The Best of L. Sprague de Camp

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AS A STUDENT of the myriad ways of man, L. Sprague de Camp has from time to time looked upon his own society with the same objective eye he uses on peoples whom geography or history make strange to most of us. He himself does not seem to find them very alien—and he has encountered many at first hand. Though he knows more about cultural differences than most professional anthropologists, his basic judgment appears to be that human beings everywhere and everywhen are much the same at heart: limited, fallible, tragi-comic, yet endlessly interesting. So in the civilizations of antiquity or among more recent "primitives" he sees engineers and politicians not unlike ours, while among us he discovers taboos and tribal rites not unlike theirs. The insight has directly inspired at least one story and added philosophical depth as well as occasional piquant ironies to most of the others.

Therefore I wonder what he thinks of this curious custom we have of prefacing a collection of one writer's work with the remarks of a colleague. It strikes me as especially odd when the former is senior to the latter, and senior in far more than years. That is, I was a boy when L. Sprague de Camp's first stories were published; I spent a decade being awed by his erudition and captivated by his ability to tell a story, none of which has changed since. When I began to write professionally myself, it became clear, once I was hitting my stride, that there was a considerable de Camp influence on me, though I will never match him in any of those areas he has made uniquely his own. In short, what the deuce am I doing introducing him?

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