Lyon Sprague de Camp (; November 27, 1907 – November 6, 2000) was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and non-fiction literature. In a career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including biographies of other fantasy authors. He was a major figure in science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s.
Biography De Camp was born in New York City, one of three sons of Lyon de Camp (a businessman in real-estate and lumber), and of Emma Beatrice Sprague. His maternal grandfather was the accountant, banker, pioneering Volapükist and Civil War veteran Charles Ezra Sprague. De Camp once noted that he rarely used pen-names, "partly because my own true name sounds more like a pseudonym than most pseudonyms do".De Camp, L. Sprague. Science-Fiction Handbook (New York: Hermitage Press, 1953), p. 177.
De Camp began his education at the Trinity School in New York, then spent ten years attending the Snyder School in North Carolina, a military-style institution. His stay at the Snyder School represented an attempt by his parents, who were heavy-handed disciplinarians, to cure him of intellectual arrogance and of lack of discipline. He was awkward and thin, an ineffective fighter, and suffered from bullying by his classmates. His experiences at the school taught him to develop a detached, analytical style considered cold by all but his closest friends, though he could, like his father, be disarming and funny in social situations. He would later recall these challenging childhood experiences in the semi-autobiographical story Judgment Day (1955).
An aeronautical engineer by education, de Camp undertook undergraduate studies at the California Institute of Technology (where his roommate was at one point noted rocket-fuel scientist John Drury Clark), and earned his Bachelor of Science degree from Caltech in aeronautical engineering 1930. He earned his Master of Science degree in engineering from the Stevens Institute of Technology in 1933. De Camp was also a surveyor and an expert in patents.
In his first job he worked for the Inventors Foundation, Inc. in Hoboken, New Jersey, which was taken over by The International Correspondence Schools. De Camp transferred to the Scranton, Pennsylvania division. He was principal of the School of Inventing and Patenting when he resigned in 1937. His first book Inventions and Their Management resulted, published in July 1937.
On August 12, 1939, de Camp married Catherine Crook, with whom he collaborated on science fiction and nonfiction beginning in the 1960s. They had two children.de Camp, Time and Chance, p. 379
During World War II, de Camp served as a researcher at the Philadelphia Naval Yard along with his fellow-writers Isaac Asimov and Robert A. Heinlein. De Camp eventually rose to the rank of lieutenant commander in the U.S. Navy as a reserve officer. From 1942 to 1989, the de Camps generally lived near Philadelphia; for decades their home was in Villanova, Pennsylvania.de Camp, Time and Chance, pp. 177, 215, 287, 399
De Camp was a member of the all-male literary and dining club in New York City, the "Trap Door Spiders", which served as the basis of Asimov's fictional group of mystery-solvers the "Black Widowers". De Camp himself was the model for the character named "Geoffrey Avalon".Asimov, Isaac. I. Asimov: a Memoir (New York, Doubleday, 1994), chapter 120 "The Trap Door Spiders."
De Camp was a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loosely-knit group of heroic fantasy writers founded during the 1960s and led by Lin Carter, with entry by credentials as a fantasy writer alone.
The de Camps moved to Plano, Texas, in 1989, and Sprague de Camp died there on November 6, 2000 (seven months after his wife, on what would have been her birthday), at age 92. His ashes were inurned, together with hers, in the Arlington National Cemetery in Virginia.
De Camp's personal library of about 1,200 books was acquired for auction by Half Price Books in 2005. The collection included books inscribed by fellow writers, such as Isaac Asimov and Carl Sagan, as well as by de Camp himself.Weeks, Jerome. "De Camp library for sale". The Dallas Morning News, October 24, 2005, p. 3G.
Coinage of "extraterrestrial" and "E.T." "Extraterrestrial", a coinage from "extra" + "terrestrial", meaning from beyond earth, is attested as an adjective as early as 1868, according to the Oxford English Dictionary. Its first use in connection with life beyond earth was likely by H. G. Wells, in his 1898 novel The War of the Worlds.Cryer, Max. Common Phrases ... and the Amazing Stories Behind Them. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2010, page 93.Hendrickson, Robert. Words and Phrase Origins. 3rd ed. New York: Facts On File, 2004, page 249. L. Sprague de Camp is credited with its 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.
Hypothesis regarding sea serpent sightings De Camp made a suggestion in 1968 that fossil discoveries had influenced modern reports of sea monster sightings. The suggestion was made in his article "Dinosaurs in Today's World" in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction v. 34, no. 3, March 1968, later reprinted in his nonfiction collection The Fringe of the Unknown, Buffalo, New York: Prometheus, 1983. In 2019 de Camp's theory was scientifically tested by C. G. M. Paxton and D. Naish, who concluded that trends in the data of reported sightings appear to support his hypothesis.Paxton, C. G. M., & Naish, D. "Did Nineteenth Century Marine Vertebrate Fossil Discoveries Influence Sea Serpent Reports?" In Earth Sciences History v. 38, iss. 1 (2019), pp. 16-27. https://doi.org/10.17704/1944-6178-38.1.16
Body of work
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 career.
