The Best of L. Sprague de Camp

"Employment" reflects a longtime interest in paleontology. As a high-school student, I intended to be a paleontologist. This ambition dismayed my mother, who was sure that the occupation would not provide the income and social position that she thought desirable. My father offered a sensible compromise: that I should get an engineering degree and so be able to earn a living. (He did not foresee the effect of the Depression on the engineering profession.) Then, if I still wished to go into pure science, it would be time enough to get the advanced training required.

As things turned out, I was never able to practice real engineering until the Hitlerian War and never to practice paleontology at all. I have consoled myself by writing books and articles on prehistoric life and putting paleontological elements into a few of my stories.

"Employment," by the way, is my only story published under a pseudonym. Campbell demanded it because, in that issue of Astounding, he was running the first installment of my long article "Design for Life," and there is a tabu against letting an author's name appear more than once on the contents page. So I chose "Lyman R. Lyon," the name of a great-grandfather. L.R.L. was a big man in upstate New York around the time of the Civil War. He once horsewhipped his brother Caleb, an eccentric politician-adventurer, in the streets of Rome, New York. Walter Edmonds fictionalized the incident in his novel The Big Barn (Little, Brown, 1930). My great-aunt used to protest that Edmonds had made her father (as "Ralph Wilder") much more of a hick than he really was. He was, she would have you know, an educated, cultivated man.

Otherwise I have practically not used pseudonyms. With a bogussounding name like mine, who needs one? When I started writing fiction, readers wrote in asking who this "L. Sprague de Camp" really was. Was he Henry Kuttner? Or L. Ron Hubbard? It took them a while to accept the idea that such a person existed.

"The Merman" is set in the old New York City Aquarium, a converted fort at the southern tip of Manhattan. I knew the place well but did not foresee that Robert Moses would demolish the structure and build a new aquarium at Coney Island, more than an hour by subway from Manhattan. So easily are prophetic stories dated by events!

"The Gnarly Man" has a little story. In December 1938, P. Schuyler Miller came from his home in Schenectady to New York for a meeting of the American Anthropological Association and other learned societies. I had just returned to New York after a year in Scranton and met Schuyler. I mentioned that I had been playing with an idea for a story about an immortal Neanderthal man. That's funny, said Schuy; he had been toying with the same idea.

For a while, we played Alphonse and Gaston: You write it! No, you write it! At last we agreed that we should both write it whenever we got around to it. Schuyler urged me to write my story first, since he was busy with other things. In addition, he generously gave me anthropological information on the man of Neanderthal. The result was "The Gnarly Man," followed a year and a half later by Schuyler's "Old Man Mulligan" in Astounding.

Biographies of writers usually make much of the connection between the writer's experiences and his fiction. John Livingston Lowes wrote a celebrated book, The Road to Xanadu, tracing everything in Coleridge's poems to things that Coleridge had read.

Actually, most fictions are composites of things the writer has experienced, seen, heard about, and read, put together in various combinations to make a new sequence of imaginary events. A writer may get all the material for one story from the library, while for another he uses his own life, with himself (thinly disguised) as protagonist. In the latter case, we may speak of the story as autobiographical. We should not, however, use the term if a story contains merely a few elements from the writer's own life amid many elements from other sources.

Compared to vicarious experience, personal experience is generally more useful to a writer. With many experiences, such as being in love, or in a battle, or in a storm at sea, or in a surgical operation, no amount of research will give one quite the feel of the experience that going through it will.

The trouble is that a writer does not live long enough to have all the experiences that he may wish to use in his stories. The man who spends a lifetime at one occupation and then writes a novel based on his experience may produce a good story but is likely to prove a one-book author. So a practicing writer must pad out his personal experience with vicarious experience. This he does by reading, talking with others, or even watching documentaries on television. Reading is the most fruitful source, but it all helps.

One can sometimes fool knowledgeable readers by research. An early story of mine, "The Blue Giraffe," was set in South Africa, where I had never been. You can imagine how pleased I was when a South African reader wrote to say that I must have once lived "in this sunny land of ours."