Seekers of Tomorrow

by Sam Moskowitz

  The boy enjoyed his summers in the Adirondacks, canoe-ing around the swamps, digging up specimens and examining them under the microscope. His parents were practicing Episcopalians, which led to his being sent to Trinity School in New York because of its connection with that church. He was a difficult child, stubborn and insisting on his own way in everything. Figuring to take some of the contrariness out of him, the family decided to send him to an institution with military discipline, Snyder School in North Carolina. There young Sprague really ran into trouble. He was pre-cociously intellectual, already a master of the snide remark, and his tongue helped get him clobbered every day for ten years. Awkward and thin, he was an ineffective fighter and become a safe target for every bully on the campus. This perpetually humiliating personal agony described in Judgment Day (astounding science-fiction, August 1955), resulted in a protective veneer of unemotional impersonality which he found difficult to discard as he matured. He cultivated a smiling, agreeable manner but kept his feelings so well cov-ered that all but his close friends regarded him as cold.

  He was a good student, but not an exceptional one. His earliest passion was the study of bugs. Later, he hoped to become a paleontologist. These were put aside to make way for the more practical prospects of aeronautical engineering, for which purpose he enrolled in the California Institute of Technology. He was delighted to find none of the persecu-tions of grade and high school in the intellectual atmosphere of the university and quickly achieved editorship of the college paper and even a small athletic distinction as a member of the fencing team.

  When he graduated in 1930, he went to work with his father in the Adirondacks. The strenuous activity, including surveying, strengthened him physically. He decided to go for his Master's degree at Stevens Institute, Hoboken, New Jer-sey, and secured it in June, 1933, majoring in engineering and economics. His first job was with the Inventors Foundation Inc., Ho-boken, where he gave a course in patents for inventors. The school was taken over by the International Correspondence Schools, and he went to work for them in Scranton, Pennsyl-vania. When he resigned in 1937 he held the title of Principal of the School of Inventing and Patenting. Several years earlier he had collaborated with Alf K. Berle on a book which appeared as Inventions and Their Management, pub-lished by the International Textbook Co., Scranton, in 1937. This was his first professional work; a standard reference on the subject, it has gone through a number of revisions and editions since then, and has been cited in at least one Su-preme Court action. As early as 1936 he had attempted writing fiction. His first was The Hairless Ones Come, a prehistory tale eventually published in the January, 1939, issue of the short-lived golden fleece, though it had been rejected by several peri-odicals previous to that.

  While in college he had roomed with John D. Clark, an avid science-fiction reader who knew many of the authors and editors. Clark introduced him to P. Schuyler Miller, a popular writer in the field, who had entered science fiction in the early thirties. De Camp collaborated with Miller on Genus Homo, a story of a busload of men and women who are buried in a tunnel cave-in and awake in the far future when no human remains and intelligent apes are the dominant species. The early part of the novel is a straight action adventure reminiscent of Murray Leinster's Red Dust. The latter part, describing the culture of the apes, contains all those elements of satire, humor, and dialogue that have become de Camp's trademark. It is difficult to understand why the story did not sell at the time, but publication eluded it until March, 1941, when it appeared in super science stories, paid for at the rate of a half cent a word. Clark's success in selling several things to astounding stories stimulated de Camp's efforts to break into professional science-fiction ranks. A first sale came sooner than he really expected. The Isolinguals, a story of a machine which caused ancestral memories to prevail over current ones, was picked up by F. Orlin Tremaine and published in the September, 1937, issue of astounding stories. Ironically, Stanton A. Coblentz, the earlier king of science-fiction satire, made his last appearance in astounding stories in that same issue with a serious story, Gravity Unaffected.

  Now a members of the "establishment," de Camp attended a meeting at the apartment of John D. Clark in New York, where he was introduced to such notables as Julius Schwartz, literary agent; Mort Weisinger, editor of thrilling wonder stories; Henry Kuttner, another aspiring author; and John W. Campbell, Jr., soon to become editor of astounding stories. This was all very exciting, but a single sale wasn't enough to retire on, so in December, 1937, de Camp took a job as assistant editor on a trade magazine, fuel oil journal. A wave of economy beached him after only three months and he found himself unemployed. There was little to do but take another crack at science fiction.