A common theme in many of his works is a corrective impulse regarding similar previous works by other authors. De Camp was frequently disturbed by what he regarded as logical lapses and absurdities in others' writings. Some, like Asimov, felt de Camp's conscientiousness about facts limited the scope of his stories: de Camp was reluctant to use technological or scientific concepts (e.g., hyperspace or faster-than-light travel) if he regarded them as impossible. Thus, his response to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court was to write a similar time travel novel (Lest Darkness Fall) in which the method of time travel was rationalized and the hero's technical expertise was constrained by the technological limitations of the age.
In like fashion, he reimagined space opera and planetary romance in his "Viagens Interplanetarias" series, and the prehistoric precursor civilizations characteristic of much heroic fantasy in his Pusadian series. When he was not debunking literary conventions he was often explaining them. For example, in the Harold Shea stories co-written with his longtime friend Fletcher Pratt, the magical premises of some bodies of myths and legends were accepted but examined and elucidated in terms of their own systems of inherent logic. The civilizations in The Compleat Enchanter, for example, are built upon a cultural and technological reality based on scientific formulas. Characters may be transported to these different worlds, but the magic contained within those worlds is only feasible to the extent that it coincides with the technology of the day (e.g., the combustion engine). De Camp's explanatory tendency also carried over into his non-fictional writings, including advice to science fiction writers on handling the different states of languages in future worlds.
Science fiction De Camp's science fiction is marked by his interests in linguistics, ancient history, and the history and philosophy of science.Laughlin, Charlotte, and Levack, Daniel J. H. De Camp: An L. Sprague de Camp Bibliography. San Francisco, Underwood/Miller, 1983, p. 192.Knight, David, ed. First Flight: Maiden Voyages in Space and Time, New York, Lancer Books, 1963, p. 9. His first published story was "The Isolinguals", in the September 1937 issue of Astounding Science Fiction—the last issue edited by F. Orlin Tremaine, prior to the long tenure of John W. Campbell. Most of his early science fiction stories were unrelated to each other, the exceptions being his "Johnny Black" tales about a black bear uplifted to human-level intelligence, and his "Drinkwhiskey Institute" stories, a series of tall tales involving time travel. Campbell's fantasy magazine, Unknown, was suited to de Camp's idiosyncratic imagination, logic, and sense of humor. He contributed ten novels (five as collaborations), much of it characterized by humor and dry wit. De Camp eschewed the intention of being a satirist, insisting, instead, that the stories he wrote were meant less for instruction or improvement, as satire requires, and more for the amusement of his readers.
De Camp's treatment of time travel and alternate history in stories such as Lest Darkness Fall (1939), "The Wheels of If" (1940), "A Gun for Dinosaur" (1956), "Aristotle and the Gun" (1958), and The Glory That Was (1960) challenged the popular notion of his time that history consisted of an arbitrary series of accidents. Instead, de Camp, through background knowledge and logical thought, systematically demonstrated how technological advances could determine the pattern of an eventful history. Lest Darkness Fall, "The Wheels of If" and "Aristotle and the Gun" have been recognized as seminal works in the field of alternate history."Past Winners and Finalists". Sidewise Awards for Alternate History (uchronia.net). Retrieved April 23, 2013. This was a Special Achievement award "for seminal works in the field" among the first annual Sidewise Awards in 1996 (generally recognizing 1995 publications).
His most extended work was his "Viagens Interplanetarias" series, set in a future where Brazil is the dominant power, particularly a sub-series of sword and planet novels set on the planet Krishna, beginning with The Queen of Zamba.Power, Colleen. "DeCamp, L. (Lyon) Sprague." Reader's Guide to Twentieth-Century Science Fiction (Chicago, American Library Association, 1989), pp. 170-74. His most influential Viagens novel was the non-Krishna work Rogue Queen, a tale of a hive society undermined by interstellar contact, which was one of the earliest science fiction novels to deal with sexual themes.
Fantasy
De Camp was best known for his light fantasy, particularly two series written in collaboration with Pratt, the Harold Shea stories (from 1940) and Gavagan's Bar (from 1950). Floyd C. Gale in 1961 said that they "were far and away the finest team of fantasy collaborators". De Camp and Pratt also wrote some stand-alone novels similar in tone to the Harold Shea stories, including Land of Unreason (1942). De Camp wrote a few more of this genre on his own.
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. He also edited a series of fantasy anthologies credited with helping to spark the renaissance of heroic fantasy in the late 1960s.Stableford, Brian M. "L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt." Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror, ed. Everett F. Bleiler (New York, Scribner, 1985), vol. 2, p. 929.
De Camp also created three sword and sorcery sequences. The Pusadian series (from 1951), composed of the novel The Tritonian Ring and several short stories, is set in an antediluvian era similar to Howard's.