(listen to episode on Spotify)
introductions, de Camp background
(Chrononauts main theme)
Gretchen:
Hello everyone, welcome to Chrononauts, a science fiction literature history podcast. I'm Gretchen, and I'm joined here with my co-hosts, J.M. and Nate. How are you both doing tonight?
Nate:
I'm doing pretty good.
JM:
I'm doing good. It's warming up here, finally, just in time for the official beginning of Spring, I guess, which is tomorrow.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
And it always does seem to be right around this time exactly that the plus temperatures start to come. So that is above freezing for everybody else, I guess.
Nate:
Yeah, I never really cared for the Celsius scale. You know, I'm on board with a metric system for everything else, but I don't know, zero to 100 for Fahrenheit, it's like a human comfort level. And, you know, being that I'm a human and not a body of water like a lake, I personally prefer it for my convenience. Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, things are okay. A little busy. The life struggle and all that, but it's going well.
Nate:
Yeah, I'd say generally going well here too: enjoying the nice weather, been listening to a lot of my favorite audio books on walks and stuff like that. So I'm excited to dig into some of these time travel voyages we have coming up tonight.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah, we have some really fun stuff coming.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I'm doing good as well. I just got back from a spring break, got to see family over the break, which was nice. And I have survived midterms. So hopefully, yeah, it's great. So I'm hoping that there will be a bit of a lull in work and I won't have too much to do over the next few weeks as I have. Yes.
Nate:
It's closing in fast.
Gretchen:
Yeah. And I also did get confirmation that I will be going into the grad school here at UAlbany.
Nate:
Congratulations.
Gretchen:
Yes, thank you. I got the news and I haven't had as much time to process it. I've been focused on everything else, but it's good to know I will be here.
JM:
Yes. Cool!
Gretchen:
For two more years.
Nate:
You're doing library science or is it?
Gretchen:
Information science, but it's a dual program in that and English, so it's two years rather than one.
Nate:
Yeah, right. Okay. Yeah.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Very cool.
Gretchen:
Also, just so everyone knows, you can find Chronanauts on all major podcast platforms: Spotify, Apple. We have a blogspot at chronanautspodcast.blogspot.com where you can read a number of texts and translations. You can also follow us on Twitter at chronanautsf and Facebook at facebook.com/chronanautspodcast or email us at chronanautspodcast@gmail.com. Had to get that out of the way.
JM:
Awesome.
Nate:
We'll definitely have some cool stuff going up on the blogspot soon. Posted a new story in the last couple of weeks and we're going to post some more stuff soon, so definitely stay tuned there, I think we're going to have some fun stuff coming up over the next several months.
JM:
Yeah. There's a really cool Russian story that we should have up soon, right? Is it up already even?
Nate:
The Ukrainian one's up. The Russian one will be up soon.
JM:
Yeah. Sorry. A very cool Ukrainian story.
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. But I believe it has a confusing translation history having been translated into Russian, but not English or possibly too many other languages. So it was really fun. It's about robots.
Nate:
You might be hearing more about those in a month or so, but...
JM:
Oh yeah. They'll be coming up. Yeah.
Nate:
But tonight we're going to be doing something a little bit different. I guess why don't we get into that?
JM:
All right. So we have three excursions in time that we're doing today. I've been really fascinated by the time travel stories lately and they've kind of, I guess, taken the place of the sea adventure fascination that was born out early last year. And so now all I want to read about and read is time travel narratives. And so we have three more for you, continuing our, sort of, course that we set at the beginning of the year with Kindred and last time with Twain's Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. We have, again, more temporal journeys, and we'll be changing the perspective a little bit for the last one. But the first two are similar in the sense that they are accidental time journeys into the past. And the first one that we're going to be covering today is from the golden age writer L. Sprague de Camp and his story, Lest Darkness Fall.
So most of the material from this segment is taken from various reference books on science fiction, which contain articles and stuff on De Camp, but chiefly from his autobiography, Time and Chance, which was a really good find, and an interesting experience reading it for sure, quite different from Jack Williamson's and both amusing and infuriating in equal measure, I would say. I came away feeling like Sprague, (rhymes with Plague, my friends call me Modest), is a really quick and intelligent but kind of embarrassing uncle.
So Leon Sprague De Camp was descended from Dutch and French immigrants, and he is distantly related to our previous author, H. P. Lovecraft, and in fact wrote the first, very contentious, biography about him, along with one of sword and sorcery and historical fiction and horror writer Robert E. Howard. The very short perfunctory biographical note in the so-called Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction of 1996, edited by David Pringle, calls him "a genial writer of monumental political incorrectness", and while I think there is a little bit more to him than that, it's kind of amusing that most of the resources have a pretty unbiased sort of just clear summation of what he did and what kind of writer he was and so forth. But this one, which had by far the shortest articles on any of the fiction writers because it also concerns itself with movies and television and stuff like that, just makes no bones about the author's personal opinions about De Camp's personality and mostly just highlights, I guess you could say, some of his more negative qualities. But we'll get a little bit more into that, and I have some, I have some thoughts, it's pretty interesting, but...
So he had a strained relationship with his father, who was a landowner, also named Leon, but doesn't really blame him for anything. Sprague is the family name of his mother. The Spragues seem to have been an innovative lot, his grandfather being a banker who introduced several new methods into the practice, as well as inventing a sort of adding machine. He was also a linguist who published several books on the subject, whereas De Camp's father had a degree in mechanical engineering. Of grandmother Sprague, he doesn't have much good to say, claiming she was imperious and intolerant. But she was a social person and enjoyed stories, reading him many in his youth.
Nate:
Now, I didn't look into this at all, but did you find a reference to Frank Sprague? If he was a relative at all, he was an early electrical engineer that electrified transportation systems and was quite well known during his time.
JM:
No, but actually, it seems like it was De Camps that were more along those lines.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
The Spragues were a very well to do upper-class family. So they're probably not related. But she told stories about how they entertained quite a few distinguished guests, including Oscar Wilde on his tour of the United States in 1882. There was indication that Beatrice Sprague's family didn't approve of her marriage to the backwoodsy Republican Leon De Camp. They all generally lived in the upstate New York and New Jersey area. L. Sprague himself, though, was born in New York City in 1907. He started using the initial L at a young age, possibly encouraged by his parents. When asked what pen names he wrote under later on, he reports he said, "with a name like mine, who needs one?"
Anyway, his parents divorced pretty early on, and his mother got heavily into Christian Science subsequently, much to Sprague's chagrin. While at a semi- military style academy in North Carolina, he discovered science fiction through the works of Victor Rousseau and Edgar Rice Burroughs. And sometime in the 20s, he talks about seeing a production in the theater of R.U.R. by Carel Capek ( More on that to come in another episode).
He went to California Institute of Technology, and he criticizes the type of person he was in college: argumentative, cynical, critical, and very outwardly opinionated. But according to some, and just an inkling I myself have, maybe he's always a bit like that. He uses this bit of Princess Ida by Gilbert and Sullivan to characterize himself. So this is quite charming the way he is quite willing to acknowledge that he can be difficult. But here's what he says, and this is what his quote is from "If You Give Me Your Attention" from Princess Ida. It goes, "Each little fault of temper and each social defect in my airing fellow creatures I endeavor to correct. To all their little weaknesses I open people's eyes, and little plans to snub the self-sufficient I devise. A charitable action I can skillfully dissect, and interested motives I'm delighted to detect. But to benefit humanity however much I plan, yet everybody says I'm such a disagreeable man. (sings) And I can't think why."
Incidentally, his views about music, rather amusingly, I'm also going to quote. "In any case, my singing is the sort at which strong men turn pale, women faint, and children run screaming. It is not that I lack interest in music: I am devoted to classical music of certain kinds, and can identify many symphonies and concerti after hearing a few bars. When I work, I turn on the local good-music radio station and run it all day and evening. Such music plays for me the role that cigarettes do for the chain smoker. My tastes run strongly to the Victorian and post-Victorian romanticists, especially the pre-revolutionary Russians: Balakirev, Borodin, Glazunov, Rachmaninov, Rimsky-Korsakov, and Tchaikovsky. In the more popular kinds of music: jazz, rock, country, and the like, I have little interest. When I find myself where the band is playing rock at an ear-splitting level, my urge is to get the hell out before my hearing is permanently impaired". (all laugh)
Later he said, even if he was right, his presentation was counterproductive. He said, "to convince somebody, don't argue with them. Get them to like you, and they will infer that because you're a good fellow, your opinions must have some weight. This is terrible logic, but sound psychology". That's his quote by the way.
His mother, the devoted Christian Scientist, died at age 44 of what was most likely a curable illness. Sprague says he has a lasting animosity toward Christian Science. But to invoke his somewhat customary, occasional mean-spiritedness, he says, and another quote, "But I suppose I ought to moderate my venom, since overpopulation is one of the world's most pressing problems. By killing off its devotees, Christian Science serves as a minor check on population growth". His outlook on religion was, in general, a bit negative, and this is something that shows through in many of his fiction writings.
After his brother Crawford died in an accident, where Sprague seemed to lose control of the car, his attitude about driving certainly changed. He didn't really like driving after that, which reflected in some of his attitudes later. For example, he very blithely tells of how General Motors, a tire company, and Standard Oil bought up all these rail systems in the 1940s and 50s and killed them off, and what a flagrant abuse of capitalist power this was.
Sprague travelled a lot from a pretty young age. His views of the places weren't necessarily as charitable as Jack Williamson's, who mostly did his travelling quite later in life after his war experience.
De Camp's first story submissions in 1931 were to some humorous magazine and to Amazing Stories. They got rejected. He was continuing to study and combined engineering with economics for The Economic Status of the Aircraft Industry, his Master's thesis. During this time, he had an aborted marriage that lasted less than a year. They spent most of the time living at opposite ends of the United States, and he blamed a lot on her alcoholism. He looks upon this as an embarrassing moment in his life. He did get his first writing work published, it was a co-authorship of a textbook on patent litigations. It was called Inventions and Their Management, and in fact collaborations would be a big part of Sprague's writing career going forward, including in the field of fiction.
It was very difficult for him to get a job as an engineer, which is what he wanted. This didn't really happen until the war killed the Depression, more or less. Nevertheless, he got various jobs working on stuff like the Catalog of Mechanical Equipment, which was a thing the American Society of Mechanical Engineers put out. He also worked for the Fuel, Oil, and Air Conditioning Journal. So that was a thing. You're dying to read it.
Nate:
Yeah, the Air Conditioning Engineering Society has been around for about a hundred years in the United States.
JM:
Oh, well, that's cool. That's how he got his writing started anyway. (laughs)
Nate:
Yeah, it's kind of interesting the kind of nonfiction writing he does. It wasn't called STS or Science and Technology Studies at the time, but that's basically what he wrote for several decades. The field would kind of establish itself in academia and name itself that in the 70s and stuff. But he was writing this stuff, I think, pretty early on in the 30s.