  Tremaine was still with Street & Smith, but Campbell was running astounding stories as he liked and bought Hyper-pilosity, an entertaining episode on the sociological impact of the spontaneous growth of a furlike coating of hair on all men and women (astounding science-fiction, April, 1938). Reader reception was only mild.

  De Camp scored his first literary hit with an article, Lan-guage for Time Travelers, which appeared in the July, 1938, astounding science-fiction. Tales of tempornautical excursions into the future had long been common, but no one had considered the problems of communication that would arise from the gradual change in pronunciation and semantics. With humor and deft style cloaking his scholarship, de Camp's Language for Time Travelers was the first nonfiction to be voted by the readers top monthly honors over fiction in the history of astounding science-fiction.

  As if he were anticipating this reaction, Campbell had inter-rupted the program of the First National Science Fiction Convention held in Newark, New Jersey, May 29, 1938, to put de Camp on display. From the platform de Camp pin-pointed the area of the United States from which various members of the audience came by the peculiarities of their speech. The more than 100 present recalled this interlude as a revelation into the extent of research that de Camp devoted to giving his humor an authentic background. The next time in print de Camp scored a runaway first place with his fiction The Command (astounding science-fiction, October, 1938), which introduced Johnny Black, the bear with the souped-up brain and a compulsion to master chem-istry. The title was prophetic, for by popular command de Camp was forced to turn out three sequels concerning his genius-rated bruin.

  The high rating of The Command won him the cover of the December, 1939, astounding science-fiction for The Mer-man, a deft chronicle of a man who invents a chemical that makes it possible to breathe under water. This also tied for first place, beating out competition as formidable as Lester del Rey's Helen O'Loy. In the brief period of but fifteen months de Camp had moved into the front rank of science-fiction writers.

  The influence of Mark Twain, which was to become so obvious in Lest Darkness Fall, was earlier evident in Divide and Rule, a two-part novel which ran in unknown in April and May, 1939. A kangaroolike race of aliens conquers the earth and restores knighthood as a means of keeping man-kind in subjugation. Though the writing was choppy in spots, the details of an utterly unique social set-up, complete with its own slang, was engrossingly worked out and chuckle-provoking. That de Camp was the funniest writer in science fiction was proved in a letter he wrote in the June, 1939, unknown, hilariously delineating the scientific effect of yoga exercises on the human body and using the spiritual terminol-ogy employed by its practitioners.

  unknown was to become almost legendary for a new type of logical fantasy for grownups, and de Camp was to play a major role in its reputation. Immediately following Divide and Rule, his The Gnarly Man (unknown, June, 1939), telling of the discovery of a 50,000-year-old Neanderthal man who is making a living as a "wild man" in a side-show, broke ground for an entirely new approach to such material, most notably emulated by Philip Jose Farmer in The Alley Man.

  Called in by Campbell as a trouble shooter to rescue a novel, None but Lucifer, submitted by H. L. Gold, he rewrote the story from end to end, and readers of the Septemb
er, 1939, unknown were treated to the shockingly original con-cept of a man who so outdoes the devil that he replaces him. During the period when he was writing his way to reader acceptance, de Camp roomed in bachelor quarters with Robert N. Lyon, a junior engineer. At a New Year's Eve party given by Lyon he was introduced to Catherine Crook, who taught at a private school for teen-agers. Isaac Asimov was later to note that she "looks like the younger daughter of a British peer. I have long considered her the most beautiful blonde in science-fiction. I can say this safely, as my own wife is a decided brunette." On their third date de Camp proposed. The problem now was to find money for a honeymoon. De Camp vigorously launched into the final draft of Lest Darkness Fall. The more he wrote the longer the novel seemed to get, and it appeared that marriage and honeymoon would be indefinitely delayed. Then Catherine suggested that there was no reason why he could not finish it after their marriage. So the ceremony took place August 12, 1939, and for the next two days de Camp pounded the typewriter in the hotel room, finally bringing the manuscript over to Campbell who got him a check while he waited. Only then were the de Camps off on their honeymoon trip.

