L. Sprague de Camp

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  "My own true name sounds more like a pseudonym than most pseudonyms do," L. Sprague de Camp said, explaining why he rarely used pen names. Over a career spanning 60 years, he wrote more than 100 books. By the 1930s and 1940s he had become a major figure in American science fiction. He trained in a field far from fiction, and later worked a day job investigating other people's inventions. Decades afterward he turned that same skeptical eye on ghost stories and psychic claims that most fantasy writers left alone. What forces shaped a mind that exacting? How did someone so committed to logic end up reshaping fantasy and alternate history for generations of readers?

• 2. An Engineer By Training

  ›

  Lyon Sprague de Camp was born in New York City on the 27th of November 1907. He was one of three sons born to Lyon de Camp, a businessman in real estate and lumber, and to Emma Beatrice Sprague. His maternal grandfather was Charles Ezra Sprague, an accountant, a banker, and a Civil War veteran. Sprague was also a pioneering advocate of Volapuk, an early constructed language.

  De Camp started at Trinity School in New York, then spent ten years at the Snyder School, a military-style institution in North Carolina. His parents, heavy-handed disciplinarians, sent him there hoping to cure a stubborn intellectual arrogance and a lack of discipline they saw in him. Awkward, thin, and an ineffective fighter, he endured regular bullying from his classmates. The experience left him with a detached, analytical manner that only his closest friends saw as anything but cold. In company, though, he could be as disarming and funny as his father. He revisited these years decades later in a semi-autobiographical story, Judgment Day, published in 1955.

  At the California Institute of Technology, de Camp studied aeronautical engineering. For a time he roomed with John Drury Clark, who later became a noted rocket-fuel scientist. He earned his Bachelor of Science from Caltech in 1930, then a Master of Science in engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1933. He also worked as a surveyor and became an expert in patents.

  His first job put him at the Inventors Foundation, Inc. in Hoboken, New Jersey, a company later absorbed by the International Correspondence Schools. He transferred to the firm's Scranton, Pennsylvania division and rose to principal of its School of Inventing and Patenting before resigning in 1937. That same year, in July 1937, his first book, Inventions and Their Management, was published.

  On the 12th of August 1939, de Camp married Catherine Crook, who would later co-write science fiction and nonfiction with him starting in the 1960s. The couple had two children. Within a few years, the patent expert and engineer would trade blueprints for a very different kind of wartime assignment.

• 3. Wartime Friendships And Later Life

  ›

  At the Philadelphia Naval Yard during World War II, de Camp worked as a researcher alongside fellow writers Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. He rose to the rank of lieutenant commander as a reserve officer in the U.S. Navy. From 1942 to 1989 the de Camps lived near Philadelphia, for decades in Villanova, Pennsylvania.

  In New York, de Camp belonged to the Trap Door Spiders, an all-male literary and dining club. Isaac Asimov later used it as the model for his fictional Black Widowers mystery-solvers. De Camp himself became the basis for a character in that group, named Geoffrey Avalon. He was also a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America. It was a loosely organized group of heroic fantasy writers formed during the 1960s and led by Lin Carter. The group admitted members solely on their credentials as fantasy writers.

  In 1989 the de Camps moved to Plano, Texas. Sprague de Camp died there on the 6th of November 2000, at the age of 92. That was seven months after his wife's death, on what would have been her birthday. His ashes were inurned together with hers at Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.

  In 2005, de Camp's personal library of about 1,200 books was acquired for auction by Half Price Books. The collection included volumes inscribed by fellow writers such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, alongside books inscribed by de Camp himself. Long before any of that, de Camp had already left a mark on the language people use for life beyond Earth. He did it in the pages of a single magazine article.

• 4. Coining Extraterrestrial And E.T.

  ›

  The word extraterrestrial, built from extra plus terrestrial, has been traced as an adjective back to 1868, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. H. G. Wells likely gave it its first connection to life beyond Earth, in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds.

  L. Sprague de Camp is credited with turning extraterrestrial into a noun meaning alien life, and with coining its abbreviation, E.T. He did both in the first part of a two-part article titled Design for Life, published in the May 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction. That noun and its abbreviation would go on to outlast most of what else de Camp published in Astounding that year.

• 5. A Theory About Sea Serpents

  ›

  In 1968, de Camp proposed that fossil discoveries had shaped modern reports of sea monster sightings. He made the case in an article titled Dinosaurs in Today's World. It appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, volume 34, number 3, in March 1968. The piece was later reprinted in his nonfiction collection The Fringe of the Unknown, issued by Prometheus in Buffalo, New York, in 1983.

  In 2019, researchers C. G. M. Paxton and D. Naish put de Camp's hypothesis to a scientific test. They concluded that trends in the sightings data appeared to support what he had proposed decades earlier. That willingness to test popular folklore against fossil evidence ran through nearly everything else de Camp wrote, fiction included.

• 6. The Corrective Impulse

  ›

  De Camp was a materialist, and his fiction and nonfiction alike examined society, history, technology, and myth through that lens. He published numerous short stories, novels, nonfiction works, and poems, many carrying a corrective impulse toward other authors' work. Logical lapses and absurdities in other writers' stories genuinely disturbed him, and he often answered them by rewriting the premise more rigorously. Isaac Asimov felt this conscientiousness about facts limited the scope of de Camp's own stories. De Camp resisted concepts like hyperspace or faster-than-light travel whenever he judged them impossible. When Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court left him unsatisfied, de Camp answered with his own time-travel novel, Lest Darkness Fall. In it he rationalized the mechanism of time travel and bound his hero's expertise to the technology of the era.