JM:
Oh yeah, yeah. But in the late 30s, he started his first fiction collaboration with the then somewhat experienced writer, Peter Schuyler Miller. Miller usually appeared in the pulps under P. Schuyler Miller, and this story after several rejections ended up in a 1941 issue of Super Science Stories: Genus Homo, later published as a book and possibly an influence on Planet of the Apes, as cited in some sources, but I would think possibly not, considering that there were quite a few ape stories as well after all, including some written in Europe, which the French author Pierre Boulle would possibly have been more likely to have been exposed to. But then again, we have seen that magazines like Amazing actually had quite a reach. So I don't know, maybe Super Science Stories did too. Maybe he picked up the book at some point. But he would do a lot of other collaborations and apparent collaborations like the Robert E. Howard pastiches, which were posthumous and which a lot of fans of Robert E. Howard have conflicting feelings about just because it was the first printing of most of the Conan stories, for example, in book form. But De Camp actually, not only did he expand on Howard's drafts, but he didn't necessarily distinguish between the two. So people had to kind of figure out what was De Camp and what was Robert E. Howard. And the way he describes it in his autobiography, which does, mind you, often make him not seem like, he doesn't necessarily want to take the blame all the time for things that go wrong. (laughs) But it makes it seem like he wasn't the first one to do this, and actually, somebody else had already kind of bowdlerized Howard a little bit and tried to link everything together into a single narrative called Conan the Conqueror, which was the first first one actually printed in America. But anyway.
Nate:
Yeah, he definitely left a lot of drafts behind. I'm going through the, it's like the first dozen or so Conan stories that appeared in Weird Tales and then the extended appendices are a bunch of the drafts and unfinished summaries.
JM:
Yeah, those are Del Rey, I think, the Del Rey Conan editions or something.
Nate:
Yeah, it's The Coming of Conan is the name of the book. Yeah, The Coming of Conan the Cimmerian.
JM:
The coming of Conan the Cimmerian is the first one, right?
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
And then there's The Conquering Sword of Conan and the crown, something, The Bloody Crown of Conan. Yeah. So those are the
Nate:
Yeah, it is the Del Rey. Yeah. They're really nice editions, but I'm assuming the other volumes have more of the related drafts and summaries and stuff like that. So I mean, there have to be dozens and dozens of unfinished sketches he left behind. Like I'm sure is the case with a lot of these people like Hodson, like Schuyler.
JM:
Yeah. Clark Ashton Smith has a lot of uncompleted stories and synopses. Even just looking at the synopses, they look really cool and you're like, Wow, I wish he'd written that. But there you go. Yeah.
But De Camp didn't really discovered Conan and Howard until 1950, but then developed a strong fascination with Howard's work, even while quick to note his historical inaccuracies.
Most of his real collaborations, though, in fantasy fiction, were with his friend Fletcher Pratt, an upstate New Yorker who enjoyed playing war games. More on that in a little bit, but they had a character that they had through symbolic logic or something, transmute himself to different time periods and parallel universes. The stories carried on for quite a while and they look pretty fun. His first real published fiction was "The Isolinguals" in the September 1937 issue of Astounding. This was pre-Campbell days. During this time, he was working for a correspondence school in their office. He also tried his hand at historical fiction and became interested in linguistics. He always enjoyed historical fiction and later published a few books in this genre, including stuff like The Bronze God of Rhodes, Arrows of Hercules and The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate. The interests of history and linguistics manifested in some of his science fiction as well. He wrote an article for Campbell in the early editorship days called "Language for Time Travelers", in which he speculated about the evolution of language in the future.
So a cool thing about Sprague's autobiography is that he also gives us pictures of many of his fellow writers and some include people we've talked about recently. Those include very concise physical descriptions, which I for one find helpful, and character talk highlighting certain quirks and mannerisms, as De Camp does in his fiction. He seems to have this knack for zeroing in on a person's traits. Like Jack Williamson, he says he wasn't really taken in by L. Ron Hubbard from the start, unlike some others in the Campbell stable, including Campbell himself, who was increasingly prone to weird and faulty ways of thinking, as well as a love for odd and useless inventions as time went on. In fact, Sprague often talks about putting people into his fiction, that is, people he has known in real life. He's rather bald about it in a way that I don't see very often, and it's really amusing because he'll tell you, his book is really full of all kinds of anecdotes, which make it pretty fun to read. He'll describe some sort of ridiculous person and he'll be like, "by the way, I put this guy in one of my books", and then he'll tell you what book it is. (all laugh) It's really, I guess he's not afraid of litigation or anything like that, because most of these people are dead.
Nate:
Yeah, and didn't he write it towards the end of his life too, so I think that also probably helped.
JM:
Yeah, in the 90s.
Gretchen:
He doesn't have too much to lose.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah. It's interesting how bald he is about it, though. It's not just once or twice. There's like dozens of instances of, oh yeah, so this person's in one of my stories. It's called, so-and-so, and he'll name the character and everything.
But the first National Science Fiction Convention in Newark, New Jersey, was in the spring of 1938. The New York fans seemed to have organized it. Attendance was 125 people, which was more than they expected. This was the forefront of the science fiction integrated concept of writers and fans at this time.
And around 1939 is when Campbell started Unknown, later to be called Unknown Worlds. De Camp explained this was because agents were baffled when customers would ask for an unknown magazine. Funnily enough, the book on Astounding actually fails to mention this kind of funny story. But in the fall of 1938, though, he published in Astounding a story called "The Command" about an intelligent black bear endowed with human-like cognition. That does predate Sirius. And many of his stories around this time were rejected, though. He says he gave some of them to independent fanzine publications for free, but annoyingly doesn't cite who those publications are, and also says he stopped doing this after John Campbell growled at him about expecting him to pay good money for stories when he was handing them out for free. I think his first story in Unknown was a two-part serial, "Divide and Rule". And he said it was science fiction, so it could have gone into Astounding. But he compares Unknown to Weird Tales, talking about how it mixed the two. So I'm just going to talk for a moment about Unknown.
The idea of starting a companion fantasy magazine to Astounding Stories/Astounding Science Fiction didn't originate with editor John W. Campbell, but with the previous editor, Something Tremaine, I didn't write down his full name, but he had brought up the idea of starting a "weird or occult mag", is what he called it. So in 38, Campbell started soliciting from his pool of writers. He mentioned an L. Ron Hubbard story in the introductory letter. "More like this, please!" is how L. Ron Hubbard interpreted it. However others interpreted it, the March 1939 issue was the first one and included a novel by English writer Eric Frank Russell called Sinister Barrier. That was Campbell's title. He liked to fiddle around with people's titles. But it was promoted in an Astounding just before launch as "a quality magazine devoted entirely to fantasy". Campbell was trying to separate the two in a way, though he still wanted rigorous logic in his fantasy stories, something someone like De Camp was happy to oblige with. And he went on to say, "it is the quality of the fantasy you have read in the past that makes the word anathema. Unknown will be to fantasy what Astounding has made itself represent in science fiction". I guess I find that interesting because it's interesting to know that as far back as that, there was still this kind of this, I guess, rivalry of sorts between sci-fi and fantasy.
Nate:
Yeah, it definitely speaks to the genre question, I think, kind of early on.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, you still see it a bit today and I mean, I think in a lot of ways, people are more tolerant now, like in terms of, I guess, the kind of readers that we would probably want to talk to are not really sticklers for that sort of thing so much. But on the other hand, I still see in various science fiction groups, people complaining about like the sci-fi and fantasy books being together in the bookstores or like they read this book and expecting it to be science fiction, but it had too much improbable fantastic stuff in it.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
And I think actually, Campbell probably did a lot here to remove that stigma. But unlike, say, in Amazing or I think even Weird Tales, Campbell paid a penny and a half a word for some authors, and that was good going rates. So writers that wrote for Unknown were Bradbury Sturgeon, who appeared in its pages 16 times, quite a bit of Hubbard, Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore, Jane Rice and Robert Bloch, Fritz Leiber and of course, De Camp. Our friend Jack Williamson showed up in 1940 with his werewolf novel, Darker Than You Think. It's been said that urban fantasy was born in this magazine. There are a lot of Fritz Leiber stories I love in there, including the retro Hugo Award winner Conjure Wife, and of course, the Fafhrd and Gray Mouser stories. Asimov sold a story to it in 1943. The magazine ran every month from March 1938 till February 1941, at which point it became bimonthly, which historian Mike Ashley and others note was never a good sign for the magazines. And unfortunately, and perhaps surprisingly, its circulation was lower than that of Astounding, even though it had many devoted fans. They were just that, fans, a fact that sometimes had to be brought home to John Campbell. That is, they didn't necessarily represent the general public. Unknown lasted only until 1943, sadly. Campbell reportedly really loved Unknown, and it seemed that during the paper shortage of the war, as Alex Nevala-Lee describes in his book about Astounding, he killed his favorite child so that the other, Astounding, might live. And this wasn't only because of business concerns, but supposedly because he thought science fiction had a useful purpose in the war effort.
There were 39 issues in total, and although it didn't match Astounding in sales, everyone who read it, including some from outside the science fiction field, like Shirley Jackson, said they were fans of it. Again, according to British SF historian Mike Ashley, it seems like often in practice the lines blur, and a lot of the same authors were published in both magazines anyway, though perhaps not all. An example of someone that I don't know was actually published in Astounding was Norville Page, who published a sword and sorcery novel in Unknown. But it's possible that Unknown was meant to be a sort of antidote to Weird Tales and its ilk. Campbell famously didn't really like gothic fiction, and he wrote in a follow-up anthology to Unknown ten years after it was discontinued. The anthology was very pompously titled: From Unknown Worlds, An Anthology of Modern Fantasy for Grown Ups in 1948, and the editorial was just as smug as the title. The antidote to Weird Tales may also be in part a reference toward urban fantasy, introducing fantasy into modern everyday life, the mythical creatures, the curses, etc. into the street, witchcraft as science. Of course, it's important to remember that the contributors to the magazine were all different people, and Campbell, although very much an ideas man, did accept plenty of submissions from people who didn't share the same views that he had. Fritz Leiber certainly had a different interpretation of the weird, and you could argue that in contrast to what Campbell might have said, many of his horror stories bring the gothic into the urban setting. But it also seems to have been an influence on science fiction as a whole. Perhaps bringing in, like I was saying, even more than Astounding in a way, a different approach to the genre.
So like Amazing before it, Astounding often had articles, and Dianetics was one, unfortunately. That is, the precursor to Hubbard's Scientology cult, I guess you might want to call it. Campbell himself wrote many of these articles, and De Camp wrote some crazy stuff too, apparently about exobiological speculations and stuff like that. And through his friend John Clark, also a bit of a science fiction writer, though he only wrote a few things, he joined this wargame role-playing group. And that's where he met Fletcher Pratt, and he even called the group Gamers. They played with model ships and met in a hall once a month. This is also where he met Catherine Crook, who's I believe the sister of one of the players. And it seems he fell in love with her quite quickly, and they planned to marry in the summer of that year. And he gushes about her quite a bit, and it's sort of cute. So they apparently collaborated a lot with her overseeing some of his work, and possibly co-writing much of it before she finally started getting credit on the byline with him in, I think, the 1960s. She also wasn't above being able to tell him when she thought something he'd written was terrible. She trimmed down this book he'd been working on, which is a book on occult research that he wanted to publish after the war, and it finally got published in 1966 with both their names on it. I think that was the first time she was officially acknowledged.
But later in the 40s he did a lot of hack work and ghost writing, including radio scripts for the Voice of America series, and a book supposedly written by a polar explorer, Finn Ronnne, called the Antarctic Conquest. And there was some travel and such, and a lot more fantasy and SF to follow.
