Lyon's Sprague de Camp

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Lyon Sprague de Camp 1988

Lyon Sprague de Camp (born November 27, 1907 in New York , USA , † November 6, 2000 in Plano , Texas ) was an American science fiction , fantasy and non-fiction author and publisher.

De Camp, who wrote numerous books and several hundred short stories, is best known for his contributions to science fiction and fantasy stories. Over the course of his career he has received a number of the most important prizes awarded in these genres, including the Gandalf Grand Master Award for Lifetime Achievement in Fantasy (1976), the Grand Master Nebula Award two years later, and the World Fantasy Award for 1984 Lifetime Achievement .

In addition to fantasy and science fiction novels, De Camp wrote non-fiction books, including biographies by Howard Phillips Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard and a book on the myth of the Atlantis . De Camp also connected Howard with the fact that he and his colleague Lin Carter continued his stories about Conan the Cimmerian . His autobiography Time and Chance received the 1997 Hugo Award for best non-fiction book.

Life

Lyon Sprague de Camp with wife Catherine Crook de Camp

De Camp was the son of Lyon de Camp and Emma Beatrice, nee Sprague, daughter of Charles Ezra Sprague , a civil war hero and accounting specialist . The family was not well off, but owned 8,000 acres and ran a sawmill in Herkimer County , Adirondacks , where young De Camp spent his summer vacation. He first attended the Trinity School in New York. Being a headstrong boy, his parents considered a school with military discipline warranted and sent him to Snyder School in North Carolina , where he suffered from the bullying of local bullying for the next ten years , a formative experience that he had processed in the story Judgment Day (1955).

After the time in high school studied De Camp aeronautical engineering at the California Institute of Technology and graduated in 1930 with a Bachelor from, then studied at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and acquired in 1933 at the Stevens Institute of Technology to master . After studying engineering, he taught at the Inventors Foundation in Hoboken until 1936 , after which he was head of the inventions and patents department of the International Correspondence Schools in Scranton , Pennsylvania , a distance learning provider . From 1937 he worked as an editor at Fowler-Becker Publishing , where the magazine Fuel Oil and Air Conditioning appeared and then at the American Society of Mechanical Engineers .

The SF authors Robert A. Heinlein, Lyon Sprague de Camp and Isaac Asimov in a photo from 1944

The first science fiction story appeared in 1937 and De Camp became a freelance writer in 1938, although this was interrupted by the Second World War. In 1942 he worked as an engineer for the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia , and from 1942 to 1946 he served as a lieutenant and lieutenant commander in the US Navy Reserve . He served there with Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein . However, the three did not take part in combat operations, but served at the aviation test station of the United States Navy . After the war, De Camp moved to Philadelphia and later to Texas . He continued to work as a writer.

On August 12, 1939, De Camp married Catherine Crook (1907-2000), with whom he was married for 60 years. His wife, a former educator and author herself, co-wrote many of his publications from the 1960s onwards. The couple had two sons, Lyman Sprague de Camp and Gerard Beekman de Camp, who both live with their families in Texas.

De Camp spoke several languages. Together with his wife he traveled almost all over the world doing research. He was chased away by a hippopotamus he got too close near a body of water in Uganda , and sea lions in the Galapagos Islands, which he too dared to get too close to. He was bitten by a lizard in the Guatemala rainforest . The couple spent Easter 1994 on Easter Island .

Although his health deteriorated in the last years of his life, De Camp continued to work. He died seven months after his wife in Plano, Texas, which they have considered their home since 1989. Since he was a participant in the war, the couple's ashes were buried in Arlington National Cemetery .

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Science fiction and fantasy

De Camp had started writing science fiction in 1936, but his first story, The Hairless Ones Come , was rejected several times, so it wasn't published until 1939. A first collaboration with the science fiction author P. Schuyler Miller appeared as Genus Homo only many years later. It's a time travel story in which a group buried in a tunnel wakes up in a distant future, in a world where humanity has disappeared and is ruled by intelligent monkeys. De Camp takes on the famous Rip Van Winkle- - subject to and delivered at the same time a precursor of the now very popular Planet of the monkeys - substance .

