Footprints on Sand

By L. Sprague de Camp and Catherine Crook de Camp

This collection of the de Camps' work, singly and in collaboration with each other, was assembled in honor of their appearance as joint Guests of Honor at X-Con, June 1981 in Milwaukee.

It is a selection of short stories, verse, non-fiction, and excerpts drawn from almost every facet of the de Camps' diverse writings--fantasy, science fiction, children's stories; poems fabulous, romantic, and pragmatic; notes on prehistory, the evolution of weaponry, and the development of imaginative fiction, the origins of engineering; of Atlantis, Conan, and magic.

This literary feast includes several new pieces, such as Catherine's "Should Your Child Read Science Fiction?" Others range from "The Coming of the Engineers" (LSdeC) to "Windfall" (CCdeC) to "Eudoric's Unicorn" (LSdeC).

Also included are extended introductory remarks about Sprague and Catherine de Camp by Robert A. Heinlein, Lin Carter, Isaac Asimov, Poul Anderson, Andrew Offutt, Patricia Jackson, and George Scithers. The de Camps have passed on since this book was published, and Advent is proud to have it in print as a memorial to them both.

With a color photograph of the de Camps as frontispiece, and black-and-white illustrations by C. H. Burnett.

• Language: English
• Publisher: ReAnimus Press
• Release date: Feb 23, 2021
• ISBN: 9781005198268

L. Sprague de Camp

L. Sprague de Camp, a SFWA Grand Master and winner of the World Fantasy Award for Life Achievement, wrote the definitive biography of Conan's creator, Robert E. Howard. De Camp died in 2000.

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Preamble

Catherine Crook de Camp

I first met Sprague at a New Year’s Eve party in 1938. He was tall, dark, and handsome, with a neat moustache and a somewhat pensive air—an intriguing combination for a little school teacher who had never before chatted with a real, live author. He told me the plot of a story he had just written about a creature that could think like a man. Half-deafened by the merrymaking, I could not decide whether this strange hero was a bass, a boa, or a bear. Sprague called him Johnny. I smiled brightly and tried to act compos mentis; but I spent the entire evening asking myself: Johnny What?

Apparently I looked less like a dizzy blonde than I felt, because Sprague started dating me regularly. I would hurry home from school with an armful of English papers to correct before classes the next day. Alas, for the paperwork! I usually had just enough time to slip into my sexiest dress—unisex dressing had not yet been invented—before Sprague arrived to take me out to dinner.

Then every evening before he went home, Sprague would hand me a science-fiction novel or novelette, expecting me to read it before setting off for school at seven o’clock. I read tales of weirdly exotic beings on unpronounceable planets until even toothpicks could no longer prop open my sleep-weighted eyes. It was a hectic spring; but then science fiction and fantasy have kept me hopping ever since.

That spring of 1939, when the forsythia came into bloom, Sprague began driving me each Sunday to John Campbell’s apartment in West Orange, New Jersey. When I first met him, John was ensconced in a lounge-chair with his feet propped up on a hassock. He could not rise for introductions because his lap, the chair arms, and the floor around him were covered with manuscripts. He waved a manuscript at me and said: Come right in. I want you to read this story and tell me what you think of it.

I protested: But I don’t know anything about science fiction...

Splendid, John replied. That’s exactly why I want your reaction.

So I sat on a pale green sofa in a sea-green living room and read story after story. Every so often, I would look up to see John studying my face. What made you smile just then? he would ask. Or: You look puzzled. Why?

Once, hoping my remarks would not blight the career of some budding writer, I remember saying: Well, it took three pages to find out where I was and why I was there.

Just what I thought, myself, he replied. And back the story went for revision.

The secret of John Campbell’s greatness was that he was willing to work with his authors. Few editors today take the time to do that. Sprague admits that he owes much to John Campbell. I, who taught style in senior composition courses, understood what John was trying to do and applauded him for both his effort and success.

I married Sprague on August 12, 1939 in a formal ceremony at the Riverside Church, which overlooked the Hudson River and the campus of Columbia University. My mother worried before the wedding: How are you going to stand the constant clatter of a typewriter for the rest of your life? It turned out that this was the least of the problems in store for me—or, indeed, for anyone who marries a creative artist.