  Among those impressed by de Camp's sprightly and enter-taining scholarship was Fletcher Pratt, a tiny man with a pointed beard who had gained a reputation as a military expert and had published a number of much-praised volumes on American and European history. As early as 1928 he was a contributor to amazing stories and had been a dilettante author in science fiction through the years, most frequently with a collaborator. In common with de Camp, he had a great interest in languages and had translated many science-fiction stories from German and French for Hugo Gernsback's mag-azines. The two were introduced by John D. Clark, and in no time at all they began plotting a fantasy for unknown based on the Norse legends. The result was the creation of Harold Shea, a bored psychologist who uses a principle suggested by one of his colleagues to whisk himself off to a time and land where the

  "natural" laws are magic and almost anything can happen. De Camp wrote the first draft of The Roaring Trumpet and Pratt polished it. The result appeared in the May, 1940, unknown, and was instantly recognized as a milestone among many milestones in the history of that honored magazine. Shea was immediately afterward shuttled off to the land of Spenser's Faerie Queene in Mathematics of Magic, a sequel which appeared in the August, 1940, unknown. This proved less popular with the readers, possibly because Spenser's work was not as familiar as the Norse myths. The two novels were combined into a book and published in 1941 by Henry Holt as The Incomplete Enchanter. The same year Holt put Lest Darkness Fall into hard covers. This was an era when fantasy pulp authors still were not literarily respectable, and de Camp's feat in achieving two trade books from an important book publisher in a single year carried monumental prestige. The volumes received good reviews and the sales, though modest (probably not over 1500 apiece), were passable for that era. The result was that another collaboration with Fletcher Pratt, Land of Unreason (unknown worlds, October, 1941), went into hard covers under the Henry Holt imprint in 1942. This time, Fred Barber, a member of the U.S. diplomatic corps, resident in England, drinks milk from a bowl left outdoors for the little people and refills it with Scotch. A drunken brownie mistakes him for a changeling and carries him off to the fairyland of Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. This volume was a failure in the market and was remaindered. De Camp attributed the failure to the fact that the book was in part an allegory of international politics spoofing Mussolini and it appeared just as the United States entered the war. No one thought it was very funny.

  Nevertheless, of the fifteen stories de Camp had published in unknown and unknown worlds from April, 1939, to August, 1942, inclusive, all but one, None but Lucifer, would eventually appear between hard covers, a tribute to his ability at popularizing the whacky variety of fiction that appeared in that magazine. Despite his preoccupation with fantasy, de Camp was hold-ing his own against a formidable array of competition in science fiction that included Robert A. Heinlein, A. E. van Vogt, Theodore Sturgeon, and Isaac Asimov. The Stolen Dormouse, a two-part novel in the April and May, 1941, issues of astounding science-fiction, in its image of Amer-ican big business hardening into feudal casts, was as clever and adroit as anything his contemporaries were doing in their specialties at the time. How well de Camp would have stood up in a continuous literary competition with this group was never to be tested. A friend and classmate of Robert A. Heinlein's, Lt. Commander A. B. Scoles of the U.S. Navy, wanted science-fiction writers as engineers at the Naval Aircraft Factory in Philadelphia. Heinlein, de Camp, and eventually Asimov were to be employed at the Philadelphia Naval Yard as civilian engineers; but de Camp, who entered on July 15, 1942, and took the naval training courses at Dartmouth, emerged a full lieu-tenant in the United States Naval Reserve. He was assigned to do test and development work on parts, materials, and accessories for naval aircraft, which included cold-room and altitude-chamber work. During the war years his writing virtually ceased, but another attribute of his nature came to the fore: a passion for research. This penchant was obvious in his fiction and even more pronounced in the rather frequent articles he had done for astounding science-fiction on subjects as diverse as brown rats (The Long-Tailed Huns, astounding science-fiction, January, 1942) and the development of the armored tank (Come and Get Under, astounding science-fiction, December, 1942). He was one of the few science-fiction writ-ers of the time whose nonfiction was every bit as good as his fiction. He researched continuously for "a book on magic, witch-craft, and occultism," which was originally scheduled for publication by Henry Holt. One chapter of this book, The Unwritten Classics, was the feature article of the March 29, 1947, Saturday review of literature. It concerned imagi-nary works which were almost as well known as the real classics of occult literature, but were what de Camp termed Pseudobiblia fake bibliographical references. Included were such titles as The Book of Thoth, The Story of Setnau, The Book of Dzyan, and of course The Necronomicon. A finan-cial crisis at Holt aborted publication of the magic book, but de Camp has since used most of the material in articles and in other books.