This story, Lest Darkness Fall, was being gone over and agonized with as they were getting married, and holed up in a hotel room afterwards. Catherine would hunt furniture, and he would type. So the trials of an author's wife, here's another quote to show you what Sprague is like. "The writer is around all day, physically. So it is natural to ask him questions or tell him about things that come up. The trouble is that, while the body is present, his spirit is on Mars, or in the Jurassic, or in the 13th century. When the writer is rattling away at his typewriter, at least there is evidence that he is working, but he may sit all day with a clipboard on a lap, pencil in hand, and a vacant look on face. Then the temptation is strong to say something like, how do you like my new hair, dear? The spouse is aghast when the writer shakes his head as if coming out of a trance and yells, damn it, can't you see I'm thinking? He is, too. If you derail his train of thoughts by untimely interruptions, it may take him a quarter hour to get it back on track. The first time Catherine experienced this trance-like phenomenon, it seems I passed her in the hall, not only without speaking, but also without consciously seeing her. She burst into tears. Recalled to the here and now, I asked, why, darling, what's the matter? Did I step on your toe?"
So with the advent of the war, like many men of his time and place, Sprague felt compelled to sign up, and ended up working in the same naval base with both Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. Perhaps the Navy liked the idea of writers with some engineering or science backgrounds. So a lot was made of the three of them being science fiction writers engaged in secret work together in some kind of covert laboratory, and there was some hoaxing going on with a newspaper reporter concocting a story about them working on spacesuits and such, and hints about invisibility experiments and dimensional transportation, all phony. De Camp says the three of them didn't work together at any time. He seems to have mostly worked in cooling systems and hydraulics and such, which I guess makes sense. Later on, he was assigned to more of a bureaucratic role, chairing the War Productions Committee, and designed some propaganda posters that were put up around military bases. He rated his efforts as a propagandist as very poor and ineffective, and overly complicated and reasoned out. While his military career was distinctly unheroic, some of the stories he tells are pretty cool. There's some pretty interesting science going on, and he kind of puts some detail into describing it. The de Camp family was set up in Pennsylvania at this point near Philadelphia, and they had an infant son. He speaks reasonably favorably of the military experience, but laments the waste of manpower and resources that took place. In particular, he rails against the army's insistence on destroying surplus material after the end of the war that could have benefited people both at home and abroad. Everything from dishes to radio sets.
He was actually offered a nice engineering job after leaving the army, but surprisingly decided he really wanted to write. So he had a big project in mind after the war, and that was a book on magic and the occult that I mentioned before, and apparently he did a lot of first-hand research visiting the weirdest churches and societies and theosophists he could find. One of the chapters was on fictional books, that is, fabled books like Blavatsky's Book of Zion and the Book of Thoth in the Sax Rohmer's novels. Presumably the Necronomicon was somewhere in there, as well as maybe the King in Yellow. But these articles were just published in magazines, and he was never able to meet with much success with this endeavor. He had high hopes for it, which he called Around the Cauldron, and his big thing was that he seemed to want to debunk magical thinking and stuff, and he kind of realized that maybe that was the wrong approach, because the people that actually believed in it would just get outraged, and the people who didn't believe in it wouldn't be that interested.
So it's interesting, looking at de Camp and Williamson. They're a year apart in age. De Camp started writing a good ten years later, but he's from a much more well-to-do family, even if his father was a failed capitalist, in his words. And he traveled the world much younger instead of older, and he's a lot more self-conscious, but I don't mean bashful, which is kind of an interpretation people have of the concept of a person being self-conscious, but it doesn't mean that they're overly awkward or bashful. He's quite the opposite, really.
He knew lots of folks, and pulled some interesting fun pranks, and developed lots of interests. More worldly, for sure, but not always that pleasant. Funny, though, and pretty smart, and definitely a bit conservative, but that doesn't mean he hated anyone on the basis of race or creed or orientation. But a bit rigid, certainly, and de Camp admits this about himself. How Williamson and De Camp respectively treated the student actions during Vietnam, and the general, quote, upheavals of the late 60s is quite instructive. De Camp calls it the student revolt of 1968-74, and he says this repeatedly in his book. So I don't think he was a fan, and similarly, while De Camp complains about the raucous unculturedness of modern music, Williamson just says, I tried to play and understand music. There must be something in it, but I just can't find it. With Jack, what you see is what you get, and that's part of his endearing quality. De Camp's views are not always very pleasing, although he rationalizes everything in a way that's non-confrontational and seems reasonable enough. While his wife was teaching at a college full of minority students, he comments that their problem is that no matter how sincere they are and how hard they work, them being brought up in a milieu of non-learning and negativity, they're simply not adapted to the life. And I guess it's a little closer to the mark than Campbell's outright racism, but still has a classist sensibility to it. But he and Campbell would have shared opinions on many things, and indeed Campbell liked him, though eventually he distanced himself from a lot of his classic writers due to various reasons. Some were uncomfortable with his ideas, like Theodore Sturgeon, and others were very contemptuous of dianetics like De Camp, Lester Del Rey, to an extent Isaac Asimov.
De Camp definitely specialized in both biological modification stories and time travel, or alternative history stories, of which he wrote quite a few. And we'll talk about maybe some of the other ones a little later. There's a story called Aristotle and the Gun, and of course there's the dinosaur hunting stories, which are some of his most famous pieces, and Nate, I believe you said you've read one of them before.
Nate:
Yeah, so I had an anthology of them called Rivers of Time.
JM:
Yes, okay.
Nate:
The first one, A Gun for Dinosaur wasn't bad, but then there were a bunch of ones from the 80s and 90s that were just dismal, like absolutely awful.
JM:
That's too bad. I read a few of them and I enjoyed them. Most of my de Camp reading was like 20 years ago or more, and I have to say I didn't really pick up on some of the things that are quite obvious now. I still have to say that I like him, I like his humor, but there's definitely some caveats that people should probably be aware of.
Nate:
And we'll certainly get into that with this one when we talk about it in a bit.
JM:
Yeah. SO he also has space opera set in the future with Brazil as the dominant power. That series went on for a long time, it's called the Viagens Planetarias, and the stories were quite numerous in the 40s and 50s, and they seem to combine elements of interplanetary adventure and sword and sorcery, and I kind of want to check them out. They sound like a lot of fun.
But among the controversies that he was involved in not only was the thing about Robert E. Howard, but also H.B. Lovecraft. I mentioned earlier on that he wrote the first published biography of Lovecraft in book form, and it turns out that a lot of the impressions that people have of Lovecraft today, that is the sort of neurotic, loner, unpleasant racist, although there's certainly more than a little truth to them, most of that stuff comes from De Camp. And I think that it's kind of interesting that he highlights that Gilbert and Sullivan passage to describe himself because that seems to be something that he kept doing for all his life. And he's very quick to find faults, especially in his fellow writers, and it's sort of sometimes damned them with faint praise to say, yeah, I like it, but here's, here's how this person did wrong, and here's what an unpleasant person this was, like kind of pot calling the kettle black, maybe just a little bit, I would say.
non-spoiler discussion, historical background
(Music interlude: synth drone with distant washes and crashes)
JM:
So, Lest Darkness Fall, that's the story that we're doing. He had recently been reading Twain's Yankee and also waded through, as he put it, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire by Edward Gibbon. He was interested in the Western interregnum, also known as the Dark Ages, and he wanted to set something during that time period. Interestingly, though, when British critic Tom Shippey wrote his essay for Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction, called "Science Fiction and a View of History", he said De Camp wrote him saying he wasn't responding directly to Yankee, but something published in Astounding that he didn't name. Also not by coincidence, though, Count Belisarius, was written by Robert Graves in 1938. He does talk about the relation to Yankee in his autobiography, though, so I'm not really sure what the deal with Shippey was. Annoyingly, neither of them really seemed to cite what they were talking about, but he says that De Camp was sort of denying that he was responding directly to Twain. But he does talk about it in his autobiography, and he's pretty clear about it. So what he says is: "The basic plot was the same as Twain's, but I had the advantage of knowing more than Twain did about inventions and their practical problems. Twain thought science and technology wonderful, but had little first-hand knowledge of them, so he lost a fortune backing the Paige typesetting machine, a 3-ton monstrosity with 18,000 parts of which the drawings in the patent applications contained 1,275 figures. Two patent examiners are said to have gone insane during the prosecution of the patent application. I knew that not even Thomas Edison himself, if translated to 6th century Rome, could whip up revolvers and bicycles easily. Even simple modern commonplaces like gunpowder and printing press would need an enormous amount of trial and error before they could be reduced to practice. The modern technologist would find no infrastructure of skilled mechanics and machine tools to help him. He would have to do all the donkey work himself by laborious hand methods. So I made Martin Padway's first successful invention, brandy, which could be distilled with a minimum of equipment."
So this book! I read it quite a while ago, many, many years ago, and I liked it. It was kind of during my real interest in, I guess, Roman history stuff. I heard about it and I kind of wanted to check it out. I still think it's a pretty fun book. What do you guys think of this?
Gretchen:
I do enjoy this book and I know that there's problems that we will get into, but I think that it does feel like it's answering to Twain and the humor feels very similar, but I do think overall that Yankee is a much better book and this sort of concept works better with Twain.
Nate:
Yeah, I think generally speaking I like this, but I would agree that Twain is much better. Like I think Twain and Butler are both like masterpiece level where this is like a 7 out of 10 type of like, and you know, it's not bad, but it feels more of like a power fantasy adventure than somebody like Twain who was using time travel as a vehicle for social commentary really, or Octavia Butler who was using it as a way to connect to her own personal past and heritage, and it doesn't really feel like De Camp here is doing much more than like nerding out about history and what it would really be like to engage with the culture and the technology and the society, whereas that's not like a concern that Twain has at all. You know, he's like playing with mythology as a way to eliminate this idea of historical romanticism where that's really not really what De Camp is trying to do at all here, even though there is a bit of humor and some funny scenes, I think the underlying core is generally different than the previous two works we've been talking about.
JM:
Yeah
Gretchen:
I think, yeah, like this book is a fun romp, I think, but there are parts and I think we'll get to it when we get into the specifics of the book. There are some parts that in the faults reminded, I believe that Nate, you mentioned this as well, that kind of reminded you, or at least a reminded, J.M., I believe, of Sirius.
JM:
Yeah.
Gretchen:
And we'll get into that, but I was talking about like even those two works together and I personally really enjoy Sirius, and I think that because I enjoy Sirius a little more for the content of the book and like the actual core of that book, that I think I just don't find this to be like you were saying a masterpiece level novel.
Nate:
Yeah, and there is like a lot of sexism that does come out just like kind of out of nowhere for no reason,
Gretchen:
Yeah, yeah.
Nate:
And we really haven't seen a fair amount of that in these early works, but I think as we're going to go forward into the 40s and the Golden Age, we're going to see a lot more of that with a lot more of the major authors, so I mean, that's kind of one of the reasons that I haven't read a lot of the big authors. I've read some of the Asimovs and Heinleins and stuff like that, and just the way they write women characters is, it's such a major turn off (laughs) to reading a lot of those books, and it comes out in L. Sprague De Camp's work here for sure, and that was again an issue I had with his dinosaur hunting stories, is there's just like one outrageously sexist story that he put kind of right at the beginning of the anthology, it just kind of soured my entire mood on that.
