| Title: | Arcana Caelestia |
| Notice: | Directory listings are in topic 2 |
| Moderator: | NETRIX::thomas |
| Created: | Thu Dec 08 1983 |
| Last Modified: | Thu Jun 05 1997 |
| Last Successful Update: | Fri Jun 06 1997 |
| Number of topics: | 1300 |
| Total number of notes: | 18728 |
Article: 341
From: [email protected] (Dani Zweig)
Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews
Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews #16: "Lest Darkness Fall" and L. Sprague
de Camp
Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest)
Date: 26 Aug 93 21:37:01 GMT
Belated Reviews #16: "Lest Darkness Fall" and L. Sprague de Camp
L. Sprague de Camp was a prolific author, but I'm only going to review one
of his books at any length. For the most part, his books are enjoyable
enough, but minor and unexceptional. (I'm ignoring the books coauthored
with Fletcher Pratt, which I'll get to another time.) There are a bunch
of light fantasies, typically with adjective-noun titles like "The
Unbeheaded King", "The Reluctant Shaman", "The Varicose Varmint", and "The
Dangling Participle". (Okay, I made up the last two.) There are a bunch
of nothing-special adventure novels with thin patina of science fiction,
which are placed on the low-tech planet Krishna, and which can typically be
recognized by the presence of the letter 'Z' in the title (eg., "The Tower
of Zanid", "The Hand of Zei".) Of his better novels, I have a fondness for
"Rogue Queen" (**+), about a planet of humanoids with the social structure
and reproductive methods of hive insects. But, by and large, de Camp's
single-authored books are nothing special.
Is it fair to just dismiss an important author's corpus so lightly? I think
so. The point of these reviews is to identify works of past decades which
may be particularly worth reading. An attempt to give every author lengthy
and balanced consideration would sabotage this effort. The fact remains
that while there are a good number of de Camp books that I've enjoyed, the
only one I'd seriously recommend to newer readers is "Lest Darkness Fall."
"Lest Darkness Fall" (***+), published in 1939, is a seminal alternate-history
novel. It is the story of Martin Padway, an modern archeologist who finds
himself in the Rome of 535 AD. This presents him with three problems. The
short-term problem is that of making a living. He has a bit of money (1939
being back in the days when people typically had some silver in their
pockets), borrows more, and proceeds to introduce friends, Romans, and
countrymen to modern amenities such as brandy and newspapers.
The medium-term problem is that he knows, from history, that Justinian is
about to invade Italy, in an attempt to reunite the Eastern and Western Roman
Empires. The attempt is foredoomed, but there won't be much left of Italy
by the time it's done. This ties into the long-term problem, which is that
the Dark Ages are descending upon Europe, and Padway would dearly like to
prevent those wasted centuries. (Fashions in the teaching of history have
changed since this book was written, and the Middle Ages are no longer
referred to as 'Dark'. They were a period of considerable social, techno-
logical, and artistic change. The modern reader may accept this, and still
enjoy Padway's attempts to avoid the accompanying unpleasantness.) Keeping
Belisarius at bay and darkness from falling requires quick footwork, and
by the time a year or so has passed, Martin Padway is Martinus Paduei,
quaestor (to Thiudahad, King of the Ostrogoths), inventor, publisher, and
the leading candidate for "most likely to be assassinated in 537."
I described the book as 'seminal', an adjective which should be used with
caution. Obviously the book owes a tremendous debt to Mark Twain's "A
Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court", in which another American finds
himself a few decades away from Padway, and a bit to the north-west. By
the time of de Camp's novel, time travel had been used extensively, both
within the genre and in the mainstream. (For anyone interested in reading
up on this, the introduction to my copy of "Portrait of Jenny" recommends
the article "Space-Time in Literary Form", by Margaret Walters, in the June
1942 issue of Tomorrow magazine.)
"Lest Darkness Fall" gave the subgenre a form it pretty much retains
half a century later. Historical accuracy is valued, and historical
characters, events, and technologies lend verisimilitude to the narrative.
(The certainty that the island will explode on a particular date, or the
barbarians will invade or the plague will strike also serves to lend a
particularly effective tension to the narrative.)
Another characteristic, at odds with most of the earlier literature, is
the possibility of real change. As long as both past and present are set
in stone, time-travel stories tend to be tragedies, with the only difference
the traveller can make being those too small for history to notice -- the
bullet hole in the armor, the grave of the maid whose lover never returned,
the traveller's adoption of a predetermined historical role, etc. If history
can be changed, or a new history can be created, a broader and more satisfying
range of possibilities is open.
