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Citadels of Mystery

Politics & Social Sciences

L. Sprague De Camp

Catherine C. de Camp

Archaeology

Fontana

The Ancient Engineers

From the dawn of history to the rise of the scientific method in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, invention and technology advanced with painful slowness. The reason was not that men were stupid during those thousands of years—it was the fact that most people were simply too busy trying to keep alive. The imagination and daring that leisure and security could divert to other ends were limited to a tiny group. It is about these brave men—whose genius enabled the Egyptians to build their pyramids, the Phoenicians to cross stormy seas, the Romans to erect magnificent public buildings—that this carefully researched and fascinatingly written account of the advance of early technology has been written. Mr. de Camp describes the methods used by early irrigators, architects, and military engineers to build and maintain structures to serve their rulers' wants. He tells, for example, how the Pharaohs erected obelisks and pyramids, how Nebuchadnezzar fortified Babylon, how Dionysios' ordnance department invented the catapult, how the Chinese built the Great Wall, and how the Romans fashioned their roads, baths, sewers, and aqueducts. He recounts many intriguing anecdotes: an Assyrian king putting up no-parking signs in Nineveh; Plato inventing a water clock with an alarm to signal the start of his classes; Heron of Alexandria designing a coin-operated holy-water fountain; a Chinese emperor composing a poem to be inscribed on a clock invented by one of his civil servants. The Ancient Engineers will delight students of technology and invention for its accurate portrayal of the foundations of modern engineering as well as lovers of history for its penetrating look at the material background of civilization and its unusual explanations of the world's social evolution.

History

World

The MIT Press

Fred Barber, a diplomat, is kidnapped from war-torn England by an elf and taken to the strange world of King Oberon and Queen Titania

The Land of Unreason

Literature & Fiction

Fletcher Pratt

Contemporary

Bluejay Books Inc.

On Midsummer's Eve, as everybody knows, you should leave a bowl of milk out for the fairies. Unfortunately—or fortunately—Fred Barber, an American diplomat convalescing in Yorkshire, didn't take the obligation with proper seriousness. He swapped the milk for a stiff dose of Scotch. So he had only himself to blame if the fairies got a bit muddled. Barber found himself in an Old English Fairyland. At the Court of King Oberon, to be precise. The natural—or supernatural—laws there were, to say the least of it, distinctly odd. Things kept changing. This made the mission with which he was entrusted, as the price of his return to the normal world, even harder than he expected. He had to penetrate the Kobold Hills, where it was said that swords were being made, and discover if an ancient enemy had returned. He was given a magic wand—but not told how to use it. Through the fields and forests he went, meeting dryads and sprites, ogres and two-headed eagles, on the way. Danger, seduction, and magic lay all around him. And, as the adventure continued, somehow it darkened and became more seriousness. At the end of Fred Barber's quest lay a shattering revelation.

Land of Unreason

Ballantine Books

Martin Padaway was a smart enough young man, with a scientific education, but no universal genius. He had the misfortune to be suddenly dropped back into time, and a very alarming time at that-sinth century Rome, when the Goths ruled Italy, and civilization in the west was collapsing. To make a living, and to try and shore up civilization, Padaway undertook to introduce inventions such as gunpowder, clocks, and printing. Some worked and some didn't, often with dramatic and hilarious results.

Lest Darkness Fall

The Compleat Enchanter: The Magical Misadventures of Harold Shea

Science Fiction & Fantasy

Fantasy

Ancient Civilizations

Ballantine Del Rey paperback, first printing, 1978. Includes introduction, "L. Sprague de Camp -- Engineer and Sorcerer" (essay) by Poul Anderson, and these works: Hyperpelosity (1938); Language for Time Travelers (1938, essay); The Command [Johnny Black] (1938); The Merman (1938); Employment (1939); The Gnarly Man (1939); "Reward of Virtue" (1970, poem); Nothing in the Rules (1939); The Hardwood Pile (1940); The Reluctant Shaman (1947); The Inspector's Teeth [Viagens Interplanetarias] (1950); The Guided Man (1952); "The Ameba" (1973, poem); Judgment Day (1955); A Gun for Dinosaur [Reginald Rivers] (1956); The Emperor's Fan [Novaria] (1973; Two Yards of Dragon [Incorporated Knight] (1976); "The Little Green Men" (1976, poem); Author's Afterword (1978).

The Best of L. Sprague de Camp

Del Rey/Ballantine

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Books by L. Sprague De Camp