JM:
Yeah, I think people sort of took a lot of his stuff more for granted, and even I myself, perhaps being brought up more with that fiction and having read a lot more of it when I was younger, it's not something that really bothered me, and now I kind of notice it more, but to be honest, it doesn't really like, it doesn't affect my appreciation of the work that much, but I think some of that may be due to nostalgia or maybe just, I mean, I don't really believe in separating the art from the artist, but I think that somebody like De Camp, you know, after reading his autobiography and getting a little frustrated, but still laughing kind of on every other page is kind of like, well, I don't think he's genuinely like being malicious, but yes, he does fall into this kind of often, and I don't know, we'll talk a bit more about that when we do the summary, but yeah, 7 out of 10, I mean, it does sound fair to me, to me that's still a pretty good book. Maybe this is no masterpiece, and I definitely find that, yes, Twain was more essentially impactful in my personal life as well with Yankee, but there are a lot of things I liked about this book, and I could say that the fact that he's not interested in making some kind of point about romanticism, and he's not interested in lampooning modern day society, he's actually genuinely interested in what it would be like for somebody from modern times to be in 6th century Rome. I think that actually is what makes it good, I think that's, I mean, it doesn't make it better than the Twain, no, but the fact that he actually, even though he doesn't take the time travel concept very seriously either, he still takes the idea of somebody transplanted in time seriously enough to think about the problems they would have, and while it is a power fantasy of sorts, it's not an easy road for him, for his character. He does leave enough ambiguity to suggest, well, you know, it seems to end on a positive note, but we can't really be sure how much he can really change. He thinks he might be able to, he thinks at the end, well, you know, the last sentence in the book is "darkness will not fall", and that's what he thinks, but he's got a pretty rough road ahead, so we can't be sure, so I don't think it's entirely gung ho optimism necessarily. It is a little bit more grounded in actually thinking out the things that Twain didn't take seriously, and I like that, because even though he does do that, he still makes it a pretty funny book.
Gretchen:
It is interesting that in the Twain, of course, like you have Sir Boss who's able to do everything almost perfectly when it comes to creating things, but Padway struggles, although Twain is much more pessimistic in the end, while De Camp is more optimistic.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, De Camp's very much an STS type writer, and this really comes out here, whereas Sir Boss had factory automation going in like a week. (laughs) Padway, he really engages with the technology of the time and how cultures and societies adapt and react to new technologies when they're introduced, and how new technologies can transform how societies function. You can really tell that that was a major interest of De Camp, because he spent a lot of his time writing about that outside of his fiction, and he really emphasizes that a lot here. There's a lot of discussion about not only just the technology that Romans were using at the time, but how Padway, even with the knowledge of the future, introducing new inventions without the machine tools, without the factory automation, has to be done from the ground up, and just piecing together the various things he needs from equipment to materials, to tools, to skilled labor and things like that, working with what he has in the ground. It's very interesting, and I think a thoughtful approach to this kind of adventure where he really does dwell on that a lot, and he makes it a huge part of the entire plot.
JM:
Yeah, he does, and he makes it interesting, and he makes it, I don't know, unlike somebody like just to pull a random example out of a hat, Ayn Rand, or maybe even L. Ron Hubbard in his later works, the things, yeah, like he does have obstacles to face, and not everything he attempts is successful. So although I get the power fantasy aspect of it, and it was dismissed by one or two writers in the references that I looked up as just that, what somebody said, I think it was somebody in the Cambridge History of Science Fiction said, "an ode to the main character's sheer competence", or something like that. (all laugh) Well, yeah, and yeah, I mean, there are times when it stretches credibility, and again, we can talk a bit more about it during the summary talk, but like towards the end, you know, all the military stuff he does, that, I mean, I guess a lot of it is based on his historical knowledge, though, and being an archaeologist, maybe military history is a specific interest of his, so it doesn't not ring true, I think, and it almost feels silly to even comment on how Twain looks at this, because Twain doesn't genuinely seem interested in what it would be like for a man to be around in England in the sixth century.
Nate:
I guess what's interesting is that it seems a conscious choice of De Camp to set this here and at this time period, because it's essentially the exact same time that King Arthur is supposed to have lived.
JM:
Yes.
Nate:
We know almost nothing about that period of English history, whereas we don't know as much about this period of Roman history as we do say the reign of Augustus or Julius Caesar, but we still know a lot more than we do about sixth century England.
JM:
Yeah. Yeah, I think that's too interesting, you know, he is really nerding out. De Camp really does a really fine job, in my opinion, of bringing forward his interests in an engaging and appealing way in a lot of his fiction, and he does it in a way that, yes, you can tell that from his autobiography and other things that and things that people have said about him, including an offhand comment in the history of, the Astounding history book, that was not cited by anybody, but I guess it was just something the author concluded from the various resources he pulled from and people that he talked to that De Camp had a tendency to irritate people and maybe, but I think that he has a, he has a sense of humor, And I think that that always shows through in his work in a way that sometimes, I guess, takes away from perhaps some of his more negative qualities and the fact that he can make, he wrote a lot of articles on naval history and on ancient technologies and stuff like that. And also on various historical outlines and stuff comparing different ways of looking at history. I feel like he would have done a good job of making that stuff good to read, unlike perhaps some people. And it does show through a lot here. Even the military campaigning towards the end of the book is, maybe it goes a little slower than the rest of it for me, but I didn't mind it at all because he still made it kind of fun.
Nate:
I think he's definitely a competent writer and that maybe would set him apart from some of the earlier pulp people who have a more, I guess, messy, basic style. He is a good and skilled writer as far as his voice and his pacing and all that goes on.
JM:
And he has a good interesting way of approaching characters as well. I don't think it's necessarily complex, but he really makes sure that everybody has at least something, some kind of quirk, some kind of thing that makes you remember them. And again, he's very self-conscious about it, which could be considered a negative because like it maybe shouldn't be so obvious that that's what you're doing. But it's just fun and memorable to read. A lot of the characters in the book have something about them that makes them endearing. And again, in his talks about real people that he interacted with, he always brings out that as well to the point where he's telling you about them and then he's like, "and I put this person in my book, by the way", but yeah.
Gretchen:
There are a lot of good character bits in this that I find pretty fun. And yeah, there's a certain one that when we get to I'll say which one I like the most.
JM:
Yeah. And, you know, when you're writing a book like this and you have like originally it was in a magazine, so he could have expanded on it a little more. We'll talk a little bit more about the, I guess, changes that were made. But there weren't that many, but there were some for sure between magazine publication and book publication. It was mostly stuff that D CAmP decided to put back in that John Campbell took out. And yes, it is the weird unpleasant sex stuff.
Nate:
Hmm.
JM:
Campbell didn't want that in there. We could say that, De CAmP says it's because he was very straight-laced about sex and they didn't want any sex in there, but it could also be because he saw that it was inappropriate and didn't really add anything to the story.
Nate:
Yeah. I mean, he basically goes around and sleeps with every woman in Ravenna. (laughs) I mean, talk about power fantasy, I think that is kind of one of the arguments for that.
JM:
So I think that's a good segue into something that I was thinking while I was reading this book and that is that, especially if you don't get the Unknown publication, which does include an introduction by De Camp describing his sources and stuff, he sort of takes it for granted that you know at least a little bit about the history and reading this again, because it had been so long and maybe I didn't even really pay attention back then. But I mean, I was kind of really into Roman history for a while there. So I probably didn't really think that much about it. But it took me a while to actually figure out what was going on with the politics and with everything else. Nate, I don't know how much you knew about this time period, or Gretchen, I don't know if you felt like a little bit lost at first"
Gretchen:
I am someone, I personally don't have that much experience with like the specifics of Roman history. I know a bit about like Justinian and Theodora and Belisarius from a world history class that I took in high school, but it's been a while since I've brushed up on it. But I was not I was maybe there were some things that I wasn't as clear about when reading it, but I don't think I was ever too confused about it.
Nate:
Yeah, I'd read a fair amount of Roman history, but it's all stuff like Plutarch and Tacitus and Livy who are writing like centuries before this takes place. So I haven't really read too much stuff at all really on the time period after the collapse of the Western Roman Empire
JM:
And most people haven't now, nowadays.
Nate:
Yeah, and the Gothic kingdom.
JM:
And I think in 1939, this was probably more of a part of history class than it is now for people in this part of the world. I'm just guessing here, but I think that that would be the case. I mean, I had an optional Latin class, which I took. And that's where I learned a lot about the historical period and also my own interest because I was kind of fired up by that stuff. So and even now, though, like reading it, it took me a while to really remember a lot of the stuff that had happened. And I kind of felt like, wow, somebody who just picked up this book and didn't really know anything about it would be pretty lost. That was my impression anyway, because even I was a little bit like the first time just kind of like, OK, wait, so who's so wait, we have Constantinople, we have the Goths, we have the Romans and the Italians are not happy with, wait a minute, I'm so confused. And then, you know, after a while, I thought about it and I remembered and I actually read a little bit of background and stuff. And I'm like, yeah, OK, this makes sense now, but he doesn't really spell it out. So you kind of just have to read it and go with it. And then eventually it does kind of come a little clear what's happening. But I definitely think that he kind of throws you in at the deep end a little bit. So I think that's why, Nate, you might want to talk a little bit about this historical period.
Nate:
Yeah. So De Camp, again, like you mentioned, wrote this really helpful introduction to the version that appeared in Unknown, where he directly cites his sources that he consults for this. So for the ancient world, he cites Cassiodorus, Jordanes, Procopius and Sidonius. And from the modern sources, it's the Bury, the Gibbon, the Hodgkin and the McGovern and Moss. And then he proceeds to tell us that, "of these, Procopius and Hodgkin are the most informative". So that's how we're going to proceed from here. But before these two, I do want to talk a bit about Cassiodorus or Flavius Magnus Aurelius Cassiodorus, as he shows up as a character in tonight's novel in one of the more amusing scenes.
Cassiodorus lived from roughly 485 to 585 and wrote a number of works, some of which are lost, including his Gothic history. He founded a monastery called the Bavarium, which championed education and the furtherance of scholarship, in particular copying and preserving works. Thomas Hodgkin, the modern source that De Camp felt was the most helpful here, was the one who translated Cassiodorus in 1886. And he seems to be more or less the definitive scholar in this era from the late 19th century. This translation is the one that's up on Gutenberg. And of Cassiodorus, Hodgkin says, quote, it will be seen that I only profess to give an abstract, not a full translation of the letters. "There is so much repetition and such a lavish expenditure of words in the writings of Cassiodorus that they lend themselves very readily to the work of the abbreviator. Of course, the long letters generally admit of greater relative reduction in quantity than the shorter ones, but I think it may be said that on average, the letters have lost at least half their bulk in my hands. On any important point, the real student will, of course, refuse to accept my condense rendering and will go straight to the fountainhead. I hope, however, that even students may occasionally derive the same kind of assistance from my labors which an astronomer derives from the humble instrument called the finder in a great observatory"
So moving on to the Byzantine historian who De Camp felt was most useful, Procopius, he wrote the text "The Secret History of the Court of Justinian", which I also have not read, but apparently gets into all the dirt on Justinian and Belisarius, who pop up in tonight's novel, and also provides for four books on the Gothic Wars going up to 559, which is a little bit beyond the time period we're covering tonight. The introduction to the Gutenberg edition says of it, "the whole work is very interesting. The descriptions are excellent, and in the matter of ethnographical details, Procopius may be said to be without a rival among ancient historians". So perhaps one to check out sometime in my off-podcast reading, as I certainly do enjoy those earlier Greek and Roman historical authors.