  Earlier an article had appeared in the May, 1947, natural history titled Lost Continents. This would eventually be in-cluded as part of Lost Continents, a book originally set in type by Prime Press (Philadelphia), but after the collapse of that company, published by Gnome Press (New York) in 1954. De Camp not only explored the legends concerning Atlantis, Mu, and other "lost continents," but did an exhaustive analy-sis of the literature, including fiction, concerning the topic. The result was unquestionably the finest single book produced on "The Atlantis Theme in History, Science and Literature," and has become the basic guide to serious research in that aspect of science fiction. Lost Continents was written after de Camp left the Navy Yard in January, 1946. During this period he attempted a spoof in the P. G. Wodehouse style, which proved unsalable. These were lean times for the de Camp family, now perma-nently resident in the suburbs of Philadelphia. Research and literary experimentation might provide food to nourish de Camp's intellect but it put little on the table. The death of his father in 1945 gave him a small income (his mother had died in 1927 at the age of 39) which helped, but it was inade-quate to carry the total financial burden.

  To get back into the routine of writing fiction proved difficult. The Ghosts of Melvin Pye, a very weak fantasy concerning the dual ghosts of a split personality who haunt the same building, appeared in the December, 1946, thrill-ing wonder stories, but it was the only work of fiction by de Camp to see publication in the years from 1943 to 1948 inclusive.

  In 1948, a collection of short stories, The Wheels of If, appeared, led off by an amusing short novel of a half-dozen alternate worlds (unknown, October, 1940). De Camp at last got the kind of press he needed. Among the short stories in the volume was The Gnarly Man, and de Camp made his fictional comeback with a variation on the theme. In Throw-back, published in the March, 1949, astounding science-fiction, giant ape-men are bred through
the kind of reverse genetics that in reality was used to bring back the European bison and the nine-foot brutes are kept on reservations. Though the style was well up to de Camp's best standards, his handling of the potential in the situation was so limited that of six stories in the magazine Throwback rated sixth with the readers.

  A second try, The Animal Cracker Plot (astounding science-fiction, July, 1949), managed to take only third place in the ratings, but it marked the beginning of a new series known as the Viagens lnterplanetarias (Portuguese for "interplanetary tours"). Why Portuguese?

  Well, in the hypothetical future de Camp propounds, Brazil is the dominant power in the world and naturally spearheads space travel. And that country is Portuguese-speaking. Much of the action of this series was to take place on three planets: Vishnu, Krishna, and Ganesha. The stories have frequently been called in toto the "Krishna" stories. The first short novel of the group, The Queen of Zamba (astounding science-fiction, August, 1940), is set on Krishna. No mechanical devices of any sort are permitted on this world, for the inhabitants (almost human in appearance) are intelligent enough to imitate them but not sufficiently socially advanced to use them for good. The concept offers de Camp the opportunity to engage in cloak-and-dagger action with much swordplay. The background provides an excuse for getting a standard historical adventure into a science-fiction magazine. The early stories were popular, but while de Camp was excellent at preparing the setting he lacked ingenui-ty in creating novel situations from his initial premises, and as a result few of the series were outstanding. One notable exception was Rogue Queen, a novel which saw first publica-tion as a Doubleday book in 1951. A planet where hu-manoids have set up a society with a sexual arrangement not unlike that of the bees on earth is outlined with thoroughness and originality. The efforts of this society to cope with the technology and philosophy of earth men from a spaceship that has landed on their world results in its overthrow. This novel, more than any other postwar work, fulfilled the expec-tations that prewar readers held for de Camp. Because the entire plot was integrally involved with the sexual basis of the alien community, de Camp was highly praised for his skilled handling of this subject matter. Actually, sex formed a part of and was handled with great competence in many prewar de Camp stories. Rogue Queen is one of the few science-fiction stories that might conceivably have made some impression on Philip Jose Farmer in preparing The Lovers, which was to break through the sex taboo in the science-fiction magazines the following year.