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L. Sprague de Camp (Lyon Sprague de Camp) (November 27, 1907–November 6, 2000) started writing fiction in the 1930s and went on to produce a substantial body of SF and fantasy, as well as five historical novels and several nonfiction books. His most famous SF work consists primarily of planetary romances, particularly in the Krishna and Viagens settings, although neither is properly speaking a series. He was married to Catherine Crook de Camp, who is credited as co-author on several of his later books but who actually had collaborated with him on previous books without being credited. The Krishna stories in particular were good natured, light adventures with frequent humorous twists. Perhaps the best is the two-part The Hand of Zei and The Search for Zei, which appeared as an Ace double book in 1963, the two halves essentially a single story.

His best SF novel was Lest Darkness Fall (1941), meant to be a rebuttal of Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court. De Camp's protagonist finds himself back in 6th-century Rome a few years prior to the Byzantine invasion, and decides to use his knowledge of modern technology to change the future. He discovers that the inertia of history is a bigger obstacle than he imagined. Other novels of note include Rogue Queen (1951), The Tower of Zanid (1958), and The Prisoner of Zhamanack (1982).

De Camp wrote several classic short stories, the most famous of which is "A Gun for Dinosaur" (1956), the definitive time travel safari adventure. Other outstanding tales include "The Gnarly Man" (1939) and "The Wheels of If" (1940). His short fantasy fiction was almost always amusing but rarely reached the level of his SF stories. De Camp's fantasy novels were a different story, most of them written in the light style popularized by Unknown magazine.

The Harold Shea series, written in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt, opened with his best single fantasy, The Incomplete Enchanter (1941). The two protagonists discover a method by which they can enter alternate universes that mirror the worlds created in popular literature and legend. The Reluctant King series, by de Camp alone, featured unlikely heroes in problematic and often very funny situations. The largest segment of his fantasy featured Robert E. Howard's Conan, either original material or adaptations of work by Howard. De Camp, who often collaborated with Lin Carter on these stories, wrote novelizations of both of the Conan movies.

His five historical novels include three excellent titles, An Elephant for Aristotle (1958), The Bronze God of Rhodes (1959), and The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate (1961). De Camp also wrote a controversial biography of horror writer Howard Philips Lovecraft.

During World War II, de Camp, a Naval Lieutenant, worked at the Naval Air Experimental Station, alongside fellow science fiction authors Robert A. Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

External Links

• L. Sprague de Camp at ISFDB.org

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