The modern author that De Camp cites as being the most important is, as previously mentioned, Thomas Hodgkin, who, in addition to the above quoted translation of Cassiodorus, wrote three major works on this time period, which include Italy And Her Invaders, a vast multi-volume work written between 1880 and 1899, The Dynasty of Theodosius from 1889, and Theodoric the Goth from 1891. All these are pretty easy to find through a combination of Google Books, Archive.org, and Project Gutenberg, so if you have any interest in both this period of history and the historiography of scholarship itself, you can easily do so. Since by Hodgkin alone there are multiple books written on the subject, we're not going to get too much into the actual historical events of the time, but we will say a little bit to set the scene, as it is a period that I really wasn't that familiar with before looking into this background material for this episode.
This might be just anecdotal, but when I'm milling around used bookstores, thrift stores, flea markets, that kind of thing, I'll typically buy any works of historical authors from antiquity that I see. So publishers like Penguin, Oxford, and Norton, all publish editions of this stuff that often make their way into the used market, and I frequently see stuff like Plutarch, Livy, and Tacitus, but I don't think I've ever encountered any history stuff from this period in the wild. I'm not sure if that means that Plutarch and the like is more well read generally, but I'm certainly more familiar with those earlier authors.
JM:
It certainly seems so.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely a couple hundred years before. But in the 5th century, Rome is sacked by Gothic tribes several times, and the last Western Roman emperor, Romulus Augustulus, is deposed in 476. It should be noted that the capital of the Western Roman Empire at this time wasn't Rome, but rather Ravenna, which was the capital of the Western Roman Empire from 408 onwards, and served as the capital city into the Gothic period. Odoacer (I'm not entirely sure how to pronounce these Gothic names), but he ruled until 493 when Theodoric the Great marched his army into Ravenna, where Odoacer was in hiding and killed him. Theodoric the Great held the title of King of the Ostrogoths, King of the Visigoths, and King of Italy. And after his death in 526, Italy is ruled by his grandson, Athelaric. But since he's only 10, the real ruler is his mother, Amalaswentha (we'll go with that) (laughs)
JM:
Yeah, these names
Nate:
So Amalaswentha herself became queen after Athelaric drank himself to death at age 17 or 18. And she was murdered the following year in 535, around the time of the start of our novel, which is one of the triggering events of the Gothic war, where Justinian had launched an army from Constantinople in an attempt to try to retake Italy and establish the full dominion of the Roman Empire.
Constantinople of course would stand as a stable power for centuries beyond this, until being sacked during the Crusades. And Justinian reconquered a good chunk of the Western Roman Empire, including all of Italy, all of the islands in the Mediterranean, North Africa, and southern Spain, which includes both sides of the Strait of Gibraltar. However, his conquest was not complete. All of modern-day Portugal, most of modern-day Spain, and all of modern-day France were pretty much still controlled by the Visigoths. And while these gains wouldn't be held for that long after Justinian's death, he is idolized by some, including Dante, who wrote him in Paradiso, encountering him flying around Mercury, which is a pretty great science fiction image.
So that's kind of where we are in the start of our novel in 535. Italy is ruled by the Goths, of which there are several different factions, all at each other's throats, and in the East, Justinian is on the rise, starting his reconquest. The Gothic Wars in real life were a long bloody series of campaigns that ravaged Italy for almost 20 years, the aftermath of which left the countryside totally devastated, triggering a long dark age in the country. And many of the real-life players in those events are people who are going to meet tonight in the novel.
JM:
Oh, so exciting.
Nate:
De Camp says that roughly half of the main characters are based off of real people, and he tries to capture their personalities as close to the original sources, presumably as described by Procopius as possible.
JM:
So before we take a short break and get to the plot summary, I have a slight tangent, and it's something that I've wondered for a long time, and something that even reading a little bit of the books that I got on the subject for this, I didn't really get too far into them, because there's a lot to go into, and that De Camp autobiography is like 400-something pages long, so yeah. But even listening to the lectures from that Louisiana State University professor, kind of what's his name, maybe we'll put that in the sources, but I have a question, and this is something I've never really understood. Why, like this is going back a little bit to Constantinople, why did they move the capital?
Nate:
Yeah, so here's why they moved the capital. Constantine wanted to found the greatest city in the world, so what do you do when you found the greatest city in the world? You name it after yourself, so that's what he did. (all laugh)
JM:
Right, but why didn't he just rename Rome then?
Nate:
Well, because Rome was already there, and when you want to make the greatest city in the world, you know, you make the greatest city in the world, that's what Alexander did in Alexandria, he basically built it up from a tiny remote port into what it is today.
JM:
I don't know, I can't help but feel that now they would just rename the city like Leningrad or something.
Nate:
Yeah, but Constantinople was also at a very strategically important location, it's right on the strait, which controls all the traffic in and out of the Black Sea, so there were kind of two capitals at the time that administered both halves of the empire separately, and you can see for administrative purposes why this would be useful. Spain is a long way from Syria and you need an administrative center that can kind of deal with things in a more time-efficient fashion. Likewise, that entire part of the world was still culturally Greek, it would be for at least a thousand years after Constantine lived, so having a Greek capital city in the Greek part of the world, I think really made sense from an administrative and a cultural standpoint, but yeah, Constantinople stood for basically another thousand years, it was a major stable power until it was sacked during the Crusades and after the Crusades there were a whole bunch of separate rival infighting factions between one another and a lot of the power dwindled as they lost a good chunk of their territory, but they eventually kind of re-stabilized before the Ottoman Turks captured the city in 1453, which was the end of the Byzantine or the Eastern Roman Empire, or they considered themselves just the Roman Empire until the end.
JM:
And now it's Istanbul, not Constantinople, and you can't go back to Constantinople. (laughs)
Nate:
Yeah.
JM:
Okay, you knew I was going to have to say that at some point.
JM:
Yeah, of course.
Gretchen:
Yeah. I was thinking it myself, but.
JM:
Oh yeah. So if I hadn't, you would have done it. Okay. Well, cool. All right, let's take a quick break then and we'll come back with our plot description.
spoiler summary, discussion
(Music: melodic, chiming)
JM:
So, as we were saying, this book originally did appear in Unknown magazine in 1939. But it made it into book form in 1941, and that was pretty quick. A lot of these were not reprinted. And you have to think to that like paperbacks and stuff weren't really, it wasn't the same in the 40s that it was like in the 80s or 90s, like you didn't see that many of them coming out of science fiction, golden age genre at that time. So a lot of this stuff was like fix up novels published later in the 50s and so on. Right. So he did have luck with this pretty early on and the story seems to have been well liked and it gets cited in a lot of science fiction publications and criticism.
But to get to our somewhat familiar by now narrative of our traveler. And believe me, it doesn't take long before he gets to his destination.
Our man's name is Martin Padway, and he's an archaeology student. Different, little mousy, nerdy, they might say today. He's being driven around Rome by a professor Tancredi. Tancredi, a jovial Italian who we'll never see again in the book, is chatting about a theory of time, and he charmingly likens time to a tree trunk and explains that when people disappear, they slip down the trunk into a former time. Amusingly, he gets the words mixed up and calls the trunk a suitcase. This little fun language play with somebody whose language is like just the fact that he took the time to point that out was really fun, I thought. This kind of shows his, his interest in linguistics and his silly sense of humor at the same time. So he thinks when you change history, though, a new branch must be created, or else we should be seeing more people disappear as their histories are unhappened. And this is cool. This is before the popularization of what's now called the Fermi paradox. But I've seen that applied to time travelers, too. And it's basically that, well, if there are time travelers coming from the future, we would surely they would be everywhere and we would know about it somehow. So the fact that we haven't seen that must mean that it's not possible. S(laughs) o it's kind of touching on this a little bit here. I actually really like this first chapter, even though it has nothing to do with the rest of the book, it kind of establishes the theory behind everything that happens in the book. And it's completely unconnected, like there's no reason why after this conversation, Padway should actually go back in time, but he does. And for some reason, that fact, that those two things are not connected, doesn't bother me.
Nate:
It is a very nice coincidence.
JM:
Yeah. But Tancredi drives like a maniac, and it's nice to know that this thing about crazy drivers in Rome was alive and well, even back in the 30s. And Padway wants to see the pantheon so he gets dropped off, and literally here he just appears to trip on an edge or something, like his foot just missed a step somehow, and suddenly he's in the past with nothing but some loose coins, travelers checks and his passport. (laughs) And it takes him a few more pages to catch on, but when he does, it's not disbelief of his situation that drives the fear. It's how the hell is he going to make it here? And he first asks for some directions to a cop and is told he's very brave and they don't know where they can find any of them. Luckily, he has some weird coins in his pocket. I mean, weird from the perspective of the money changer he goes to see. So he gets some silver for them and he figures out that it's the year 536. And here he meets a fellow, a Goth who befriends him because of his bad Latin. He's very happy to find someone in Rome who speaks it worse than he does. And Padway's advice about how he might be able to put a stop to his allergic reaction at home. By the way, this is something De Camp took from his actual life. He had a very, very intense allergy to cats and it extended to the point where just about any furry animals, although he could stand to be around ones that weren't cats, he certainly wouldn't have wanted to live with them. So he knew what he was talking about. Nevita, his new friend, agrees to keep the dogs out of the house and see what will happen. And the Goth, whose name, like I said, is Nevita, he seems happy to discover they have a similar social class and says Padway should come to dinner sometime.
Then Padway goes to Thomasus the Syrian, a banker, and this guy is so much fun.
Gretchen:
He's the character that I found to be. The bits are good with him.
JM:
Yeah, but Padway has this crazy scheme. He thinks and starts small. He wants to brew some brandy because it hasn't been invented yet. And yeah, Tomasus is just hilarious. They do this haggling. And it's like, Padway talks about how he doesn't like haggling. And there are several instances in the book where he is forced into a position where he has to haggle with other characters. And with the other characters, it's not much fun, and you can see why he's exhausted by the end. But with this guy, it's like, yeah, yeah, let's hang out.
Gretchen:
Yeah, with Thomasus, it's always like, No, that sounds crazy, I'm not going to help you with that. How much money do you need for that though? (laughs)
JM:
Yeah, it's like every time. (laughs) And then he has his favorite exclamation. "Did you hear that, God?" It gets to the point where later on when they haven't met for a while, and Padway runs into him, and he's like, "so how's your friend God?" And Thomasus is like, "blasphemer!"
But Thmasus is going to front his alcohol operation, and Padway will teach his clerks about decimal notation, or American mathematics, as he calls it. And he also proposes to teach them a better system of accounting. As for the brandy, they need a lot of materials and for the filtering process. There's plenty of bad wine available, but no copper tubing, it seems. So Padway even sets himself up in a rundown house. And there's funny interactions with his help. Fritharik, his bodyguard, and Julia, his maid. Julia screams that "Satanas has come!" when he fumigates the house.
Martinus, as he's called now, on his first day off in a month, he's been working very diligently, you see, he goes to the library, and he finds many great lost works of history, lost in his time, that is. He meets a Cornelius Anicius, and his daughter Dorothea. Cornelius is a gentleman patrician of sorts, and he wants to know about Martinus's travels. But he gets cold and snooty when he learns that Martinus is just a humble brewer of some sort. A shame, Martinus wanted to get to know him. He needs all the friends he can get, and he knows it. So he and Thomasus hang out at the baths and tell dirty jokes. And Thomasus wonders about his new friend and his mysterious ways.
Martinus, or Mysterious Martinus, as they start calling him, all around. It's kind of like his version of Sir Boss, I guess. It's pretty fun. He can't help but make predictions and show off his strange knowledge. And he jokes about Fritharic murdering his assistant Hannibal, or the other way around. And does indeed show up in the middle of a fight. Hannibal, this cocky Sicilian guy, is brained in the head after going a bit berserk. And he was caught selling copper on the side. So he leaves in disgrace, but he may cause trouble.