Novels like "Lest Darkness Fall" are still a science fiction staple. The
recent "Crosstime Engineer" series, by Frankowski, to take a typical example,
is fairly faithful to de Camp's pattern. Like Padway, Conrad must gain the
support of the nobility, keep the clergy molified, and introduce enough
technical and social change to achieve his goals -- the last made easier for
Conrad by the happy circumstance of his having swallowed a copy of "How
Things Work" as a child.
LDF is driven less by technology and more by the protagonist's sheer gall,
and said protagonist's achievements are less of a triumphal progress and
more of the tiger-by-the-tail variety, but that's part of what makes the
book fun to read. And it is fun to read.
%A de Camp, L. Sprague
%T Lest Darkness Fall
%D 1974
%I Ballantine
%P 208
%O There are other reprints, both earlier and later than my 1974 edition.
%O The story originally appeared, in a shorter version, in the December 1939
%O issue of Unknown.
Standard introduction and disclaimer for Belated Reviews follows.
Belated Reviews cover science fiction and fantasy of earlier decades.
They're for newer readers who have wondered about the older titles on the
shelves, or who are interested in what sf/f was like in its younger days.
The emphasis is on helping interested readers identify books to try first,
not on discussing the books in depth.
A general caveat is in order: Most of the classics of yesteryear have not
aged well. If you didn't encounter them back when, or in your early teens,
they will probably not give you the unforced pleasure they gave their
original audiences. You may find yourself having to make allowances for
writing you consider shallow or politics you consider regressive. When I
name specific titles, I'll often rate them using the following scale:
**** Recommended.
*** An old favorite that hasn't aged well, and wouldn't get a good
reception if it were written today. Enjoyable on its own terms.
** A solid book, worth reading if you like the author's works.
* Nothing special.
Additional disclaimers: Authors are not chosen for review in any particular
order. The reviews don't attempt to be comprehensive. No distinction is
made between books which are still in print and books which are not.
-----
Dani Zweig
[email protected]
Watership Down:
You've read the book. You've seen the movie. Now eat the stew!
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| 1162.1 | De Camp and Pratt's Enchanter series | VERGA::KLAES | Quo vadimus? | Fri Sep 03 1993 11:20 | 145 |
Article: 350 From: [email protected] (Dani Zweig) Newsgroups: rec.arts.sf.reviews Subject: REPOST: Belated Reviews #22: De Camp, Pratt, and the Enchanter Organization: Netcom Online Communications Services (408-241-9760 login: guest) Date: 02 Sep 93 22:29:32 GMT Belated Reviews #22: De Camp, Pratt, and the Enchanter I've already looked briefly at L. Sprague de Camp's work, but it's appropriate to cover his collaborations with Fletcher Pratt separately. It was one of those too-rare partnerships in which both authors' strengths combined to produce something different from the sum of their parts. They coauthored a few minor light fantasies -- and they coauthored the 'Enchanter' novellas (****) in the early forties and fifties. These stories pioneered the magic-as-a-science subgenre. Harold Shea, a psychologist, is the Enchanter. He and his boss work out symbolic-logic representations for the 'laws' of magic -- and find that immersing yourself in such a representation causes you to be shifted to an alternate universe in which those laws actually hold. (And since they *do* hold, anyone who knows those laws can perform magic in those universes. Not necessarily very well...) A second premise is that our great myths and legends may correspond to universes in which they are realities. Each novella, then, has Shea (and later others) land (in trouble) in a new universe whose laws have to be figured out before they prove fatal. The first novella, "The Roaring Trumpet", has Harold Shea transport himself, completely by accident, to a universe of Norse myth. On the eve of Ragnarok, which is rotten timing. His magical triumphs in this setting are achieved more by accident than by design, but he does in the end prove more helpful to the Gods than to their enemies. It's well written, enjoyable, and maintains a good balance between scholarly accuracy and irreverent slapstick. In the second novella, "The Mathematics of Magic", he and Chalmers (his boss) attempt a better-planned expedition to the world of Faerie, that is, the universe in which Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queen" is factual history. (Reading "The Faerie Queen" takes a degree of determination. Spenser had a genius for the right word and the telling phrase, but that never scaled up into a talent for telling a story.) Spenser's knights are forever battling evil enchanters (for reasons which make good allegorical sense and virtually no plot sense), and Shea and Chalmers find themselves infiltrating the guild of the evil enchanters in order to bring the story to a better close than Spenser's. In "The Castle of Iron", they