The collaboration with P. Schuyler Miller was arranged by John D. Clark, a very active science fiction fan who also helped significantly with De Camp's first publication. The story The Isolinguals appeared in the science fiction magazine Astounding in September 1937 , shortly before John W. Campbell became editor there. De Camp had met Campbell at a meeting in Clark's New York apartment, and when he lost his job as an editor at Fuel Oil and Air Conditioning after just three months due to the economic turmoil, it was the occasion to seriously consider a career as a professional writer To take an eye. While many previous Astounding authors faded into the background with Campbell's takeover of the magazine, De Camp became one of the lead authors of Astounding and, above all, of the fantasy magazine Unknown , also published by Campbell , where De Camps co- authored Horace L. Gold in 1939 . Narration None but Lucifer and in the same year an abridged preprint of his first science fiction novel Lest Darkness Fall appeared. Lest Darkness Fall is a time travel story in which an American educated in ancient languages ​​ends up in Rome in the sixth century. He quickly found his way around and made a living by inventing the distillation of brandy , the printing press and the newspaper industry. However, this is not enough for his thirst for action and he tries to prevent the fall of the ancient world and the coming dark age by intervening in the course of the wars of the Goths . The novel has been compared many times to Mark Twain's A Yankee at King Arthur's court .

Other early works by De Camp are:

  • Hyperpilosity ( Astounding , April 1938) in which everyone grows a fur as a result of a virus infection. When a scientist finally succeeds in finding a cure for the plague, people have already got used to the whole-body hairy life.
  • The Command ( Astounding , October 1938), a story about Johnny Black, a black bear whose thought processes have been strengthened and accelerated by an experimental drug and who is endowed with human intelligence, can now read but cannot speak, but manages to do it anyway to prevent an attack on humanity by means of molds that impair the intelligence. The story found several sequels.
  • The Gnarly Man ( Unknown , June 1939) is about the discovery of a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal who was immortalized by a lightning strike and has survived to the present day, disguised as an ape-man, who works in a curiosity show and is noticed by a scientist. The background is that a suitably dressed Neanderthal would hardly attract attention among modern people. The idea was picked up in 1959 by Philip José Farmer in The Alley Man (German as Der Müllkutscher , 1983).

Many of the stories and novels de Camp emerged as collaborations. In the early years, his co-authors included Fletcher Pratt , then author of historical and military history books, occasional SF author and translator, whom De Camp had also met through John D. Clark. The figure of Harold Shea emerged from their collaboration in 1940 , a psychologist who uses a system of “symbolic logic” to visit various imaginary parallel worlds . A cycle of five novels was created between 1940 and 1954 , in which the following fantasy worlds are explored:

The laws of the imaginary worlds differ significantly from the laws of nature that are familiar to us, insofar as, for example, magic works. The rationalist Shea always tries to find out the principles underlying magic, which does not always succeed and leads to unintended, often comical results. The Harold Shea novels belong to the subgenre of humorous fantasy, of which De Camp is considered to be one of the main representatives. After Pratt's early death in 1956, the series of novels by De Camp and others was continued in a second series in the 1990s.

From 1943 to 1948, little narrative by De Camp appeared and his first publications after his return to civilian life were less successful. After all, The Animal Cracker Plot ( Astounding , July 1949) marked the beginning of an extensive cycle of science fiction novels and short stories, mostly known as Viagens Interplanetarias , Portuguese for interplanetary travel. Portuguese because in the future that De Camp designed, Brazil is the dominant world power and Portuguese is the national language of Brazil. Most of the stories are set on the three planets named after Hindu deities Vishnu , Krishna and Ganesha , which is why the series is also known as the Krishna cycle. A special place in the series is taken by the novel Rogue Queen (1951, German Das Orakel der Kulturen , 1978), in which terrestrial spacemen, in search of a lost spaceship, land on a planet with a humanoid population organized in the manner of a bee state is. The novel is considered to be one of the first to break the taboo on sexual topics that existed in science fiction at the time.

In 1949 the first issues of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction were published, which at 2 cents per word paid twice as much as the previous magazines and - as the title suggests - now placed the emphasis on fantasy. In 1950, De Camp and Pratt published the first of a series of fantasy stories that were later collected as Tales from Gavagan's Bar (1953, German stories from Gavagan's Bar , 1982). Sam Moskowitz commented: “The short stories were evidently modeled after the well-known Jorkens stories of Lord Dunsany , each beginning with a yarn spun in a bar . For the most part, they weren't just unsuccessful, they were boring and boring. ”Groff Conklin, on the other hand, found the stories“ very magical - wise, crazy, fantastic, funny, warm-hearted and often very moving ”.

Once again, John D. Clark was to have a decisive influence on De Camp's career when he, together with Fr. Schuyler Miller, referred him to the stories of Robert E. Howard , who died in 1936 . When De Camp learned in a telephone conversation with Donald A. Wollheim at the end of November 1951 that Howard's literary agent, the SF author and editor Oscar J. Friend , was still storing a box with unfinished and unpublished Howard stories, he got himself into their possession and began to edit and add to the stories to bring them into printable form. 1952 published revised The God in the Bowl (German The God in the Bowl , 1970), in 1953 with De Camp as a co-author of The Treasure of Tranicos (German The treasure of Tranicos , 1971) and The Frost Giant's Daughter (German The daughter of the Frost Giants , 1970) and 1955 under the title Tales of Conan several oriental stories by Howard, which De Camp had converted into Conan stories and enriched with fantasy elements. In 1955 he was awarded the title of Royal Chronicler for his efforts by the Hyborian Legion , an association of Howard fans . Numerous other revisions, expansions, and several Conan stories entirely written by De Camp were to follow, many with Lin Carter as co-author.