Martin thinks about the coming darkness, the age of darkness that will swallow Europe for almost a thousand years. He wonders what could have kept the Empire afloat longer. And he decides that his focus should be rapid communication and printing. Thomasus says there used to be publishers in Rome but haven't been for years. Rome is kind of a dying town at this point. Thomasus has been around a bit, and he knows. Nevertheless, Martin is determined to build a printing press. The carpenter is convinced it's some kind of new torture or execution machine. Paper is a little bit of a challenge, and so is the ink. He has to do a lot of experimenting and buy a lot of vellum, which is costly. Nevita the Goth shows up and gets a grand tour. Martin's come down with a cold and everyone is fussing over him and wanting to cure him with herbs and magic stuff and all kinds of hogwash, and Padway just wants to be left in peace. He threatens one astrologer quack with putting out the sun, nd I'm reminded of Connecticut Yankee. So I mean, I think there's some pretty obvious and deliberate callbacks here.
Nate:
for sure.
JM:
The newspaper does pretty well, although he has to avoid printing scandalous stuff, as he worries he might be killed. He even has an assistant in mind, a Greek called George, who writes condemnatory articles about the city governor and does it well, even if they can't be printed. He has to find a solution for the paper problem and settles on thin felt. Building a clock is his next challenge, and it thwarts Martin Padway completely.
So, Martin has dinner with Nevita's family, and they talk about the coming war. The Goths will besiege the Italians. The Eastern Empire, that is Constantinople, may want to retake the West. And Padway can't help but hint that he has knowledge about what will happen. Nevita says the Goths want to preserve the Italian civilization. But we'll see how well that goes. After a nice night out with friends, he comes home and gets arrested for sorcery by the cops, who are now using his own paper for warrants.
At the police precinct, there's a literal tug-of-war between the municipal and state police to take him into custody and torture him. And they pay no attention to his plaintive cries for help and to stop pulling his arms in opposite directions. And he convinces the governor to let him go by explaining the concept of a stock corporation and promises to build a semaphore telegraph system for the rapid transmission of messages. He also promises a nice write-up about his daughter's wedding in the newspaper. He has every intention of really building telegraph towers, but the patrician senators and such, who he's now in cahoots with, they all think he's faking it, and it's just a money-making scheme, which they're more than happy to go along with. (laughs) The corruption is rampant.
Unfortunately, there are a lot of con artists in Rome, and the first guy he hires to make lenses is one of those. He has to go all the way to Naples to find someone who can do it, and it's a big chore and hassle, and he has to give the paper over to George the assistant editor. Even then, the lenses aren't quite right, being of plain convex or concave type, but he makes them work. And he starts advertisements in the paper, and there's this really funny ad that I'm going to quote, so it's the ad for his funeral service, and it goes: "Do you want a glamorous funeral? Go to meet your maker in style. With one of our funerals to look forward to, you will hardly mind dying. Don't imperil your chances of salvation with a bungled burial. Our experts have handled some of the noblest corpses in Rome. Arrangements made with the priesthood of any sect. Special rates for heretics. Appropriately doleful music furnished at slight extra cost. John The Egyptian, Genteel Undertaker near the Viminal Gate". I think Twain would have been impressed with that ad.
Nate:
Definitely sounds like the kind of thing Sir Boss had the knights carrying around on banners.
Gretchen:
I was going to say that, I feel like that would be something that would show up on one of their signs.
JM:
Oh yeah, it would have been on one of those knight billboards. (laughs) Yeah, the sandwich boards.
So construction of his towers is stopped by some German soldiers, and he hasn't asked the king's permission to build them. This is a problem. The war is not going well, and no chances are being taken, so it's off to Ravenna he goes. And he gives King Thiudahad a magnifying glass to help him read, and tries to get him to allow the towers. And the king is impressed with the printing press, which he has heard about. The king's pretty out of it and unpredictable. Seems pretty senile, actually. And it's a really exhausting bargain with Padway teaching the king about Copernican solar theory and giving him his best telescope in exchange for a promise that the towers won't be interfered with.
Martin arrives back in Rome just in time to stop the distribution of the new paper. George has printed another scandalous corruption story, which makes both the king and the church look pretty bad. The instructive contrast to Yankee here in that Martin is horrified, telling George they'll all be hanged or burned alive for printing this, which Sir Boss takes the chance at every time he gets, right? Every chance he gets to ruffle some feathers. But he has to bribe yet more people, almost gets arrested again, and his horse is stolen.
And then Martin and Julia the maid get drunk together, and this is not a great part. So Julia wants him to be, "nice" to her, and it really sucks because the next day he sees a bug crawl out from her armpit after they've had sex and he's repulsed. She retaliates by setting the church on him. It's basically like Sirius all over again. And only worse for Padway, you know, he didn't have to. But anyway,
Nate:
he definitely does Julia dirty here.
Gretchen:
Yeah.
JM:
Yeah. So this like, I mean, Padway is very bad at romance, like de Camp establishes that early on. So I don't necessarily like, it doesn't have to be that de Camp thinks like this. But just seeing some of his other somewhat misogynistic talk does kind of make me think that yeah, he's a bit like this. And there's some other comments that come up later. Yeah. Yeah.
Gretchen:
This is the part I was referring to earlier, just because it's, I will say, I don't think it's as egregious as it was in Sirius because in Sirius, it's so much more mean-spirited and like comes, it feels very much more out of the blue. At least in Lest Darkness Fall, there are moments when a lot of the characters are, they're not all completely flattering depictions of characters. So I don't think it's as terrible, but it's still pretty bad.
JM:
Interesting. I actually think that, I thought this was more egregious than Sirius, because I thought the fact that he is actually responsible for it, I mean, it kind of works hard to make Padway pretty likable and for the most part he is. And like, I mean, in Sirius, we don't know that character, so it's conceivable to think that yeah, maybe, maybe somebody could be that messed up in the head and they would do something like that, and it would suck, no matter what way you looked at it. But I don't know, this just seems yeah.
Nate:
And again, it ties more into the power fantasy stuff of, you know, Padway sleeps with a maid; later, he's gonna sleep with a queen and then he's gonna sleep with the noble's daughter.
JM:
Yeah. But the joke is that he sucks at all of it.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
He kind of knows this, right? So I don't know. I mean, there's it's a bit nuanced, but it's definitely not comforting. Like it's a little squirmish, you know, like, why would he have to do that? And this is again, the fact that Campbell took this out. It kind of makes me think, well, of course, De Camp would say, "oh, it's because he doesn't like sex in his stuff", right? But I mean, not that I'm defending Campbell, who really seems like a shitty human being in so many ways. Maybe he just thought it was egregious.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, it's not needed for the story.
Gretchen:
Yeah, I think that also, that is part of like, at least this could be removed where with Sirius, it's like, that sort of is the catalyst for everyone completely turning on Sirius. So it's hard to take that out.
JM:
Right. But it's still it kind of makes a sort of logical sense in Sirius, like it is part of the, like we all commented on the downturn toward the end of the book, but it's a general downturn of the attitude towards Sirius as well, right? So it's kind of like, more uncomfortable like more going into the relationship that he has with Plaxy and more going into like, I think it's a lot more central to that than this is. So either any way you look at it, it kind of isn't great, but I did want to point out, and this is something that I forgot to bring up when I was, another anecdote from De Camp. And I guess now is as good a time to bring it up as any. He did actually meet Olaf Stapledon. in 1949, Fletcher Pratt, and possibly Frederick Pohl actually threw a party for him. Olaf Stapledon was in the United States, and I believe one of us did bring this up during the Sirius episode, this thing, but De Camp notes, he calls him "quiet and amiable". But he also notes that Stapledon was very insistent that the Cold War was a direct result of American foreign policy, and some of the guys didn't like that very much. (laughs)
So after this incident happens, he goes to the bishop and acts obsequious. And they make a trade. The next Sunday, he goes to Mass, and Father Narcissus is rather nice about him. It's just great that his name is Father Narcissus. (laughs) So Padway kicks Julia out now, and she leaves him a curse or a bad luck charm hidden in the house, and George suggests having Julia hung for witchcraft! So I like George, but anyway. (laughs)
Now the war is going badly for the king, and he wants the telegraphs discontinued. So Padway meets with Cassiodorus at this point. And they have a big intellectual palaver that is kind of equated to debauchery. Not masturbation, mind you, but debauchery. So it's definitely a mutual endeavor. Anyway, he hangs with Cornelius Anicius after that, the guy who snubbed him earlier. He's gone up in the world, you see.
The Empire's forces take the nearby Naples. And the king's son visits Martin's shop/house, and seems to want to start a fight, and shit's about to go down when his bodyguard and workmen save Padway's butt.
Now he gets arrested yet again. And Martin's in prison camp, and things don't look great for Rome. The king is deposed, and the new king marches off to the new capital of Ravenna, leaving Rome mostly undefended. Meanwhile, the old king's son, the one who got Martin arrested, is now in the camp with him. Martin has secret plans to affect the outcome of the war. Since he believes in Tancredi's theory of temporal branches, he doesn't give a damn about history. And this is kind of interesting, there's like two or three different types of time travel/history stories or travel into the past stories, and I guess it sort of equates to the philosophy that you assign to time travel and how it could actually work. So I mean, it's either, yeah, you go back in time and you change something, so you cause some kind of damage and you basically overwrite things, or I don't know, somehow you create another universe and you just exist there. And that's what happens now. And there's no going back in time to kill your grandfather kind of paradox. So I don't know, I guess nothing has been proven, it does seem like travel into the future is way more possible than travel into the past, possibly for reasons like that.
Nate:
Right.
JM:
So I mean, also for in terms of sheer accomplishability, like you can kind of imagine with the time dilation effect and stuff how it would be possible, but travel into the past just seems so rife with immediate problems, right? And it's worth noting that De Ccamp himself did not consider time travel to be a possibility. He just thought it was fun to write about. And that's pretty much what a lot of it comes down to. And a lot of the principles I think behind Unknown were sort of based along those kind of lines like hypothesizing in a serious way something that the writers knew wouldn't quite be possible. And I think that's John Campbell's very literal interpretation of how a science fiction writer should do fantasy. And although you could argue that it's a bit reductive, I think it actually did a lot of good for establishing certain principles in the genre that we now enjoy and take for granted. And a lot of that stuff by those writers was really good. I mean, nobody writes what being put under a curse is like better than Fritz Leiber does. And that's in both his modern urban stories and his otherworldly fantasy stories.
So anyway, a bit of a tangent there. But just thought the time travel musing here is a little interesting. It doesn't take up a lot of space in the book. Padway doesn't, he really quickly gets down to brass tacks about what he has to do. He doesn't waste any time. He's like, how can I make it? And okay, start with Brandy and then work your way up. (laughs)
But yes, Padway doesn't want darkness to fall. And he's pretty clever really. And his resolve to escape and do something grows. He gets Thomasus to smuggle in some supplies to the prison camp. And he causes a distraction with a candle and a pot of stinking sulphur. He sneaks into some kind of pond, I guess, but I think it's connected to the Tiber. I was a little unclear on where they were, maybe because I don't really know the layout of the city. But I was a little unclear about where the prison camp was. But I guess it's I don't know if it's by the Tiber or something like that. You'd think it'd be pretty cold and nasty, but it's quite a while he spends down there in the water and he's all right. He makes it to the house of Nevita, and he doesn't explain that he's from the future, but tells him he can foresee a bit of it. But if he intervenes, and it makes his vision no longer true, he wants to get rid of Wittigis, the new king, but still have the Goths win instead of Justinian's forces. And that's his plan.