The day before the wedding I learned that writers are unworldly and forgetful. Sprague, who still hates to stow valuable bits of paper in his wallet, had put the marriage license in one of his letter files. Earlier in the week I had helped him pack his belongings, which were sent to a storage warehouse until we could set up our new apartment. Only at the wedding rehearsal did he discover that the license was in a file box in one of four enormous cartons sitting on a warehouse loading platform. We made frantic calls to the manager of the warehouse. No, he said, goods shipped for storage could not be unpacked until they had been checked into their proper cubbyholes. No, said the minister, we could not get married in Maryland that night and then be remarried in church the following day. No, said the clerk at the license bureau, they could not issue duplicate marriage licenses, and there was a three-day wait if we took out another license.

After we pleaded with the warehouse manager all evening, he relented. So at dawn on our wedding day, we rushed to the Bronx, pawed wildly through cartons taller than a man, and located the file box in the last corner of the fourth carton.

That morning I also learned that for a writer a deadline is more important than anything—even than a honeymoon. I discovered that the first half of Sprague’s first novel was already in press and the last, unwritten fifty pages had to be finished and turned in to the publisher before we could set out on a wedding trip. So, unknown to family and friends, we holed up in a hotel near the Grand Central Station until the story was completed. Perhaps because I made a sacrifice for it, Lest Darkness Fall has always been my favorite among Sprague’s science-fiction stories.

I soon found out that writers are introverted and self-contained, and must be so to insulate themselves from the buffeting of reality. The cheerful fellow who takes his wife and kiddies shopping rarely has the intensity of interest that makes an author sit for long hours huddled over his typewriter, oblivious to the honk of traffic, a leak in the roof, or the plaintive mewlings of a wife whose dinner is getting cold.

Still, it comes as a bit of a shock to discover that your bridegroom is not present in spirit most of the day and all of the evening, seven days a week. We had just set up housekeeping, when Sprague walked past me in the hall, as unseeing as a zombie. I burst into tears. At this, Sprague returned from Krishna—or wherever he was—long enough to ask politely: What’s the matter? Did I step on your toes? It was hard to explain that I would rather be stepped on than remain an invisible woman, day after day.

An author’s wife should be neither seen nor heard, so as not to interrupt the great mind at work. Dutifully, I learned to pay the bills, tend the kids, stretch the dollars, to cope with plumbers, lawyers, insurance salesmen, literary agents and publishers, and to bat my head against the wall—quietly, of course.

Writers do emerge from the great silence once in a while. When Fletcher Pratt, Sprague’s earliest collaborator, and his wife came to dinner, Sprague was utterly charming. Then there were the authors’ teas. Back in the 1940s and ’50s, flush publishers and ladies with literary pretensions used to give teas for struggling authors. At these affairs, I regularly found myself standing at the tea table nibbling dainty and fattening sandwiches while my spritely husband chatted with garrulous females who clustered around him. Their questions kept him so busy that he seldom got to the tea table at all; that is why he still has such a trim figure.

One fine day, after several years of marriage, I realized that, to insure success, a writer needs not only to be a superior craftsman but also to be a salesman and an accountant as well. In short, unless he is skilled in business management—and few writers are—he needs a well-organized office and a competent person to run it.

That day I became Sprague’s business manager and a liberated woman. No longer was I a mute wraith doing Cinderella’s chores, overworked and undervalued. I became an instant business woman whose decisions were respected inside the house and out of it. If any one of you has the courage to marry an author—or an artist of any sort—I advise you to clap your genius into an ivory tower and become the dragon at the gate. It is financially rewarding, and spiritually rewarding, too. Writers who do not establish a business partnership with their spouses rarely stay married for long, or—at the least—fail to exploit their talents to the full in today’s cutthroat publishing world.

Quite early in the game, I began to serve Sprague as his personal editor and rewrite gal. It was a time-consuming, arduous, and thankless task: for my favorite writer in those days considered my suggestions and corrections an intrusion on his Muse.

I won my wings as a full-fledged collaborator in a rather curious fashion. One evening Sprague and I were invited to the home of a younger literary couple. Having been detained by an earlier dinner engagement, we arrived to find sixteen people sitting in a circle, playing an intellectual parlor game. Crude charcoal sketches were placed, one at a time and for a minute only, in the middle of the circle. Each player, armed with a pad, was supposed to jot down the first thought that crossed his mind, to sign his name in the corner of the sheet, and to fold it up. A man collected the women players’ sheets; a woman collected the men’s. Then the sheets were unfolded and read aloud, and each player tried to guess the author of the deathless prose. A prize awaited the person with the highest score.