Another story series starring Reginald Rivers, a big game hunter who offers dinosaur safaris, began in 1956 with A Gun for Dinosaur . Some of the bizarre characters, including scientists, who want to witness the impact of the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs are among the hunting parties that Rivers accompanies on the journey through time to the Mesozoic . In addition to the question of which type of rifle is most suitable for killing dinosaurs, which De Camp dealt with very seriously, he also deals with the problem of the possible effects of the downing of entire dinosaur populations on evolution. The Reginald Rivers Stories appeared in Rivers of Time in 1993

In addition to his SF and fantasy novels, which sometimes approached the historical novel partly through the treatment of time travel themes, partly through scenes resembling a medieval or archaic past , De Camp also corresponded more directly to his inclination to historical topics by being the author of several is a designated historical novel, the best known of which is An Elephant for Aristotle (1958, German Ein Elefant für Aristoteles , 1989). Other titles include The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate (1961), The Arrows of Hercules (1965), The Bronze God of Rhodes (1960) and The Golden Wind (1969).

Non-fiction

One of De Camp's better-known non-literary works is HP Lovecraft's 1975 biography , which was also published in translation in 2002. It was the first work dealing with all aspects of the life and work of Lovecraft, which was criticized for one reason or another, until the publication of the Lovecraft biography by ST Joshi (1996, expanded new edition as I am Providence , 2013) was considered authoritative . Another De Camp biography is Dark Valley Destiny (1983) about Robert E. Howard , the creator of Conan , who committed suicide in 1936 at the age of 30. It is not De Camp's only preoccupation with the authors of heroic fantasy , so he wrote a first biography of Howard ( The Miscast Barbarian ) in 1975 . Other titles in this area include Blond Barbarians and Noble Savages (1975) and Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers (1976), not to forget his autobiography Time and Chance (1996), for which he received the Hugo Award in 1997 .

Although a writer of fantastic stories, De Camp was a proven skeptic (and a member of the Skeptics Society ) who endeavored to counter widespread superstition and pseudoscientific humbug by soberly rational presentation of relevant topics, while he did not limit himself to refuting irrational views , but made such perspectives an object and described them as historical-cultural phenomena.

With his book Lost continents: the Atlantis theme in history, science, and literature , written in 1948, first published in book form in 1954 and reissued in 1970 , which was also published in German in 1975 under the title Sunken Continents: von Atlantis, Lemuria and other submerged civilizations , De Camp presented the first comprehensive, popular scientific treatise on the historical development of the Atlantean myth and its reception in the context of contemporary , cultural , literary and scientific history . De Camp presented the search for Atlantis as a historical-geographical entity as pointless and coined the term “Atlantism” (English 'Atlantism') as a derogatory term for the pseudoscientific literature on Atlantis. Due to the great abundance of material presented in it, the work is now part of the standard Atlantic literature. This topic also includes the book Lands Beyond , which was written together with Willy Ley and deals with various geographical myths, such as the legendary realm of the Priest King John or the golden land Eldorado . In 1953 it was awarded the International Fantasy Award . From his exploration of the occult , the book Spirits, Stars, and Spells: The Profits and Perils of Magic was published in 1966 together with his wife . Finally, the book The Ragged Edge of Science (1980) is a collection of various articles by De Camp, in which he deals in an entertaining way with various pseudoscientific theories, particularly in the area of ​​prehistory, and with various forms of occultism.

In his non-fiction book Ancient Ruins (German Mysterious Places of History , 1966) he describes, together with his wife, in detail some important places of the past, including Troy , the pyramids of Gizeh , Stonehenge and Rapa Nui . De Camp does not stop at a detailed description, but also illuminates the myths and legends that have entwined and entwined around these places, as well as the controversies that arise from them. De Camp described the metropolises of the ancient world in Great Cities of the Ancient World (1972, German as New York was once on the Bosporus , 1972).

Another group of works is his work on the history of technology . This subheading includes The Evolution of Naval Weapons (1947), The Heroic Age of American Invention (1961) and The Ancient Engineers (1963) on ancient technical history, German as engineers of antiquity (1964). The story of Science in America (1967, together with his wife) describes the history of science in the United States and the history of the discovery of Antarctica is described in Antarctic Conquest (1949, with Finn Ronne).