So here he's, I think, pretty closely following the historical path.
Nate:
I believe so. I'm not entirely sure. He's inpecting troop movements and
JM:
The pieces are assembled pretty much as he described. Yeah, it's pretty, pretty clear about where the changes were and what Padway is actually doing from this point forward, which I think is pretty cool.
So now the idea is to intercept the king. So Martin takes Nevita's servant, Hermann, and they actually do run into the king on the way to Ravenna. There's a pretty funny encounter all around. He's about to be killed according to Martin's historical knowledge. So this is where Martin has to stop history from taking the course that it was originally designed to take in his time. The king, or the ex-king, THiudahad, he's a really pathetic figure, really. And meanwhile, the new king has sent one of Thiudahad's enemies to hunt and dispatch him, and he comes upon them on the road. Padway accidentally kills him and is congratulated by his companions while he's puking in the bushes. And Padway gets himself together and his king well in hand. From now on, he's the king's quaestor or legal assistant. And they disguise him as a farmer. They visit Luterus, the military commander at Rome, after picking up some stuff in Florence. The commander recognizes King Thiudahad instantly and has a lot of questions. So this is where I would say for a non-military man, Martin has drawn up some pretty good plans. Night attacks, drawing more troops from Formia, catapults. The advance party of Imperials, led by Belisarius, can be seen now. And Martin likens their serpent standard to a balloon from Macy's Thanksgiving Day parade. And they have a massive catapult they name Brunhilde, and with it, and some of the other sulphur tricks, they create chaos in the Byzantine camp. Martin Padway tries to take the campaign against the imperialists in hand, but it doesn't really do much good. All his engineering corps goes to fight, and Luterus insists on joining the combat himself as it's the honorable thing to do. So Padway just sits on his horse a quarter mile from everything without doing much. Miraculously, the Goths manage to take the camp and Belisarius. And there's a lot of looting. Unfortunately, Luterus is killed. Discipline among the Goths is basically non-existent. Nevertheless, despite only having experience in high school Air Force training or something, he manages to impress Belisarius, who compliments him on his warmanship. Belisarius is too rigidly moral to join the Goth side, though, which is what Martin was hoping for. He also knows that Justinian will eventually banish him or something, so he has that profitable, advanced knowledge. And every interest in getting the first-rate general on his side.
So here's where he talks about the history written by Procopius at some length. Procopius himself has been delayed apparently and isn't on the scene. It's kind of Doctor Who-like in a way, meeting all these historical figures and just being like, it's pretty casual. Like, you don't really spend a lot of time with each of them, but it's like, oh, that's fun. Like, if you know the history and everything. So while Belisarius won't go over to the other side, though, he does give Martin some helpful advice on what to do next and also about making a speech. Now, Padway raids the imperial pay chests and deposits half of it with Thomasus and gives the other half to Thiudahad, who is quite pleased naturally. Martin doesn't say how much was in the chests. "I'm becoming quite a hardened criminal", he thinks gleefully to himself. And indeed he is!
After a stay in Florence, the new home base, so Padway can fix his books, he and the king and a troop head for Ravenna. General/King Wittigis is supposed to get married into the Amaling family of nobles and Padway is just in time to interfere. He marches into the church like a badass. The princess is being held captive and forced to marry against her will with the collusion of the bishop. Once freed, the angry would-be bride throws some righteous punches. The men have to work pretty hard to subdue the angry Wittigis then. I'm surprised at this point that Padway hasn't had his head chopped off by now, but anyway, martinus wants Wittigis held in custody as a potential spare king and mollifies the angry Thiudahad, who was so looking forward to a nice relaxing and long torture and death session, by telling him about the book they'll write together on the theory of gravitation. Thiudahad thinks this is marvelous and looks forward to the great fame. Padway sadly muses that he has difficulty finding loyal men who are trustworthy and not crooks. The dependable ones all seem to have previous obligations.
So, although previously he was eyeing Lanicius' daughter, Dorothea, he now has a fancy for MathaSwentha, the erstwhile abducted princess, and he wants to take her on a tour of Italy. He explains a lot of his ideas and goals to her without saying he's from the future. After a few visits, he has ideas about marrying her, even though she's a little bloodthirsty, but doesn't really know how to go about it. She reads him like a book, though, and is amused. They have a good time, but it isn't long at all before there's a snag. She has certain demands: the death of Wittigis and even Thiudahad. Padway won't be able to bring himself to do it. Also, he doesn't want to be king. Oh, and she also knows about Julia and wants her dead too. Now, his love for Mathaswentha dies on the vine much quicker even than it bloomed up. Again, just sort of showing how much he sucks at this, and by the way, it does mention too that he is in the process of a divorce as the book stars. So, he's obviously very unsuccessful in every single one of his romantic endeavors, and it's just one of De Camp's running jokes, basically. So, I guess if we don't take it that seriously, whatever, it's fine. But he's in quite a pickle now. He just remembers that he has a wife back in America, and of course, the princess is unimpressed, and it seems Congregationalists, which is the religion of America with which he's identified himself (It's always the closest religion to whatever the party he's talking to's religion happens to be), apparently, they can't get divorced. How unfortunate, she says. They could just send someone to America to poison her. Problem solved. "You will never kiss anyone else, my love", she says happily. Padway runs back to quarters and has one of his men kick him in the balls.
He has a wonderful idea to foist Mathaswentha off on Wittigis' nephew, a young man with whom he's developed a liking relationship. And he does this fairly artfully by arranging a social gathering, telling her he wants her to try to convince Urias, the nephew to work with him. He's anxious, but has an awesome time.
So, he sends a message, that is Padway, sends a message to Justinian, a truce ultimatum of sorts. But Constantinople must pay reparations, and there must be a swear never to hold arms against each other again. Martin doesn't really like Ravenna, calling it "the city of fogs, bogs and frogs". So, he gets the king to agree to move the capital to the much nicer Florence with some support. I'm sure he's right. I haven't actually been to Italy, but my dad spent a lot of time there. Have either of you ever been to Italy?
Nate:
Yeah, it's been a while.
Gretchen:
I have not.
JM:
Cool. What did you think?
Nate:
I definitely enjoyed myself, but I can see Ravenna being cooler in climate than some of the more southern cities, which are quite hot in the summer.
JM:
Yeah, yeah.
Nate:
I'm not exactly sure what kind of weather they get or what time of year this part particularly.
JM:
Yeah, so I guess Ravenna is up in the mountains somewhere, but Florence is very pleasant by all accounts.
Nate:
Yeah, definitely.
JM:
Yeah. But he also has to convince Thomasus to arrange to get Julia way out of town under a different name. And Thomasus says she's a free citizen and can do what she wants. But Martin maintains if they don't do this, they're all in deep shit. He's worried about Mathaswentha, but he has lots of plans to boost and improve the military. Crossbows and plate armor. When a visit from a Frankish emissary threatens war, Padway demonstrates his futility by taking him out to the parade ground where Urias and Fritharik are practicing with their crossbows. And Fritharik shoots an apple off Urias's head, William Tell style, inspired by an offhand remark from Martin. Next comes an emissary from the Coutregors or Bulgars, and during a very formal and somewhat amusing conversation, Martin makes the envoy laugh by telling about how the Bulgars got the pants beat off of them the last time they tried to invade Gothic territory.
So not many really respect his terms, though. Justinian is outright condescending in his letter, and Padway realizes he still has a lot to learn about diplomacy.
Military movements come and there's an attempt to invent gunpowder. The Franks are going to attack in force, but they have no military strategy or advanced weaponry, of course. Unfortunately, Padway's knowledge of chemistry is weak, and even though he believes he's found potassium nitrite crystals in cow shit or something, his things just don't go bang. It's a bit embarrassing. Meanwhile, Urias is all mopey about Mathaswentha, and Padway can't wait to be rid of her and assures Urias that he can have her, and even helps him write a love letter. No sooner do they finish than he rushes off to Anicius. He doesn't love Dorothea, but he figures she's the right kind of girl for him, and maybe he can in time. It's pretty weird, but I guess it's a status thing as well, probably. I also feel in preparation for a really nasty comment that's coming later, not that this lets De Camp off the hook, but I would also point out what the year is right now when this is written and that Italians are nobody's favorite in North America right now.
Nate:
Well, you'd be surprised actually. Some of the homegrown sentiment for fascism before America actually joined the war was stronger than you might think.
JM:
Yeah, and I mean, that is definitely something that I have noticed with quite a number of these writers is they were pretty gung-ho about the war effort, and it shows through in some of their work, sometimes in ways that are a little bit surprisingly narrow-minded, I guess. A writer I really like, C.M. Kornbluth, has some pretty nasty anti-Asian sentiment from around this period too, and it's like, well, you should have been better than that, but I don't know. I guess the sentiment was just in the air, and I guess the prevailing feeling in the magazines at that time was that, so they kind of maybe felt also a little bit obligated to include some jingoism in their material, perhaps.
Nate:
Yeah, I mean, a lot of the big authors were writing anti-Asian sentiments stuff well into the 1950s. I mean, Heinlein's book, "The Sixth Column", was like, outrageously racist.
JM:
Yeah, so apparently that was actually John Campbell's idea, and it was actually, I don't know, if it's just that Heinlein wanted to disown it in time. I mean, it's not considered one of his better books, and I think even probably he realized, like, although he's very conservative and very pro-military, almost in a way that smacks of fascism sometimes, and his ideas of being a feminist were very strange, and I don't know. But I don't think there's any too much evidence that Heinlein himself was a racist like Campbell was, but I don't know. Then you get a book like that, and it's just like, it's not just racist, but it's jingoistic in that way where it's like, yeah, we have an enemy right now, and like, I mean, I even read in the De Camp biography that he had a Chinese character in one of his books, and the guy who was publishing it, I can't remember what his name was, it wasn't Campbell, it was somebody else, but he said he wanted him to change the nationality because the Korean war was going on.
Nate:
Yeah, right.
JM:
It's not even the same, like, two totally different people, but I guess it's, yeah, so there was a lot of that in the air in the 40s and 50s.
Nate:
I mean, before that too, I mean, with the Edisonades that we read from the 1890s or whatever it was, the exact same sentiments there, and I think it's really been present in a lot of those pulp publications, more or less, I don't know when you stopped seeing it as much, maybe the 1960s, 1970s, I really don't know that era as well as the earlier stuff, but certainly it's still there during the 1950s pretty strongly.
JM:
Yeah, I mean, we see it even like in the 90s and 2000s around like Arab characters in movies and stuff like that too, so it doesn't entirely go away.
Gretchen:
I mean, there's the tradition of like orientalism just throughout American culture, so you do get that in a lot of the works, and especially with the the wars going on, I'm sure that exacerbated it.
Nate:
Yeah,
JM:
But Wittigis escapes and tries to kill Thiudahad at this point and is slain by guards while the poor old king trembles in a corner. He's totally mad by now and does nothing but talk utter nonsense.
