November 30, 2007
L. Sprague de Camp Posted by Fredric Smoler at 09:50 AM EST This last Tuesday was the centenary of the birth of L. Sprague de Camp, who provided a few generations of teenaged boys with a remarkable amount of pleasure as a writer of alternate history, fantasy, and science fiction, and produced some durable work in a lot of other genres, writing over a hundred books. De Camp had a degree in aeronautical engineering from Caltech, along with an M.S. in engineering, and he spent the Second World War working in the Philadelphia Naval Yard with two other writers, Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov, who were even more famously associated with the golden age of American science fiction, and both of whom, like de Camp, actually knew some science. De Camp’s engineering background may have given him his determined rationalism and aggressive contempt for cant—he wrote a once-famous history of the Scopes trial and a number of books debunking pseudoscientific hooey of various kinds. This distaste for pseudoscience did not stop him from producing some delightful fantasy novels. One of those books, in which some Depression-era Americans entered the world of Spenser’s Faerie Queen, cost me an astonishing amount of money in fines and a fair amount of baffled disappointment, since at the age of 15, on the strength of what I took to be de Camp’s salacious wit, I borrowed a volume of Spenser from the public library, and found the poem so inaccessible that I abandoned it, forgotten, in an obscure corner of my parents’ house. De Camp’s most celebrated and beloved work of alternate history, Lest Darkness Fall, from 1941, in which a time-travelling American engineer arrests the fall of Rome, arguably kicked off that genre in America, and it is still in print. Lest Darkness Fall was a response to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, and it is still generating homages and sequels, the most recent a short story, “The Apotheosis of Martin Padway,” by S. M. Sterling, reprinted just this year in a collection of Stirling’s short fiction; Stirling is probably the closest thing de Camp has to an heir among current writers of alternate history. As a fantasist, de Camp was witty and a little bawdy, also learned, and a lot of fun. Other personae included what seemed a gentle but not too gentle version of another traditional American type, the village atheist, and de Camp was an older and admirable sort of American in other ways, too: He wrote some histories of invention, technology, and engineering, also a good monograph on the history of naval weapons, which are all subjects more kinds of people seemed to care about when I was a boy than appear to now. He was also a pioneer in writing the history of the profession he went into: He wrote biographies of other American writers of fantasy, including books on Robert E. Howard and H. P. Lovecraft, which made him some enemies among cultists, and he made other contributions to the history of genre fiction. It seems only fair to return the compliment, and note the centenary of his birth.
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