When Sprague and I were invited to join the game, Sprague objected that, since we knew only the hosts and one other couple, we could not possibly identify the other players. Our host agreed and suggested that Sprague identify only Catherine’s writing.

With that, the final sketch was tossed on the carpet. Sixteen pairs of dancing eyes bent to their task as the minute hand ticked by. Then the offerings were collected and our host began to read. All eyes were focused on Sprague, as their owners hunched forward on their chairs. Six sheets were unfolded and read. After each reading, Sprague thought a bit, then shook his head. No, that wasn’t Catherine’s. When only two remained, I could feel the young people’s excitement. I kept a poker face as my offering, the seventh, was intoned.

After a long pause, Sprague said: This one shows a knowledge of Oriental philosophy, an informed use of English, and a feeling for the poetry of the English language.

Yes, nudged our host, gently. Is this one Catherine’s?

Another long pause ensued. Then Sprague said judicially: No, Catherine can’t write like that. It must be Christine’s.

Christine giggled; everyone else laughed. My laugh was strangled between clenched teeth. Then prizes were handed out and ice cream passed around.

As we drove home, I asked, a trifle acidly: If I can’t write like that, why do you let me edit and rewrite parts of your books?

I had no idea you wrote so well, Sprague replied. And from that day to this, when I complete a manuscript or make it saleable, Sprague lists me as co-author.

I can count ten books that I have co-authored with Sprague. The latest is Dark Valley Destiny: The Life and Death of Robert E. Howard, a full-length biography, which should be completed in 1981, and Science Fiction Handbook, Expanded, an extensive rewrite of the revised edition now sold out. And there is another collaboration in the works, which, for the present, we are keeping secret.

In addition to two money-management books, one still in print, I have edited three anthologies of science-fiction stories for children under twelve. The Million Dollar Pup and The Horse Show, which are included in this volume, were so well liked by the publisher of Creatures of the Cosmos that I have been asked to expand both to book-length—and I shall, if ever I find time hanging heavy on my hands.

I do not want to give the impression that my life is a dismal round of blue-pencilling, writing, record-keeping, and fighting lawsuits or the I.R.S. Now that I am established as Sprague’s guardian dragon, he takes very good care of me. He has the odd notion that dragons are rather hard to come by and, as a result, has developed into a splendid chef and a steady companion.

Moreover, I married an author and saw the world. Sprague is an inveterate traveler, and he takes me everywhere with him. The only continent on which I have not set foot is Australia. Sprague and I have visited most of the states of the Union, the Caribbean, the Galapagos Islands, Panama, and the Andes. We have clambered into the Great Pyramid at Gizeh, walked along the Appian Way, tramped the ruins of Pompeii, and bought jewelry on the Ponte Vecchio. We have explored the wide-flung camps and palaces built by the Roman conquerors of Britain and even risked our necks to walk along the top of Hadrian’s Wall in pouring rain, trembling at the hundred-foot drop that restrained the Piets some fifteen hundred years ago.

Oh, yes, we’ve swept down the Rhine on a river boat and strolled beside the canals of Amsterdam. In France, we have toured the medieval city of Carcassonne, haunted the great chateaux, and stood, awestruck, in the Paleolithic caves of the Dordogne, where prehistoric beasts still decorate the inmost walls. And these scarcely start the catalogue of cherished wonders.

Over the years, we have met many of the most fascinating people in science fiction. Take Isaac Asimov, for instance—and what woman wouldn’t spend some time with him in lecherous repartee? We first met Isaac when he was nineteen and sported a small moustache and neat bow tie. For over four decades, he has remained one of our closest friends.

During the Second World War, Isaac, Bob Heinlein, and Sprague worked as mad scientists inventing secret weapons at the Philadelphia Navy Yard. Weekends, when our rationed gas held out, we would gather together to entertain out-of-town friends and acquaintances. I remember L. Ron Hubbard—he was a naval officer and writer then—astonishing us all with a thoroughly professional rendition of Fifteen Men on a Dead Man’s Chest, sung to a guitar.

I shall never forget an evening at Bob Heinlein’s apartment on Seventeenth and Chestnut Streets when Bill Lederer, he of The Ugly American fame, dropped in with Art Clarke, who had just arrived from England. I thought the two of them were crazy when they talked about moon launchings within twenty-five years, and space platforms as weapon sites a few years after that. I later learned that Arthur C. Clarke had invented the communications satellite. These have multiplied like rabbits, and now deliver instant news and pictures all over the world.

