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.