So the Goths elect their king through a council of nobles, but the king has to be a member of the Amaling family, and Martin has arranged it all. Urias will marry Mathaswensa, and all will be well. I am slightly confused, though, because I thought Wittigis wanted to do the same thing and he was already king, but I don't know. I guess the council decided maybe that Tiudahad was mad, so under extenuating circumstances, they decided, okay, we'll just let this Wittigis guy be king even though he's not yet part of the family or something, but yeah. So some of the politics still kind of goes over my head, even listening to those lectures on Constantinople and the Byzantines. The guy was really good, and he explained things pretty well, but there are just some leaps that my mind has trouble making, like just the way people thought about Christianity even at that time and how much it influenced every single way about how people thought, and how it was still so new at that time, too. Why do people believe this? It hasn't even been around for that long, and they had this idea that your faith in whatever gods you believe in, you could convert if some other god seemed to have the upper hand, and we'll actually see that in another story coming up in just a little while, that very topic being discussed, but it's weird to me. I can't quite fathom it, and some of this stuff, even around the succession and stuff like that, it's like, oh, they were electing their king, but it has to be from this family. How many candidates were there?
So De Camp does go into this a little bit though, and he does sort of help to clarify things, but Martin and Mathaswentha sort of condescend to one another, and apparently the latter has no suspicion that Padway put Urias up to this thing in the first place.
So Florence is now the new capital, and there's a real election, almost USA style, but then another problem rears. Thiudagiskel, Thiudahad's son, reappears at the last minute to cause trouble. He has a gang of thug supporters, and gets a lot of the rabble to follow him. Tudahad's son, I'm going to say, because at least Thiudahad is easier to say, is kind of like the, he reminds me of the Ford family here in Toronto, so he throws a barbecue before the election to get everybody all excited, and is like, "a buck a beer, guys, a buck a beer! You like me, don't you? Vote for me! Free burgers!"
So here's the other really uncomfortable thing in the book. So Padway gets this desperate thing going on, and I knew what he was gonna do a little bit before he did it, and I was thinking to myself, ah, no, he's not gonna, he's not. But he does. So there's this horribly awkward idea he has, where he wants to humiliate Thiudagiskel by having a young boy claim that he's his father, and the boy happens to be black, so there's this Wagnerian laughter among the Goths, and that's what De Camp calls it. And the boy wants his money, and wonders if there's anybody else Martin wants him to call daddy. So he plays really, really dirty, and I mean, again, like he says, "oh, I have to abolish slavery", but it's like so casual and sort of way different than the way Twain handles it.
Gretchen:
Just tacked on.
JM:
Yeah,
Nate:
Yeah. He definitely describes the kid with some racist language as well as his father. Yeah, definitely not one of the book's high points.
JM:
No, no, I mean, it's, again, it's De Camp trying to be funny, right? And unfortunately, it's not humour that works very well.
Nate:
No.
JM:
It makes you a little bit, and I don't know if this is something that Campbell cut out, because he doesn't talk about this. And the thing is, like, I'm sure if you asked him, he would say he wasn't racist, but there you go. And I mean, the idea works. And I guess, realistically, who knows? A boy could have been anybody, maybe, because what's his name supposed to be married, but whatever. So Padway reassures Urias and insists that Americans have ways of making elections come out the way they want them to.
Well, sure, but on Election Day, Justinian's Imperial forces arrive by sea and not at the place where they might have been expected. Bloody John is their commander. And Thiudahad's son rounds up his army command and marches back. Padway tried to send a telegram, depriving him, but who wants to listen to that newfangled thing?
So Thiudahad's son, though, is killed and the Imperials are still marching across Italy, and Martin decides it's time to free the serfs and peasants. They'll fight for that. The rich Italians may be welcoming the Imperials, but those guys certainly aren't. Half of them are pagan, too. So that's good. I approve of that motion. So Padway has to go with the troops at this point, mostly a bunch of retired men and boys. And Dorothea gives him a fragment of Saint's skull to protect him, and he's like, "you believe in its effectiveness?" And she says, "yes, there's no doubt it's genuine", like that's what he asked about in the first place. (laughs) He kisses her goodbye.
And so now, unfortunately, though, Padway's friend, Nevita, the first friend he had in Rome, is killed, and his son badly wounded. There is a big battle, and everyone scatters. There's a funny scene where Padway rushes at the Imperial commander and, quote, raises his sword, only to find that he doesn't have a sword! And he's caught in the middle of the fighting. And later on, though, he does manage to have a weapon, and he does some cutting. But the battle is almost lost until Belisarius rides from the rear with his men and does some slaughter in the region. "What should we do about all the prisoners?" Belisarius asks. "Put them in a camp or something. I don't care. I'm going to sleep right here and now," says Padway.
The Goths are united, and there's talk of land across the Atlantic. Somewhere to get tobacco from, thinks Padway excitedly. Urias is king, and Mathaswentha has reportedly calmed down a lot since most of the people she fears are dead. Finally, and at long last. And they're expecting a baby. "Aren't you going to look for a girl," asks Urias? As soon "as I can get some sleep", says Padway. And it's maybe for the best. Like we said, he's really sucked at this romance thing thus far. Well, he does have hopes for Dorothea, though, and he obviously doesn't really love her at all. And it turns out she's furious with him anyway for freeing the serfs, and her father is too. And she says they never want to see him again. And here's where he makes a nasty comment about Italian women having a tendency to put on weight out of nowhere. It's not very charitable, but remember, Italians aren't the favorite of the moment, I guess. But the book ends with Padway having hopes for his accomplishments, figuring that even if he perishes, he will have made enough impacts in small corners and places to have made a difference. Darkness will not fall.
And he really does have quite a future ahead of him. There is for one thing a huge plague epidemic that is about to sweep through Europe. Decimate much of the western and eastern empires, I believe. So we'll see how he handles that situation. Maybe it's time for him to show if his knowledge of biology is any stronger than his knowledge of chemistry. We don't know how any of that turns out. There is a sequel written by David Drake. Apparently, the 1996 printing of Les Darkness Fall includes this second work. I guess Drake had De Camp's blessing to pen the sequel. So I haven't read it. I don't know much about David Drake other than that he is a military sci-fi / sometimes horror writer. He's known for both, but especially these military sci-fi series of some kind. And he did some stuff with Karl Edward Wagner as well, who's a pretty well known horror and sword and sorcery writer who died in the 80s.
But so yeah, that's our book. And I don't know. I think it's pretty good. I definitely have been a little closer to De Camp than I was thinking I would be just reading about all the other stuff and reading the autobiography and so on. But it has kind of got me more interested in checking out a few of the other things too. I will say I might not that soon, but I probably will before too long. Like that space opera/ sword and sorcery series, the Viagens Planetarias sounds really cool, and so did the the fun stories about the two guys that travel through all these parallel universes and stuff like that. And he was definitely somebody who wrote a lot of series.
Nate:
Yeah, I don't know. Overall, this is good. I think the sexist stuff is kind of a bummer. He refers to the Gothic princess as a luscious wench at one point. It's like, you know, really come on. It's just bad writing. And that does mar the dinosaur hunting stories too. So I don't know. I mean, it's definitely a blemish that didn't need to be there. But I think overall, it's a fun romp. I don't really have too much to say about the overall themes that it's just kind of neat to geek out about history. And it's cool that he focuses on the technology and things like that, you know, making him start off with brandy building on top of what they already have, you know, they have wine, so you can just cook that up and still it into something else rather than trying to start making, I don't know, some other kind of wine or make beer or something like that where the chemical process is totally unknown. He does kind of take it very simply. And what you maybe be able to practically do, although I guess he does seem to get a lot of things right in ways that maybe seem unrealistic, like he does have an extremely detailed knowledge of history. And even if I read through Procopius a couple times, I don't think I'd be able to remember nearly the level of detail that Padway was able to remember as well as kind of triangulating what language is spoken based on his knowledge of ancient Latin and modern Italian, and he kind of like merges the two together to vaguely arrive at the 6th century Latin Vulgate.
JM:
Yeah, but he does go into it. And the fact that he does go into it at all is at least something.
Nate:
Oh, yeah.
JM:
This is his specialty. Like so far, each of the time travelers we've met so far have their, their kind of place in the world that either helps them to cope with where they are or doesn't as the case might be. And Sir Boss was a factory foreman and seemed to have all kinds of crazy knowledge about building things. This guy's an archaeologist, so his knowledge lies in history. And I suppose in order to do his job and stuff, studying ancient languages was probably a thing. And although he probably couldn't have heard any spoken, the way it was spoken back then, until he actually got there, it wasn't that hard for him to pick it up. I don't know, he was the right man for the job, I guess, again, in a different way than Sir Boss was. Sir Boss just Yeah, he takes things in hand pretty well. I guess maybe it's just me, but I choose to interpret the ending in a somewhat open-ended way. I mean, he does seem pretty confident and definitely knowing what I know about somebody like John W. Campbell, I'm sure that he interpreted it in a triumph of man against the odds kind of way. But I don't know that necessarily it's going to go that way. And I think just the whole nature of telling the story kind of makes it worthwhile. And it is a gamble that Padway is trying. And is it one that entirely pays off? Well, who knows, right? Like, I don't know, I mean, I'm not going to say I'm guessing the sequel maybe deals with Padway. I don't really know. But I don't know, imagine a sequel written 1500 years from the time of that history, what would a book written in 1939 from the perspective of Padway's changed timeline look like? Then we would know, I guess. We can't be certain. So, I don't know. I had a lot of fun with it, despite its shortcomings, again, getting close to De Ccamp was sort of weird. I didn't agree with him a lot of the time. But I also, he also made me laugh a fair bit. So, I don't know, I guess it evens out in the end. Nobody's perfect. And I guess being a little full of yourself and whatnot is, I mean, some writers are just like that, I guess. So, 7 out of 10 sounds about right to me too.
Gretchen:
I agree. I think that, like Nate was saying, it's a fun romp. There's not as much that I can say on this that I could Twain or Butler. It's fun for the history aspect and how detailed it is. And yeah, it is funny when the jokes land, they are pretty funny. And I like some of the characters and their quirks quite a bit, not just Thomasus, but I think Fritharik is pretty fun too.
JM:
So Robert Silverberg likes to write about these kind of things. He likes to write about alternate histories. And he has several books, I think about Rome, different, I can't remember the name of the Roman one, but he has one called Sailing To Byzantium as well. So this is about a time period that he was quite interested in. And his name will come up again later on in the episode. But for now, I think we've had enough lovely sunny time in Florence. Is it time we move somewhere colder?
Nate:
I think so.
JM:
All right
Nate:
So let's take a quick break and we'll be back in Iceland.
Bibliography:
Ashley, Mike and Tymn, Marshall - "Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Weird Fiction Magazines: (Historical Guides to the World's Periodicals and Newspapers)" (1985)
Cassiodorus - "The Letters of Cassiodorus" (6. c) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/18590/pg18590-images.html
de Camp, L. Sprague - "Time and Chance: An Autobiography" (1996)
Hodgkin, Thomas - "Theodoric the Goth - Barbarian Champion of Civilisation" (1897) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/20063/pg20063-images.html
Hodgkin, Thomas - "Italy and Her Invaders" (1892) https://penelope.uchicago.edu/Thayer/E/Gazetteer/Places/Europe/Italy/_Texts/HODIHI/home.html
Nevala-Lee, Alec - "Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction" (2018)
Pringle, David - "The Ultimate Encyclopedia of Science Fiction: The Definitive Illustrated Guide" (1996)
Procopius - "The Secret History of the Court of Justinian" (558) https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/12916/pg12916.html
Shippey, Tom - "Science Fiction and the Idea of History" in "Hard Reading: Learning from Science Fiction" (2016)
Stableford, Brian - "Science Fact and Science Fiction: An Encyclopedia" (2006)
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