In those days, the science-fiction community was small, and we knew nearly everybody in the field. On one of our western trips, Jack Williamson took us and our cowboy-worshipping ten-year-old, Rusty, to his parents’ ranch in New Mexico. Jack’s parents, proud of their newly installed bathroom—the first inside plumbing they had ever had—were real pioneers, who had traveled north from Old Mexico by covered wagon.

When we arrived in Los Angeles, Bob Heinlein was acting as consultant during the filming of his motion picture Destination Moon. Bob arranged for us to see the sets and model-work for that outstanding documentary of events that lay about twenty-five years in the future. Some years later, when Gerry, our younger son, was also ten years old, we were house guests of Bob and Ginny in their beautiful home in Colorado.

We have been house guests, too, of Poul and Karen Anderson in Orinda, California, and of John Brunner in England. And we have many good friends among the younger writers—too many for me to mention all, even if I were in a name-dropping mood.

In addition to our fellow writers, we have made thousands of friends among the fans of science fiction and fantasy. We stand amazed at the kindness and generosity of today’s readers toward us and our attempts to entertain and inform. It is heartening to realize that all of us who share an uncommon interest can reach out across the years and find a common ground for exchanging ideas and expressing mutual respect and affection.

Many groups have welcomed us, but none more warmly than the members of The Milwaukee Science Fiction and Fantasy Society and its hard-working committee. Sprague and I are proud to be your Guests of Honor at X-Con Five. Because of this book, we shall indeed leave a few more footprints on the Sands of Time; and in passing, we shall remember all of you with an extra measure of love.

February 14, 1981

§

A Flourish of Trumpets

Tributes from Indulgent Friends

§

Introduction

Robert A. Heinlein

In the fields of science fiction and of fantasy there are very few humorists. That is not to say that there are not many, many writers in these fields who try to be funny; of the number who try, entirely too many manage to peddle their weary efforts to desperate editors and the depressing results may be found on any newsstand. Most of these attempts are burlesque—and burlesque is an art hard to apply in a field in which there is literally no limit to the imagination; the practitioner is often tempted to use too wide a scoop when a teaspoon would have been more than adequate. An approach almost as common as burlesque is that of satire, but satire is an even more difficult steed to ride. To induce a smile, satire must be subtle; but it has long since been proved that no satire can be sufficiently broad to be recognized as such by all readers. There always remains a large, very vocal, and angry minority who will have taken the attempted satire with utter seriousness at its face value and who will thereupon accuse the author of defaming motherhood, attempting to cast a smirch on the reader’s church and, no doubt, being opposed to good roads and good weather.

L. Sprague de Camp is, I believe, the only living writer in the fields of science fiction and of fantasy whose stories are all (without any exception that I can remember) consistently humorous. Other writers in these fields have written truly funny stories—Henry Kuttner, Theodore Sturgeon, and Fredric Brown, to give a sample of the very few who have managed this difficult trick—but no writer other than de Camp, so far as I know, has made humor his regular product in science fiction and fantasy... and gotten away with it.

Like standing on one finger, this trick is more difficult than it looks. Is it possible to analyze how he does it? Too much literary criticism is dry stuff at best and too often consists of someone who can’t do the thing he is criticizing nevertheless explaining to others how the natural artist achieves his results—and how he should have done better. The reader is justified in skipping over the next page or so of this discussion, or, better yet, skip it entirely and get on to de Camp’s story.

True humor is not cruel, or at least the cruelty is held down to a single dash of bitters. Time was when a rotten egg splashing in the face of the prisoner in the stocks, or a swift kick in the stomach, or even sudden and unexpected death was considered frightfully witty, but our culture has changed and such violence is no longer likely to win a laugh—from most of us. De Camp’s humor is never cruel; the pain is bearable, the embarrassment never too sharp. His civilized restraint may lose a few belly laughs (there are few in his stories) but he does not lose his readers through disgusting or dismaying them; instead he takes them along through a long series of warm smiles, contented chuckles, and broad grins. The reader is left with a pleasant glow, a feeling that life is not so bad after all and that the foibles of our monkey race are bearable and even entertaining if one does not take them too seriously.

This, I maintain, is, in an age of hydrogen bombs and iron curtains, a very desirable trick.

