Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Shadow Library Re-Organized

 

Lest Darkness Fall … L. Sprague de Camp

The Fallible Fiend … L. Sprague de Camp

The Goblin Tower; The Clocks of Iraz; The Unbeheaded King; The Honorable Barbarian … L. Sprague de Camp

The Complete Compleat Enchanter …L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt

The Enchanter Reborn … L. Sprague de Camp & Christopher Stasheff

Land of Unreason ... L. Sprague De Camp & Fletcher Pratt

The Blue Star … Fletcher Pratt

The Well of the Unicorn … Fletcher Pratt

H. P. Lovecraft: A Biography … L. Sprague de Camp

A Midsummer Tempest … Poul Anderson

Hrolf Kraki’s Saga … Poul Anderson

Three Hearts and Three Lions … Poul Anderson

The Moon’s Fire-Eating Daughter … John Myers Myers

Mention My Name in Atlantis … John Jakes

Swords and Deviltry; Swords Against Death; Swords in the Mist; Swords Against Wizardry; The Swords of Lankhmar; Swords and Ice Magic … Fritz Leiber (but not those last two in the picture)

If I speak of Robert E. Howard and Conan, can L. Sprague De Camp (1907 – 2000) be far behind? Part of the heroic and foundational nerds of the Fifties and Sixties (although his career began in the Thirties), I always picture him in the intellectual regalia of the time: horn-rimmed glasses, a cigarette holder, a goatee, and two-piece plaid suits. In his professional career as an aeronautical engineer, he worked with Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein. What follows is a patchwork of facts from Wikipedia:

“De Camp was a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loosely knit group of Heroic fantasy writers that was founded during the 1960s and led by Lin Carter, with entry by credentials as a fantasy writer alone … De Camp and his wife moved to Plano, Texas, in 1989, and Sprague de Camp died there on November 6, 2000 …  L. Sprague de Camp is credited with [the word “extraterrestrial] first usage as a noun with the meaning of "alien life" and with coining the abbreviation "E.T." in the first part of his two-part article "Design for Life", published in the May 1939 issue of Astounding Science Fiction …  

“De Camp was a materialist who wrote works examining society, history, technology and myth. He published numerous short stories, novels, non-fiction works and poems during his long career … De Camp had the mind of an educator, and a common theme in many of his works is a corrective impulse regarding similar previous works by other authors. A highly rational and logical thinker, he was frequently disturbed by what he regarded as logical lapses and absurdities in others' writings.

“De Camp was best known for his light fantasy, particularly two series written in collaboration with Pratt, the Harold Shea stories (from 1940 et seq.) and Gavagan's Bar (from 1950) … He was also known for his sword and sorcery, a fantasy genre revived partly by his editorial work on and continuation of Robert E. Howard's Conan cycle.”

De Camp’s autobiographies and analysis of other Fantasy authors’ books have been criticized as downgrading their work as compared to his personal criteria. Fantasy is a rather odd choice of genre for someone so firmly ‘materialist’ and ‘logical’, although a loose inner consistency, a ‘plausible impossible’ does help sell a magical tale. His most popular works (certainly the ones I’ve enjoyed) seem to be riding still on the coattails of Fletcher Pratt and Robert E. Howard. But he is definitely responsible for rescuing and revitalizing Howard from his pulp obscurity; it is largely due to De Camp that Conan has such a presence in pop culture today.

Included in this list are some swordsmen and sorcerers I equate with his type. I so much wanted to like Poul Anderson (1926 – 2001; also a SAGA founding member; also spent a period of his life in Texas!) from what I’d heard of him, but these books were not to be my entrance to his multifarious and award-winning work.