Seekers of Tomorrow (22 page)

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.

The advent of the magazine of fantasy and science fiction in 1949, which paid two cents a word, double that of any previous magazine stressing fantasy, reopened the market for nonscientific extravaganzas. To breach this market, de Camp again teamed up with his old friend Fletcher Pratt. The first story they sold to the magazine,
Gavagan's Bar,
ap-peared in its second (Winter-Spring, 1950) issue and sparked a series eventually to be collected as
Tales from Gavagan's Bar,
published by Twayne in 1953. The brief tales were obviously fashioned after the popular Jorkens series of Lord Dunsany, every yarn starts in a pub. The Gavagan stories were for the most part not only failures as stories, but tedious and dull. A far more successful collaboration with Willy Ley pro-duced
Lands Beyond,
a book published by Rinehart in 1952. Here some of the research for
Lost Continents
was used and two ranking writers of science nonfiction teamed up to apply scholarship to the stories of Atlantis, Sinbad, Prester John, the ten lost tribes of Israel, among other amazing and ro-mantic elements of history and literature, to produce an absorbing and worthwhile book.

De Camp's literary diggings for
Lost Continents
intrigued him with science fiction as a literature. In a symposium with Robert A. Heinlein in the February, 1952, galaxy science fiction, he contributed
Where
Were We?
evaluating the prophetic qualities of science-fiction works of the past and concluding they had been too conservative. The future, he held, was likely to be much more, not less, remarkable than science fiction thought it would be.

Hermitage House, a New York publishing firm which during its existence enjoyed the distinction—and profits—of publishing L. Ron Hubbard's best-selling
Dianetics,
was building a series called "The Professional Writers Library." They already had four titles in the series and decided they would like to have one on science fiction. De Camp heard about it from a friend and outlined his qualifications to Hermitage. The result, produced in 1953, was
The Science Fiction Handbook,
which proved to be much more than the customary volume of half-baked writing advice. It had chap-ters on the history and philosophy of the literature, biograph-ical sketches of its leading practitioners, and bibliographies of recommended readings. It was suitable as a college text on the subject and was used in extension classes at The College of the City of New York in Creative Science Fiction Writing during 1953, 1954, and 1955.

The similarity of sequences in de Camp's
Viagen's
stories to the flash and vigor of Robert E. Howard's sword-and-sorcery epics of Conan the Cimmerian is no accident. Reading Howard was urged on de Camp by his two good friends, John D. Clark and P. Schuyler Miller (who had collaborated on
A Probable
Outline of Conan's Career
in 1938). De Camp's analytical intellect told him that Howard's premises were implausible but his emotions were overpowered by the sagas so vividly visualized that they came to "furious and gorgeous life."

When he was told on November 30, 1951, in a telephone conversation with Donald A. Wollheim, that a box of Howard's unpublished manuscripts was at the home of liter-ary agent Oscar J. Friend, De Camp virtually took possession of them. He proceeded to revise and edit Howard's unpub-lished work, readying it for the printed page. Three stories went into the magazine or book almost immediately:
The Frost Giant's
Daughter, The God in the Bowl,
and
The Treasure of Tranicos.
Four other straight oriental adventure novelettes de Camp converted into Conan stories, adding ele-ments of the supernatural, and they were collected as
Tales of Conan
by Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp (Gnome Press, 1955). When a Swedish author, Bjorn Nyberg, wrote a novel called
The Return of Conan,
de Camp put it into shape for book publication by Gnome Press in 1957. For his efforts he was elected on November 12, 1955, Royal Chronicler of the Hyborian Legion, a loose-knit asso-ciation of admirers of Robert E. Howard's work. Through Conan, the bullied weakling of school days now vicariously but happily beheaded and skewered the tormentors of his youth, only lightly disguised with the armor and speech idi-oms of an unrecorded period in mankind's history.

But Conan apart, de Camp's ventures into fantasy fiction were growing less frequent and his plots less incisive. An out-standing exception was
A Gun for Dinosaur
(galaxy science fiction, March, 1956) which, in a time travel story, dis-cussed with an air of quiet authority the problem of what type of gun and what methodology were best suited to shoot-ing dinosaurs.

De Camp's love of historical research and his zest for swordplay finally met in a happy marriage in
An
Elephant for Aristotle,
a novel of the ingenuity and adventure involved in walking a pachyderm from its natural habitat to the city of the great Greek philosopher. Critical reviews were excellent when Doubleday issued the novel in 1958. A second book,
The Bronze God of Rhodes,
followed in 1960, and for a third,
The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate
(1961), de Camp traveled to Africa to absorb local color; his real-life adven-tures included being chased by an enraged hippopotamus. This tale of the search on the south side of the Mediterrane-an for the ingredients of the elixir of life was de Camp's favorite, but it proved to be the poorest seller and endan-gered the continuation of the series. De Camp, however, has a contract for another historical swashbuckler and means to have at least one more try at the genre. All three novels harmoniously combine the scholarship, humor, and action which are de Camp's forte. At the same time, de Camp wrote a number of illustrated juvenile books on power machinery, biology, and other scien-tific and historical subjects. He also did a book on
The Heroic Age of American
Invention
for Doubleday in 1961. This sold well enough to warrant a follow-up nonfiction title,
The Ancient
Engineers
(1963), deservedly praised as a sprightly rendition of the building feats of the ancient Ro-mans, Greeks, and Egyptians, as well as other early civiliza-tions. It has outsold all thirty-seven of de Camp's previous books—with over 12,000 copies in print at last count—and seems to epitomize a new, more dignified phase in his writing career. Appropriately the book was dedicated to his wife, Catherine Crook de Camp, for whose sake and that of their two sons he had persisted so dedicatedly at the writing game, and who had been doing more and more editorial work on his copy.