The reader is often able to recognize himself in the bumblings and misadventures of de Camp’s unheroic heroes and unvillainous villains, and to get there from a rueful but unbitter smile and a feeling of comradeship and here, I think, lies the principal key to the de Camp brand of humor: he can laugh at himself. He sees himself as just one more of the occasionally noble but always embarrassed race of simian bumpkins, and possibly the most comical of them all. This is the source of the kindness and gentleness of his humor; seeing a man with his foot stuck in a bucket and unable at the moment to shake it off, de Camp will laugh, but with a rueful sympathetic quality which concedes that it may be his turn next to step unexpectedly into a bucket.

It would be easy to go on at length about why I find laughs in de Camp’s stories but to do so would be neither entertaining nor instructive. Much of his humor appears to be based on the inappropriate, the out of place, the unexpected, like the classical Horse in the Bathroom. If this does not entertain you, you are not at fault; there are no fixed rules for humor and in the clown business there can be only one immutable law—that which states that the customer is never wrong.

De Camp’s stories are always meaty. He brings to his art an astonishing range of knowledge. In addition to formal education and years of experience as an engineer, he knows an amazing amount about an amazingly wide range of subjects—aerodynamics, alchemy, anthropology, archery, Bacchanalia, ballistics, Barbarossa, bimetallism, blastogenesis, catapults, cats, cephalopods, chitons, cults, chlamy—finish the alphabet yourself; you will not be wrong. In fact this man knows almost too much; his erudition would be unbearable were it not so unobtrusive. As it is, he fills his stage with such authentic detail that empathy is built and never broken.

In still another way de Camp preserves empathy with his readers; there is nothing of Gee-Whiz! about his stories, no matter how remote or improbable the scene. Even in the Viagens series, although the stage is so large as to require light-speed transportation, the characters are no more than lifesize and the actions are the actions of men, not demigods. De Camp has never destroyed a galaxy and has only rarely and excusably rescued the human race.

This restraint may reduce the flavor for some—but not for me. The best fantasy is usually no more than light wine, the worst mere soda pop, all bubbles and synthetic flavor. The best of the Galaxy Busters are strong Bourbon; the worst are rotgut. In this analogy I would class de Camp’s fiction as a very dry Martini.

for The Glory That Was, 1960

Quixote with a Pen

Lin Carter

In 1950 a small publishing firm called Gnome Press, which operated out of Hicksville, New York, began publishing hardcover books made up of Robert E. Howard’s deservedly popular Conan stories, which had run in the magazine Weird Tales in the 1930s. The man behind the Gnome Press imprint, an old-time fan and collector named Martin W. Greenberg, launched the series with an edition of The Hour of the Dragon, the only full-length novel about Conan that Howard ever wrote.

Greenberg retitled the novel Conan the Conqueror in order to capitalize on the magic of that character’s name. In due course, a reviewer’s copy was dispatched to Fletcher Pratt. Pratt, a diminutive man with a wispy, straggling beard, owlishly thick eyeglasses, and a taste for plaid shirts of the most excruciating loudness, gave the book short shrift. Although fond of the Icelandic sagas and the romances of William Morris, and enthralled by the word-witchery of Dunsany and the ringing Tudor gusto of Eddison, Pratt had little patience with the muscle-bound hero who could only batter his way out of sticky predicaments, relying on beef and brawn rather than brains.

Pratt handed the book to his friend, colleague, and collaborator, L. Sprague de Camp, with some casual remark to the effect that here, perhaps, was something he might find amusing.

De Camp was then, as he is now, a tall, lean, distinguished-looking man with piercing black eyes, a stiff, military manner, and short, neatly trimmed dark hair (his short, neatly trimmed Van Dyke beard he added to the ensemble later). He was forty-two years old and had been writing fantasy or science-fiction stories for the pulp magazines for thirteen years, and was the author of some ten books. His first published story was The Isolinguals in John W. Campbell’s Astounding Stories for September 1937; his first book was a non-fiction item called Inventions and Their Management, done in collaboration with Alf K. Berle and published by the International Textbook Company in Scranton, Pennsylvania, in 1937.

Pratt was a war-gamer before the term had even been coined, and conducted elaborate naval war games complete with carefully detailed, whittled-out models of warships. These games, which sometimes drew as many as fifty participants, were played out on the floor of Pratt’s apartment in Manhattan. In 1939 de Camp’s old friend John D. Clark, Ph.D. (they had been college roommates at the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena, California, from which de Camp took a Bachelor of Science degree in aeronautical engineering