  His first published story, The Isolinguals, appeared in the September 1937 issue of Astounding Science Fiction, the last issue edited by F. Orlin Tremaine before John W. Campbell's long tenure began. Most of his early stories stood alone. Exceptions included the Johnny Black tales, about a black bear given human-level intelligence, and tall-tale time-travel stories set at the fictional Drinkwhiskey Institute. Campbell's fantasy magazine, Unknown, suited de Camp's idiosyncratic imagination and dry humor, and he contributed ten novels to it, five of them collaborations. He resisted being called a satirist, insisting his stories aimed to amuse readers rather than instruct or improve them. That same explanatory instinct shaped his nonfiction advice to fellow writers. It included guidance on how a language's pronunciation and vocabulary might shift for characters visiting the far future.

  His most extended work was the Viagens Interplanetarias series, set in a future where Brazil holds the position of dominant world power. A sub-series of sword-and-planet novels within it takes place on the planet Krishna, beginning with The Queen of Zamba. His most influential Viagens novel, though, was Rogue Queen, a non-Krishna story about a hive society disrupted by contact with outsiders. It was also one of the earliest science fiction novels to explore sexual themes. That same rigor about consequences and systems had been applied to alien hives and rewritten timelines. It would soon be turned loose on wizards, demons, and ancient empires instead.

• 7. Swords, Sorcery, Ancient Worlds

  ›

  De Camp was best known for light fantasy, especially two series co-written with his longtime friend Fletcher Pratt. The Harold Shea stories began in 1940, and Gavagan's Bar began in 1950. Critic Floyd C. Gale wrote in 1961 that the pair were far and away the finest team of fantasy collaborators. De Camp and Pratt also wrote stand-alone novels in a similar tone, including Land of Unreason in 1942. De Camp later added a few more solo entries to the genre.

  In the Harold Shea stories, the magical premises of various myths and legends were accepted at face value. They were then examined and explained through their own internal logic. The civilizations of The Compleat Enchanter, for instance, rest on a cultural and technological reality built from scientific formulas. Characters may travel into these worlds, but the magic there only works to the extent that it lines up with the era's technology. The combustion engine is one example.

  He built three sword and sorcery sequences of his own. The Pusadian series, starting in 1951, includes the novel The Tritonian Ring and several short stories set in an antediluvian era similar to Howard's. The larger Novarian series began in 1968 with the Reluctant King trilogy: The Goblin Tower, The Clocks of Iraz, and The Unbeheaded King. The trilogy follows the adventurer Jorian, ex-king of Xylar, in a world where our own reality serves as its afterlife. Other Novarian novels include The Fallible Fiend, told from a demon's point of view, and The Honorable Barbarian, featuring Jorian's brother. The Incorporated Knight series pairs 1970s short stories with two novels co-written with Catherine Crook de Camp. Those novels are The Incorporated Knight in 1988 and The Pixilated Peeress in 1991. The series is set in a medieval alternate world where a Neapolitan empire filled Rome's role. No religion like Christianity ever united its pagan nations there. The setting borrows in part from Mandeville's Travels.

• 8. Debunking, Honors, Fictional Afterlives

  ›

  De Camp spent years researching a planned book on magic, witchcraft, and occultism. Only its first chapter, The Unwritten Classics, reached print, in the Saturday Review of Literature in March 1947. By May 1976, de Camp had grown worried about a trend fellow skeptic Paul Kurtz described. Kurtz called it an enormous increase in public interest in psychic phenomena, the occult, and pseudoscience. That same year, de Camp joined the newly formed Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal. Its founding members included astronomers George Abell, Bart Bok, and Carl Sagan, and philosophers Brand Blanshard, Antony Flew, Sidney Hook, and Ernest Nagel. Authors Isaac Asimov, Daniel Cohen, Charles Fair, Martin Gardner, and Phillip J. Klass also joined, alongside psychologists Ray Hyman and B. F. Skinner. Magician James Randi was a founding member too.

  Despite decades of writing fantasy, de Camp did not believe in ghosts in any supernatural sense. His own ghosts, he said, lived only in his mind, as memories of his parents. In a New York Times Magazine article he wrote that his mother had died from an overdose of faith healing. Confronted with claims about UFO sightings or astrology, he pushed back against circular reasoning by demanding first-hand, unbiased, measurable evidence. "In the history of cultism," he told Science News, "one is always experiencing a feeling of deja vu."

  Writer Randall Garrett folded de Camp together with Tolkien's Gandalf to create the magician Sir Lyon Gandolphus Gray in his Lord Darcy series. Lawrence Watt-Evans gave him an unnamed court magician role in Return to Xanadu, part of a 2005 tribute anthology called The Enchanter Completed. He appears without disguise in short stories including Green Fire, published in Asimov's Science Fiction in April 2000, and in novels such as S. M. Stirling's In the Courts of the Crimson Kings and Paul Malmont's The Astounding, the Amazing, and the Unknown. A semi-fictionalized de Camp even turns up in the 2017 television series Manhunt: Unabomber, placed among academics the FBI consulted. He appears there because his book The Ancient Engineers was cited in endnote 18 of the Unabomber Manifesto.