find themselves in the universe of "Orlando Furioso". (Ludovico Ariosto's "Orlando Furioso" was the inspiration for "The Faerie Queen". Ariosto's epic, however, is far more readable, and I recommend it highly.) Things are hard all over: Shea and Chalmers both found lady loves in Faerie, but Chalmers's inamorata is made out of snow -- not a recipe for longevity -- and Shea's has fallen under the spell of this new universe and forgotten him. As for the colleague who joins them in this story...let's just say that some universes should be avoided by people with Transylvanian ancestors. In "The Wall of Serpents", Shea and his wife seek out the land of the Kalevala, to find some sorcerous help in retrieving a policeman they mislaid in "The Castle of Iron". They go looking for Vainamoinen -- the competent and trustworthy sorcerer. What they find is Lemminkainen, who is less competent and not at all trustworthy. Still, they find themselves committed to accompanying him to Pohjola. (Some novels based on the Kalevala portray Pohjola as a sort of netherworld -- Petaja's, for instance -- but the introduction to the translation I read suggests that Pohjola is better translated as "big farm". Pratt and de Camp fall somewhere between these extremes. Pohjola is *not* a nice place to visit.) They leave the land of the Kalevala (with the policeman) in more of a hurry than they'd planned, and instead of returning home, they find themselves, in "The Green Magician", in the land of Irish myth, helping Cuchulainn. (For some reason or other, I didn't enjoy this story as much as the others. Maybe Celtic mythoi have to work harder to achieve their effect, because they're so overused?) Since their magazine appearances, the novellas have been collected a number of times. The first two were published as "The Incomplete Enchanter", "The Castle of Iron" was published as a short stand-alone novel, and the last two were published as "Wall of Serpents". In 1975, the first *three* novellas were collected under the title "The Compleat Enchanter", and "Wall of Serpents" was reissued shortly after. Recently, all five were collected in the paperback omnibus "The Complete Compleat Enchanter". It's worth seeking out. Besides serving as the inspiration for so much modern fiction (much of it bad), it still stands up as an enjoyable piece of storytelling. (The stories have also provided many readers with their first introductions to the classics which inspired them.) For completists, there is the recent "The Enchanter Reborn" (**), a sharecropped collection of new Enchanter stories edited by de Camp and Christopher Stasheff. The stories aren't bad, for the most part, but they're missing something. (At a guess, I'd say they're missing Pratt.) L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt collaborated on a number of other light fantasies, none of which were in the same class as the Enchanter tales. "The Carnelian Cube" (**) is about an artifact that can take you to the world of your dreams, and about a man who uses it to seek out a logical world in which to live. (Logic, however, will only take you so far: Lewis Carroll was a logician.) "Land of Unreason" (**) is about a modern who finds himself in a world of myth -- one in which he turns out to have an unexpected importance. And "Tales From Gavagan's Bar" (**) is a collection of tall tales. %A De Camp, L. Sprague and Pratt, Fletcher %T The Roaring Trumpet %T The Mathematics of Magic %T The Castle of Iron %T The Wall of Serpents %T The Green Magician %O The first two of these were collected as "The Incomplete Enchanter", %O the first three as "The Compleat Enchanter", the fourth and fifth %O as "Wall of Serpents", and all five as "The Complete Compleat Enchanter". Standard introduction and disclaimer for Belated Reviews follows. Belated Reviews cover science fiction and fantasy of earlier decades. They're for newer readers who have wondered about the older titles on the shelves, or who are interested in what sf/f was like in its younger days. The emphasis is on helping interested readers identify books to try first, not on discussing the books in depth. A general caveat is in order: Most of the classics of yesteryear have not aged well. If you didn't encounter them back when, or in your early teens, they will probably not give you the unforced pleasure they gave their original audiences. You may find yourself having to make allowances for writing you consider shallow or politics you consider regressive. When I name specific titles, I'll often rate them using the following scale: **** Recommended. *** An old favorite that hasn't aged well, and wouldn't get a good reception if it were written today. Enjoyable on its own terms. ** A solid book, worth reading if you like the author's works. * Nothing special. Additional disclaimers: Authors are not chosen for review in any particular order. The reviews don't attempt to be comprehensive. No distinction is made between books which are still in print and books which are not. ----- Dani Zweig [email protected] Roses red and violets blew and all the sweetest flowres that in the forrest grew -- Edmund Spenser | |||||