Given his choice of what he preferred to write, he would dearly love to have another crack at the Conan-type story.

Given his choice of professions, more than anything else de Camp would have preferred a professorship at some college or university, where he could delve endlessly into the library, to emerge with nuggets of fascinating lore which he would impart with wry humor to an endless succession of classes. If on occasion an ancient incantation, from a dusty old tome, actually delivered as promised, all to the good; if not, the magic of his typewriter would serve equally well.

An accident in an atomic energy plant. The chance forma-tion of an isotope which upon reaching critical mass could blow half the United States off the map. The only man who might save the situation buried in the radioactive debris. Government inspectors on the premises engaged in an investi-gation to decide whether the plant should be relocated from the urban area which had grown up around it. There you have the taut situation in Lester del Rey's
Nerves
in the September, 1942, astounding science-fiction. The story's value as prophecy is self-evident. It was an attempt to write a "realistic" drama in the setting of a hypo-thetical atomic energy plant at a time when the Manhattan Project had barely gotten underway. There had been other stories on the same theme, notably
Blowups Happen
by Robert A. Heinlein (astounding science-fiction, Septem-ber, 1940), but none of them possessed the crisp immediacy of this tale which built in suspense page by page.

What amazed readers most was that the story was the work of an author whose reputation had been built on tear-jerkers threaded with passages of somewhat purplish prose that verged on poetry. So chilling a blast of "realism" from his typewriter called for a revaluation of Lester del Rey. Ramon Felipe San Juan Mario Silvio Enrico Smith Heathcourt-Brace Sierra y Alvarez del Rey y de los Uerdes' mother died a few days after his birth, June 2, 1915, and he never forgave her. Twenty-nine years later, writing as Lester del Rey,
Kindness,
his short story in the April, 1944, astounding science-fiction, echoed his feelings: "Danny was only a leftover, the last normal man in the world of supermen, hating the fact that he had been born and that his mother had died at his birth to leave him only loneliness as his heritage."

This had been the third marriage for his father, Francisco Sierra y Alvarez del Rey, a 55-year-old carpenter, tenant farmer, and Northern sharecropper, who had lost an arm in the Spanish-American war. Despite the name, the father's background was only partially Spanish. He came from a line of militant atheists in Spain, his great-grandfather having left that country for France after hanging three priests who came out to question him during the time of the Inquisition. The family came to America before 1750 and through the gener-ations acquired a sprinkling of English, Scotch, German, and Indian blood. Lester's mother, Jane Knapp, was English and New England Methodist Yankee.

There were no children from his father's first marriages and since a girl born a few years earlier was barely toddling about, the problem of taking care of a motherless baby boy became a desperate one. The woman who acted as nurse at the time of the mother's death stayed on for a time and Francisco Sierra y Alvarez del Rey convinced her it might be a good idea if they married. This seemed to take care of the immediate needs of raising an infant and a little girl but it actually was the start of the family's problems. The sod-floor shack they lived in was so vermin-ridden that the boy and his father frequently slept outside in a tent during the summer. As a child of a dirt farmer, Lester del Rey literally did not have enough to eat, let alone a balanced diet. The days were never-ending bouts with malnutrition that left him a delicate wisp of a child in contrast to his father, who despite a missing arm, was physically a powerful man. Because of his slightness, fear of physical violence bal-anced between desperation and cowardice in the boy. One day, when he was only four, his stepmother threatened physi-cal discipline. Almost frantic, tiny Ramon grabbed a kitchen knife and held her at bay until his father got home. The stepmother washed her hands of him after that and an uneasy state of coexistence was established with the boy as a completely independent spirit, answerable only to his father. As he grew older he frequently prepared his own meals. Despite the birth of a half-brother and a half-sister, the stress of economics and incompatibility made the marriage relationship between his father and stepmother an increasing-ly strained and unhappy one. Within the family, his full sister was completely obedient to his stepmother and had little to do with him, while his half-brother was subject to outbursts of temper, on several occasions striking Ramon with metal implements that left life-long scars. The half-sister maintained an air of neutrality. Except when his father was home, he was an outsider living in the home on sufferance.

While his father was poorly educated, he did respect learn-ing and was surprisingly well read. Hs introduced the boy to the theories of Charles Darwin and taught him algebra. An atheist, he nevertheless felt that his son should have religious training and arranged to have him attend Catholic Sunday School. Lester entered grade school at Utica, Minnesota, when he was seven, and was fortunate in going to the two-room school house of an old schoolmarm of outstanding ability who understood him and saw him through the fourth grade. In relation to other children he was somewhat of a loner, introspective and tending to read a great deal, rather than to engage in games. Because he was small and thin the bigger boys did not seem to regard him as worth bullying.