L. Sprague de Camp was a master of the time travel and alternate history story. In many respects his novel Lest Darkness Fall founded alternate history, while "Aristotle and the Gun" is probably one of the best stories about tinkering with history ever written. In addition we include stories of time travel — both backwards and forwards — and de Camp's wonderful essay "Language for Time-Travelers".
This is a collection of L. Sprague de Camp's SF best stories and essays dealing with time travel. It is the first volume of a projected series of stories and novels by L. Sprague de Camp.
Table of Contents
- Introduction by Harry Turtledove
- The Wheels of If
- Tiger in the Rain [poem]
- Balsamo's Mirror
- Time [poem]
- Aristotle and the Gun
- Language for Time-Travelers [essay]
- Faunas [poem]
- The Gnarly Man
- Reward of Virtue [poem]
- A Gun for Dinosaur
- Nahr al Kalb [poem]
- Lest Darkness Fall
- Kaziranga [poem]
- The Isolinguals
L. Sprague de Camp
L. Sprague de Camp was born in New York in 1907 and died in 2000. He got a BS in Aeronautical Engineering from Cal Tech in 1930 and later earned his MS. Before WWII he was one of the new writers recruited by John W. Campbell to launch the Golden Age of Astounding and became a distinguished writer of short SF. He was a Lieutenant Commander in the US Naval Reserve in WWII. After the war and for the next fifty years he was a full-time professional writer, mostly of SF and fantasy. He wrote over 100 SF&F books, several hundred stories, and many non-fiction works in history, science, and biography.
De Camp is a winner of the Hugo and also a Grand Master Nebula.
L. Sprague de Camp spoke several languages and traveled world-wide. He has been chased by a hippopotamus in Uganda and by sea lions in the Galapagos Islands, seen tiger and rhinoceros from elephant back in India, been bitten by a lizard in the jungles of Guatemala, and spent Easter on Easter Island in the South Pacific. His autobiography, Time and Chance, published by Donald M. Grant in 1996 won the 1997 Hugo Award for best non-fiction.
Besides his solo works, de Camp is well-known for his fantasy collaborations with Fletcher Pratt and many books, mostly non-fiction, written with his wife Catherine Crook de Camp.
Bob Eggleton
Bob Eggleton is a science fiction, fantasy and landscape artist. Winner of 7 Hugo Awards and 11 Chesley Awards, his art can be seen on the covers of magazines and books. He was Official Artist at Boskone 23 in 1986, was presented with the Jack Gaughan Award for Emerging Artist in 1988, and elevated to the rank of Fellow of NESFA in 1995, and has created artwork for the covers of several other NESFA Press books.