Dr Simon Reads Appendix N Part Seven: L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
Dr. Simon Reads
Appendix N Part Seven: L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
Normally here I go into a brief bit of biography, but I’m skipping that this time. I’ve already covered L Sprague de Camp in the previous instalment, and Fletcher Pratt has his own solo entry later on (under “P”, of course!) All we need to know for now is that the two men met through wargaming (seems apropos) and were both members of the Trap Door Spiders literary club. As well as the collaborations described below they worked together on a number of short stories, and the one that I think I’ll look out for later is The Tales From Gavagan’s Bar, a collection of tall tales that sound like a mix of Damon Runyon and Robert Rankin.
The recommendations from Appendix N are The Carnelian Cube and the Harold Shea series (which I encountered as five stories spread across three volumes – The Incompleat Enchanter, Castle of Iron and The Wall of Serpents. All of these feature a ‘Varsity man catapulted from his own time and place into a series of fantastic worlds (something that de Camp’s solo work Lest Darkness Fall also shares). Luckily the protagonist manages to survive by his wits and one or two handily applicable extra-curricular skills, usually also managing a complicated relationship with one or two women on the way. As with de Camp’s solo works (see last time), they all share a level of whimsy and dated phraseology that makes them fun but uneven reading.
The Carnelian Cube
The titular Cube is a magical artefact like a small die
covered in Etruscan symbols, confiscated by the protagonist Arthur Finch, an
archaeologist, from his dig supervisor Tiridat Ariminian. The Cube is said to
take its owner to his or her dream world but, as Tiridat warns, like all
magical artifacts come by less than honest means, the user should beware that
the effects will not be to his liking.
Finch wishes for a more logical world, and finds himself in an alternative Kentucky where clients attach themselves to the sprawling houses of wealthy and powerful patrons, and all is conducted by rote with little space for individuality. Names are designated by family and function, and I can’t be the only one where Finch’s new name of Finch Arthur Poet reminds me of Dent Arthurdent. As readers of this kind of story may well expect, Finch’s deliberate and accidental individualism get him into a lot of hot water, but he is without the Cube. It transpires that each world he visits has its own version of Tiridat, and Finch must each time seek him out and acquire the Cube anew. Eventually he does so and dreams himself into a world of more individuality and creativity.
Again he ends up in an alternative Kentucky, a crazy Roaring Twenties kind of place where cars are built like tanks to survive the complete lack of traffic regulations, and crazily-dressed artist-gangsters fight turf wars over literary works. Finding the alternative Tiridat and once again in possession of the Cube, Finch wishes for a world where archaeological research is taken seriously.
And seriously it is, in the darkest of the three settings, where massive reconstructions of famous battles are carried out by brainwashed participants who fight and die at the behest of the researchers (it reminded me of the Doctor Who story The War Games, last of Patrick Trougton’s era and one of his best). In this setting, Tiridat is nowhere to be found until the very end, where he turns out to be Sargon of Akkad. Finch’s next destination is left unanswered.
The first two worlds, particularly, feel like satirical looks at Western society, and US society in particular, taken to absurd extremes. The third, even though casual murder is relatively common in the first two, is a much more horrific place than the first two, and the stakes for Finch feel much higher.
The Harold Shea Series
Harold Shea’s method of travelling between worlds is the use of “symbolic logic” to align one’s mind with alternative worlds. In the case of this series, the alternative worlds are those found in myth and fiction, suggesting that the original authors of these works were also able to visit or perceive the alternative worlds. As the series goes on, Shea acquires acquires a number of companions including a university friend, a wife from the land of Faerie and a hapless cop who thinks Shea has murdered his vanished mystery wife.
The Incompleat Enchanter consists of two novellas, The Roaring Trumpet and The Mathematics of Magic. The Roaring Trumpet takes place in Norse mythology, with Shea teaming up with Odin and Heimdall to gear up for Ragnarok. It lays down the theme for the rest of the stories, to whit, each setting adheres to its own internal rules of existence. Shea’s technology doesn’t work here, and he is unable to read his English book, but he learns that he is able to work the sympathetic magic of the setting to his advantage. In The Mathematics of Magic, Shea takes his colleague Chalmers along with him, and the two end up in the setting of Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. During adventures with Questing Beasts and a cabal of sorcerers, Shea meets his wife Belphebe the huntress, and Chalmers if left behind. In both of these stories, return to the “real” world is down to the actions of others banishing Shea.
