The somewhat cheesy Mass Market paperback edition on Amazon (and also historically inaccurate since the book is set in Ostrogothic Italy) – all covers I’ve seen for editions of the book are cheesy (fair use)

(5) L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP –

LEST DARKNESS FALL (1939)

Sprague de Camp is sadly somewhat obscure these days, despite being a major figure – and prolific writer – of the so-called Golden Age of Science Fiction in the 1930’s and 1940’s, chumming around with better remembered writers such as Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov.

His novella Lest Darkness Fall has had more lasting influence, at least for my enduring love of alternate histories, particularly alternate histories created by time travelers from our own time. Written in 1939, it “is certainly one of the earliest and most influential” of the alternate history genre.

Visiting the Pantheon in Rome, protagonist Martin Padway finds himself transported by a mysterious storm to sixth century Rome – and sets out to singlehandedly stave off the impending Dark Ages. The western Roman Empire has fallen, but the Ostrogothic Kingdom that has replaced it in Italy is suitably stable for Padway’s purpose.

Fortunately, Padway is a capable individual for this tall task – I’d have been royally screwed. For one thing, he is a scholar of the period (hence his visit to Rome) and speaks Latin. He also knows double-entry bookkeeping – which, with his knowledge of Arabic numerals, he shares with a Roman moneylender to borrow money without the usual usurious Roman rates. He also knows how to distil brandy, which allows him to create his own profitable business. And so on, through using his money to create, by trial and error, the technologies of communication to prevent the Dark Ages, while becoming increasingly involved in politics and war to preserve the Ostrogothic kingdom from its opponents, particularly the encroaching eastern Roman Empire.

As I said, Lest Darkness Fall inspired my long-lasting love for alternate histories, particularly alternate histories through time travel, which become even more fun when you don’t just send individuals back in time, but whole groups or even towns – such as John Birmingham’s Axis of Time trilogy (in which a twenty-first century naval battle group is transported back to the Battle of Midway and find themselves fighting a very different Second World War) or Eric Flint’s 1632 series (in which the whole town of Grantsville in modern Virginia finds itself transported back to Germany in the Thirty Years War).

And as a side note, similarly to de Camp in Lest Darkness Fall, Asimov retold the history of the fall of the Roman Empire, but as future history rather than alternate history in his Foundation series – and his Galactic Empire would in turn seem to be an influence on the similar Empire in Star Wars).

Close runners-up are his light fantasy Harold Shea or Compleat Enchanter stories, written in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt. The premise of those stories is that the protagonist and companions use symbolic logic or the ‘mathematics of magic’ to travel to parallel worlds in which fantasy, myths and legends are real – Norse mythology, Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene (where Shea meets his wife Belphebe), Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Kublai Khan, Ludovico Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso, the Finnish Kavela and Irish mythology. These stories had a certain resonance for me as they seemed to symbolize the magic of reading fantasy itself.

RATING:

A-TIER (TOP TIER)