De Camp deals with Charles Darwin's theory of evolution in Darwin and His Great Discovery (1972, together with his wife). The great monkey trial (1968) deals with the cultural consequences of the 1925 trial , also known as the Scopes monkey trial, in which a court in Dayton , Tennessee fined a teacher under the Butler Act for opposing it Biblical doctrine had traced the origin of man back not to divine creation but to evolution from animal ancestors. In connection with the history of human evolution, De Camp also wrote a book on the continued effects of evolutionary adaptations in human culture and the problems associated with it ( The Ape-Man Within , 1995), which, however, was criticized as overly simplistic and imprecise in detail.

Two of his books on science and technology, aimed more at young readers, have also been translated into German, namely Engines (1959) als Motoren: vom Wasserrad zu Atomreaktor (1972) and Man and Power: The Story of Power from the Pyramids to the Atomic Age (1961) as Man and Energy: From the Pyramids to Nuclear Fission (1968).

Finally, Elephant (1964), a book about the history and prehistory of the elephant, links up with the fiction work De Camps, in which elephants (or mammoths ) repeatedly play a role, which points to a lifelong fascination for De Camps with this species. In An Elephant for Aristotle (1958, German Ein Elefant für Aristoteles , 1989) the elephant appears in the title and in Lest Darkness Fall the protagonist writes a treatise on the elephant.

In 1953 he and his wife published the Science-Fiction Handbook , in which they provide a presentation of American science fiction, the SF literary scene and handouts and advice for budding SF authors. A revised new version appeared in 1975.

reception

Isaac Asimov , who was friends with De Camps until the end of his life, said in a speech at the World Fantasy Convention 1990 on de Camp: "He is one of the few science fiction writers who just in fiction as in nonfiction to Are home. Together with Willy Ley and Martin Gardner, he is one of the great rationalists among science fiction authors ... "

When asked about De Camp's work, Robert A. Heinlein replied with an analogy: “The best fantasy is like a light wine, the worst just lemonade. The best space adventures are like good bourbon, the worst like intestinal rot. In this analogy, de Camp's work is a very dry martini. "

Memberships

De Camp was a member of numerous learned societies and scientific associations, including:

He was also a member of several writers' associations and fandom groups, namely:

And finally he was particularly connected to Philadelphia and therefore a member of:

  • Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, Philadelphia
  • Athenaeum of Philadelphia
  • Fellows in American Studies, Franklin Inn Club, Philadelphia
  • University of Pennsylvania Museum of Archeology and Anthropology

Awards

bibliography

literature

Web links

Commons : L. Sprague deCamp  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ 1941 published in the Super Science Novels Magazine published by Frederik Pohl , only published in book form in 1950.
  2. ↑ Clark was a chemist and occasional SF writer. He later married Fletcher Pratt's widow. See John D. Clark in the Fancyclopedia .
  3. ↑ Sam Moskowitz : Seekers of Tomorrow. Cleveland, Ohio 1966, p. 155.
  4. ↑ None but Lucifer is a longer story that can also be considered a novel and was published as a paperback by Gateway in 2002 . Lest Darkness Fall was published in hardcover as early as 1941 and is in any case De Camp's first science fiction novel. In addition, None but Lucifer was originally a work by Gold, which was completely revised by De Camp at Campbell's request. See Sam Moskowitz: Seekers of Tomorrow. Cleveland, Ohio 1966, p. 157.
  5. ↑ Sam Moskowitz: Seekers of Tomorrow. Cleveland, Ohio 1966, p. 163.
  6. ↑ Groff Conklin: Galaxy's 5 Star Shelf. In: Galaxy Science Fiction , June 1954, p. 121
  7. ^ Lyon Sprague de Camp: Lost continents: the Atlantis theme in history, science, and literature. Gnome Press, 1954, 362 pages. New edition: Dover Publications, 1970, 348 pages.
  8. ↑ Jeffrey Mckee: Darwinism made too simple . In: New Scientist , December 2, 1995, accessed December 31, 2017.
  9. ^ A b c d Robert Reginald : Science Fiction and Fantasy Literature. A checklist. Detroit 1979, p. 874.
  10. ↑ a b c L. Sprague De Camp 1907-2000 , short biography of the Spectrum Literary Agency (English), accessed December 30, 2017
personal data
SURNAME Camp, Lyon Sprague de
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Lyon, Lyman R. (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American writer
DATE OF BIRTH November 27, 1907
PLACE OF BIRTH New York City
DATE OF DEATH November 6, 2000
Place of death Plano (Texas)