reread it several years ago as an adult I wasn’t nearly as enamored by it. It came off very condescending. <i>Lest Darkness Fall</i> I felt was a better story and paced much better. Some of that might just be the writing style of the times in which they were written though.
Yankee suffers from poor choice of viewpoint. The narrator is an dull, insensitive clod who would not recognize the most ethereal and poetic Camelot if he were dropped in the middle of it.
Lousy research was another aspect. It’s one thing to connect Camelot and how Southerners’ fancies about it deluded them, but another to throw Southern stuff into Camelot and excuse it on the grounds
“It is not pretended that these laws and customs existed in England in the sixth century; no, it is only pretended that inasmuch as they existed in the English and other civilizations of far later times, it is safe to consider that it is no libel upon the sixth century to suppose them to have been in practice in that day also. One is quite justified in inferring that whatever one of these laws or customs was lacking in that remote time, its place was competently filled by a worse one.”
I was biased in favor of Yankee by some cartoon adaptation that had a darkish third act but was generally pretty enjoyable (might have been the version with Orson Bean) and then I read the book. It might have been my first exposure to really blatant intellectual dishonesty in print.
Baen Books used to have all of deCamps books available. I just checked, and you are right. They are no longer available. Sigh. I wonder why?
I got them all back then. Glad I did.
I’ve got quite a few of deCamp’s books in dead-tree editions…somewhere. A box in the attic, I think. The Clocks Of Iraz, The Gobliin Tower and The Unbeheaded King are on my main book shelf. Can’t forget The Wheels Of If or The Gnarly Man, either.
Several of his books were available from the Baen Free Library, others have been included in the monthly Baen Bundles. I’ve got those.
I have a couple of Science Fiction Book club editions, Compleat Enchanter and the short stories, published through Doubleday. I was with SFBC off and on from the early ’70s into the late ’80s, when Grey Goo started taking over and Life got in the way. The paperback version of Darkness didn’t make our move to Oregon; I’ve repurchased some as eBooks since most of my paperbacks were donated beforehand.
This is why you need to add your intellectual property to your will. Life plus 70 is the standard; even if your heirs only make coffee money via eBook sales, they can keep your writing in print if you give them the rights.
It’s quite possible that de Camp’s estate is held by a literary agency that doesn’t care like a descendent would.
Slate (I know!) did a great article a few years back on what happened to John M. Ford (How Much for Just the Planet). Long story short, his agent held the rights to his books. Not his girlfriend, not his relatives. The agent kept them out of print.
Similarly, Dorothy Sayers’ literary estate is held by a London literary agency. They keep her books in print but do they sell rights to TV or film, keeping her in the public eye? They do not, which is why you don’t see something along the lines of Murder at Downton Abbey.
Whatever you could say about the quality of a potential Lord Peter solves the crime of the week TV series, you can’t avoid this: each episode introduces him to an audience that never heard of him.
WPDE ate my comment…
Some of the novels were on TV. Search Lord Peter Wimsey on TV and you’ll find that the Beeb did two sets, 5 novels in 1972 to 1975, then three more in 1987.
Why we never saw a show “based on characters written by Dororthy Sayers”, a la Midsomer Murders, Vera, Inspector Morse and many others, is a mystery to me. (Ducks incoming carp.)
I’m very aware of the two previous sets of Lord Peter films. We’ll be watching them (and live-streaming or podcasting afterwards) for the future project Murder, She Watched. That’s a film review book devoted to mystery movies.
The reason I mention Dorothy Sayers is her estate is handled completely differently from Agatha Christie (Agatha Christie, She Watched soon to be followed by International Agatha Christie, She Watched).
Agatha has been filmed worldwide well over 500 times; we’ve seen approaching 400 films because we’re limited by availability and English subtitles.
The Agatha Christie estate, with strong family management, WANTS to license her films. Every TV episode or film introduces her to a new audience. The Dorothy Sayers estate, run by a literary agency in London with ZERO family involvement, not even collateral relatives, hasn’t done anything with her and TV since those old Lord Peters in the 80’s.
One of the things that’s come out of the Agatha project is seeing how many, many, many, many authors who used to be massive worldwide bestsellers have vanished entirely. Very few authors continue to sell past their deaths. Even fewer continue to sell decades later.
How about James Hadley Chase? Blockbuster, twisty thrillers and utterly forgotten today. He popped up during International.
That’s why I brought up Dorothy. Her estate is handling her intellectual property poorly. They keep her in print and that’s all they do.
The Agatha Christie estate shows how it’s done.
TXRed as Mod: Your first reply went into spam. I have no idea why. WPDE.
No problem. The second reply is better. (Might have refreshed before the “subscribe” thing came up. Weather has been interesting and I’ve been really tired dealing with the results.)
The first reply can stay in spam.
I, too, was a reading omnivore pre-teen, and the best fiction to hand were some SciFi paperbacks my mother had randomly bought. Yes, the early exposure to SFF concepts were delightful and character forming.
Happily, my father, who paid little attention to what I was doing in detail, was happy to finance anything that seemed educational (the advantages of the Jewish traditions — if I could identify books I wanted, I could generally get them — the problem was discovering, by myself, what existed). My mother (a war bride from Antwerp) was happy to take me to book shops where my brown grocery bags of SFF paperbacks from the 60s joined her literary novel investigative purchases at the checkout (she audited local university classes). I didn’t realize it at the time, but in retrospect I am delighted that she trusted my own judgment on what I wanted to read (buy) without influence, and my father’s benign neglect didn’t get in the way. The result by college in the early 70s was a massive SFF collection which accompanied me away from home (and a good thing, too, since the marriage broke up and the home sold while I was in college, so all would have been lost.
Somewhere in storage….
NESFA Press has two volumes of deCamp in print. One volume collects all the Harold Shea (Enchanter) stories, and one collects all of the time travel/alternate history stories (including Lest Darkness Fall and Wheels of IF).
And a bunch of the Baen stuff is still available.
Tor had reprinted Divide and Rule as part of the Tor Doubles, but it’s long out of print (it has Brackett’s Sword of Rhiannon on the other side).
The Baen version, with “Lest Darkness Fall” and “To Bring the Light.” is available at Open Library. I just finished reading it, FOR the FIRST time. Now I may have to go read the Belisaurius saga again.
I’m particularly fond of that one rant on ‘religious persecution’ in Lest Darkness Fall.
“You don’t like the Goths?”
“No! Not with the persecution we have to put up with!”
“Persecution?”
“Religious persecution. We won’t stand for it forever.”
“I thought the Goths let everybody worship as they pleased.”
“That’s just it! We Orthodox are forced to stand around and watch Arians and Monophysites and Nestorians and Jews going about their business unmolested, as if they owned the country. If that isn’t persecution, I’d like to know what is!”
The one other De Camp book I’m particularly fond of is non-fiction: Science Fiction Handbook, Revised – how to write and sell imagnative stories. It does date back to the time when Manual Typewriters Roamed The Earth, but still.
Not allowed to burn heretics… persecution