The Castle of Iron, the second volume, consists entirely of the third story in the sequence, set in the world of The Horn of Roland, where Frankish and Moorish knights face off in northern Andalusia. Belphebe mysteriously vanishes and Shea is arrested on suspicion of her murder along with two other colleagues, Bayard and Polacek. The three of them, along with a police officer Pete Brodsky, are suddenly transported to the Xanadu of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan poem (as any fule kno, the one left unfinished because of the Person From Porlock). Shea and Polacek are transported away again, to discover that Chalmers has been trying to summon Shea all along, accidentally dragging others, including Belphebe, into the alternative worlds. Belphebe has reverted to her textual counterpart in this setting, whilst Chalmers is seeking to rescue his lady love, Florimel, a maiden made from snow who originated from the world of The Faerie Queen. All the while surviving local politics, plus rescuing Brosdky and Bayard, with a ride on a hippogriff thrown in for good measure.
Wall of Serpents
continues the saga with Wall of Serpents,
set in the Finnish myth cycle of the Kalavela. Shea is trying to seek the help
of the wizard Vainamoinen (“steady old Vainamoinen” as the Kalavela puts it),
but end up with Leminkainen (“wanton Leminkainen”), a much less emotionally
stable and reliable character (with a vague kinship to Loki, I’ve always thought).
At the end of it the characters are cast into Irish mythology and The Green Magician.
Here, Shea, Belphebe and the cop Pete Brodsky meet Cuchulainn, and Brodsky (being a stereotypical beat cop) finds that he likes being in Irish mythology with its singing contests and drinking. Once again the characters become embroiled in the struggles of the mythical heroes but eventually make it home, although Walter Bayard is still missing somewhere in Irish myth. Note that the stories are continued after Fletcher Pratt dies, but if you’re being a purist, this is where you should stop.
Although these are fun, there’s something about the
writing of the pair that didn’t quite gel with me. The characters never really
felt very well developed nor stood out for me, a problem exacerbated by the
enlarged cast of the later Enchanter series. I read these a while back now, and
revisiting the summaries I have no recollection, for example, of what kind of
person Walter Bayard was other than a spare wheel. That, and there is a problem
with any kind of dimension-hopping story that we must spend some time where the
protagonist gets up to speed with the local details. I think in this respect
The Carnelian Cube does this more deftly and dynamically than the Shea series.
As always, I like to look for any obvious influences from the stories into the Dungeons and Dragons game, as well as anything else that the reader could incorporate. First off, I recall a magic item known as the Cubic Gate, an obvious reference to the Carnelian Cube (it’s even described as “made from carnelian”). The adventure module GQ Against the Giants reflects the plot of The Roaring Trumpet where hill, frost and fire giants are all aligned in a pact to attack the world of men and gods, and finally the Roaring Trumpet also mentions magic composed of “verbal, somatic and material” components, a fundamental factor in the D&D magic system.
Dimension hopping itself is a fun gaming mechanism to use (subject to the warnings above about time spent in orientation), especially those employed in the Carnelian Cube where the world remains the same but the society changes. For the rest of the Shea stories, one could as much return to the source material to glean ideas (many of which, such as flying carpets and hippogriffs, are already in the game from the original mythology) as from the stories, but they also present interesting ideas for inserting characters alongside known mythological figures (one could, perhaps, find a use for those gaming statistics from Deities and Demigods where the likes of Cuchulainn and Vainamoinen are featured).
This is an ongoing sporadic series, in which I explore classic fantasy and science fiction works. Appendix N is the bibliography of Gary Gygax's original Dungeon Masters Guide, and lists a range of classic SF and fantasy authors that influenced his interest in the fantastical. See the first part of this series for more information.
This time around, I have reached the works of:
L Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt
Normally here I go into a brief bit of biography, but I’m skipping that this time. I’ve already covered L Sprague de Camp in the previous instalment, and Fletcher Pratt has his own solo entry later on (under “P”, of course!) All we need to know for now is that the two men met through wargaming (seems apropos) and were both members of the Trap Door Spiders literary club. As well as the collaborations described below they worked together on a number of short stories, and the one that I think I’ll look out for later is The Tales From Gavagan’s Bar, a collection of tall tales that sound like a mix of Damon Runyon and Robert Rankin.
The recommendations from Appendix N are The Carnelian Cube and the Harold Shea series (which I encountered as five stories spread across three volumes – The Incompleat Enchanter, Castle of Iron and The Wall of Serpents. All of these feature a ‘Varsity man catapulted from his own time and place into a series of fantastic worlds (something that de Camp’s solo work Lest Darkness Fall also shares). Luckily the protagonist manages to survive by his wits and one or two handily applicable extra-curricular skills, usually also managing a complicated relationship with one or two women on the way. As with de Camp’s solo works (see last time), they all share a level of whimsy and dated phraseology that makes them fun but uneven reading.
The Carnelian Cube
Finch wishes for a more logical world, and finds himself in an alternative Kentucky where clients attach themselves to the sprawling houses of wealthy and powerful patrons, and all is conducted by rote with little space for individuality. Names are designated by family and function, and I can’t be the only one where Finch’s new name of Finch Arthur Poet reminds me of Dent Arthurdent. As readers of this kind of story may well expect, Finch’s deliberate and accidental individualism get him into a lot of hot water, but he is without the Cube. It transpires that each world he visits has its own version of Tiridat, and Finch must each time seek him out and acquire the Cube anew. Eventually he does so and dreams himself into a world of more individuality and creativity.
