The Best of L. Sprague de Camp

The mistake that some writers make is to think one can convincingly describe an exotic milieu from a mere smattering of knowledge, such as one gains by reading others' fiction laid in that milieu, with neither personal experience nor intensive research. A weakness of Robert E. Howard as a writer was that he wrote stories laid in Afghanistan and other oriental lands without ever having been out of the American Southwest. Hence he admitted that his fictional Orientals were merely "Englishmen and Irishmen in turbans and sandals."

If personal experience is impossible, then one must hole up in the library and dig like a mole, noting every aspect of the milieu in question: weather, topography, fauna, flora, custom, costume, language, and so on. Of course, no amount of research guarantees the writer against any mistakes. In Lest Darkness Fall, laid in sixth-century Rome, I caused one of my characters to say a few words in Gothic. A scholarly reader wrote to point out that I had made this Goth use the nominative case where he should have used the vocative!

Like others, I have used my own experiences in my fiction. Naturally, as I have lived longer, I have had more experiences to draw upon. Since most of the present stories are relatively old—more than half go back before the Hitlerian War—their content of personal experience is smaller than in many later pieces.

"Nothing in the Rules" was suggested by a swimming meet at the YMCA where I lived for a while in New York. In "The Hardwood Pile" and "The Reluctant Shaman," I leaned on my firsthand knowledge of the Andirondacks, where my father was in business and where I spent much of my boyhood and youth. There I have hiked, climbed, ridden, hunted, fished, worked in a sawmill and on a survey gang, and even prospected by airplane for uranium.

"The Guided Man" uses some of my trade-journal experience. Other stories, not represented here, have used other bits out of my own past. I drew on my correspondence-school days for the fantasy novelette "Mr. Arson" and on my war service in a Naval research center for my historical novel, The Arrows of Hercules. Recently I have drawn upon my travels for the backgrounds of some of my Willy Newbury stories, and on my experience as a guidee on many guided tours for my new Krishna novel, The Hostage of Zir.

The story that comes the nearest to being autobiographical is "Judgment Day," in which several incidents are taken straight out of my boyhood. It was, as you can infer, not a very pleasant one. Many other elements of the story, such as the narrator's parents and wife, are imaginary. From what colleagues tell me, this boyhood must have been fairly typical for a writer. Boys who are more athletic, extroverted, boisterous, and mischievous to begin with are, I suppose, less likely to take up the scrivener's solitary trade.