Again he ends up in an alternative Kentucky, a crazy Roaring Twenties kind of place where cars are built like tanks to survive the complete lack of traffic regulations, and crazily-dressed artist-gangsters fight turf wars over literary works. Finding the alternative Tiridat and once again in possession of the Cube, Finch wishes for a world where archaeological research is taken seriously.
And seriously it is, in the darkest of the three settings, where massive reconstructions of famous battles are carried out by brainwashed participants who fight and die at the behest of the researchers (it reminded me of the Doctor Who story The War Games, last of Patrick Trougton’s era and one of his best). In this setting, Tiridat is nowhere to be found until the very end, where he turns out to be Sargon of Akkad. Finch’s next destination is left unanswered.
The first two worlds, particularly, feel like satirical looks at Western society, and US society in particular, taken to absurd extremes. The third, even though casual murder is relatively common in the first two, is a much more horrific place than the first two, and the stakes for Finch feel much higher.
The Harold Shea Series
Harold Shea’s method of travelling between worlds is the use of “symbolic logic” to align one’s mind with alternative worlds. In the case of this series, the alternative worlds are those found in myth and fiction, suggesting that the original authors of these works were also able to visit or perceive the alternative worlds. As the series goes on, Shea acquires acquires a number of companions including a university friend, a wife from the land of Faerie and a hapless cop who thinks Shea has murdered his vanished mystery wife.
The Incompleat Enchanter consists of two novellas, The Roaring Trumpet and The Mathematics of Magic. The Roaring Trumpet takes place in Norse mythology, with Shea teaming up with Odin and Heimdall to gear up for Ragnarok. It lays down the theme for the rest of the stories, to whit, each setting adheres to its own internal rules of existence. Shea’s technology doesn’t work here, and he is unable to read his English book, but he learns that he is able to work the sympathetic magic of the setting to his advantage. In The Mathematics of Magic, Shea takes his colleague Chalmers along with him, and the two end up in the setting of Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. During adventures with Questing Beasts and a cabal of sorcerers, Shea meets his wife Belphebe the huntress, and Chalmers if left behind. In both of these stories, return to the “real” world is down to the actions of others banishing Shea.
The Castle of Iron, the second volume, consists entirely of the third story in the sequence, set in the world of The Horn of Roland, where Frankish and Moorish knights face off in northern Andalusia. Belphebe mysteriously vanishes and Shea is arrested on suspicion of her murder along with two other colleagues, Bayard and Polacek. The three of them, along with a police officer Pete Brodsky, are suddenly transported to the Xanadu of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan poem (as any fule kno, the one left unfinished because of the Person From Porlock). Shea and Polacek are transported away again, to discover that Chalmers has been trying to summon Shea all along, accidentally dragging others, including Belphebe, into the alternative worlds. Belphebe has reverted to her textual counterpart in this setting, whilst Chalmers is seeking to rescue his lady love, Florimel, a maiden made from snow who originated from the world of The Faerie Queen. All the while surviving local politics, plus rescuing Brosdky and Bayard, with a ride on a hippogriff thrown in for good measure.
Here, Shea, Belphebe and the cop Pete Brodsky meet Cuchulainn, and Brodsky (being a stereotypical beat cop) finds that he likes being in Irish mythology with its singing contests and drinking. Once again the characters become embroiled in the struggles of the mythical heroes but eventually make it home, although Walter Bayard is still missing somewhere in Irish myth. Note that the stories are continued after Fletcher Pratt dies, but if you’re being a purist, this is where you should stop.
As always, I like to look for any obvious influences from the stories into the Dungeons and Dragons game, as well as anything else that the reader could incorporate. First off, I recall a magic item known as the Cubic Gate, an obvious reference to the Carnelian Cube (it’s even described as “made from carnelian”). The adventure module GQ Against the Giants reflects the plot of The Roaring Trumpet where hill, frost and fire giants are all aligned in a pact to attack the world of men and gods, and finally the Roaring Trumpet also mentions magic composed of “verbal, somatic and material” components, a fundamental factor in the D&D magic system.
Dimension hopping itself is a fun gaming mechanism to use (subject to the warnings above about time spent in orientation), especially those employed in the Carnelian Cube where the world remains the same but the society changes. For the rest of the Shea stories, one could as much return to the source material to glean ideas (many of which, such as flying carpets and hippogriffs, are already in the game from the original mythology) as from the stories, but they also present interesting ideas for inserting characters alongside known mythological figures (one could, perhaps, find a use for those gaming statistics from Deities and Demigods where the likes of Cuchulainn and Vainamoinen are featured).
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