by Brian Kunde
Today’s de Camp highlight is Aristotle and the Gun and Other Stories (Five Star, Waterville, Maine, 2002), a posthumous hardcover collection of de Camp tales. It has seen just the one edition. My copy, from which the illustration here was scanned, is remaindered from the Montgomery County Library in Conroe, Texas. It’s a decent copy, though the spine is a bit off-kilter.
This book started a minor trend, being, to date, the first of three such collections issued in the years since the man’s passing. It’s been good to see these occasional “new” de Camp books, even if they’re all basically remixes.
It would be nice to pronounce them more than that, to say, for instance, that they actually add something to the published book corpus besides a couple extra titles, but … no. Aside from gathering in the odd previously uncollected piece ( “The Isolinguals” in Years in the Making: The Time-Travel Stories of L. Sprague de Camp (NESFA Press, 2005, and “Sir Harold of Zodanga” in The Mathematics of Magic: The Enchanter Stories of de Camp and Pratt (NESFA PRESS, 2007), they just bring back old familiars for additional curtain calls.
But Aristotle and the Gun and Other Stories is different! It doesn’t even do that much! Nothing previously uncollected. No thematic cohesion, even. You may well ask, what’s good about it, then? That is, aside from presenting some of the better (and, admittedly, some of the mid-range) de Camp shorts to an audience that may not have previously encountered them.
Well, it showcases one of the greatest of the shorts (“Aristotle and the Gun”) in the title, a distinction previously restricted to “The Wheels of If” (The Wheels of If, and Other Science Fiction, 1949), “The Continent Makers” (The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens, 1953), “A Gun for Dinosaur” (A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales, 1963), and “The Reluctant Shaman” (The Reluctant Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales, 1970). So there’s that.
It has a cool cover, if not terribly faithful to the content. So, that, too. It’s by Ken Barr, by the way, showing a hero figure driving an antique chariot through a glass fourth wall by wielding an electric whip against his poor horse. The wall, one presumes, is the time barrier breached by protagonist Sherman Weaver in the title story. The driver could be an idealized version of Sherm, or it could be an equally idealized Alexander the Great, who also appears in the story, albeit as a spoiled young punk. Surely not the crotchety old philosopher Aristotle himself. And anyway, I don’t recall the plot featuring anybody chariot riding. Nice scene, but it doesn’t give one confidence Barr read the story. Maybe it’s intended to be symbolic.
What else? It permitted publisher Five Star to boast that it had put out a de Camp collection along with its collections of other big-name old-time authors, and not-so-big-name recent ones.
And … its example may have encouraged NESFA Press to put out its own two de Camp collections, which were better.
Um, okay. But, given my evident lack of flag-waving boosterism about the book … why am I showcasing the thing? Ah, that’s easier. Because, given its complete redundancy, only a newbie or a crazy de Camp completist is likely to have bought it, which means it will be unfamiliar to many fans, which means I can tell you about something you may not know about. Or, to put it another way, I got it so you don’t have to! (But, hey, if you want to, or if you, too, are a crazy de Camp completist, then by all means, feel free.)
So. What’s in the book?
It actually does have something new in it—an introduction by Harry Turtledove. And, for a wonder, he doesn’t just parrot his usual line of having been started on his life’s course of Byzantine scholarship and spec fic authorship by having read Lest Darkness Fall, and having wanted to be L. Sprague de Camp when he grew up, only to find that no one could be, because the job was taken. No, he actually talks about the book! About how if the reader is new to de Camp, he or she is in for a treat. About how Heinlein characterized the man’s fiction (“a very dry martini”). Capsule, single-paragraph outlines of de Camp’s early life and writing career. All of which proves beyond a reasonable doubt that Turtledove can indeed be brief when he wants to! And then … then he devotes a paragraph each (less, for the Reginald Rivers pieces) to the stories that constitute the collection, and how they “nicely illustrate [de Camp’s] strengths.” And only getting a little spoilery. And, finally, he oversells the book, because that’s what he was hired to do, informing us that “[t]his collection goes some way toward giving him his due.” Um, yeah. Sure, okay. Though is this kind of remix really the way to do it? Wouldn’t it have made more sense to make a book of some of the better stuff that hadn’t previously been collected, with perhaps just one or two of the best shorts that had been to headline it? An opportunity was definitely missed, here. Still, that’s to fault the book for being what it isn’t, rather than what it is. And what it is, as Turtledove so ably tells us, is “a treat” and “fun.” Which, for all my whining, is undeniably true. After all, this is de Camp, folks!
The stories included are as follows:
• “Aristotle and the Gun” (from Astounding, February 1958, previously collected in A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales, 1963; subsequently in Years in the Making: The Time-Travel Stories of L. Sprague de Camp, 2005, and, as a stand-alone, as Aristotle and the Gun, 2013). I mean, of course. Can’t have it in the title if it’s not in the book, so it is. Sherman Weaver reacts badly to his time travel project getting shut down by going back to Ancient Macedon to change history by selling Aristotle on the wonders of science. Which goes so wrong. One of three 1950s tales that saw de Camp at the top of his game as a short story writer. Can’t go wrong opening with this one.
• “The Gnarly Man” (from Unknown, June 1939, previously collected in The Wheels of If, and Other Science Fiction, 1949, and The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, 1978; subsequently in Years in the Making: The Time-Travel Stories of L. Sprague de Camp, 2005). Here we have de Camp at the top of his late 1930s game, with an immortal Neanderthal who survived to modern times by maintaining a low profile—and whose interactions with present-day humans jarringly remind him why keeping his secret was such a good idea.
• “A Gun for Dinosaur” (from Galaxy Science Fiction, March 1956, previously collected in A Gun for Dinosaur and Other Imaginative Tales, 1963, The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, 1978, and Rivers of Time, 1993). Another of de Camp’s top three 1950s tales (the remaining one being “Judgment Day,” which in the present instance plays “Sir Not-Appearing-in-this-book”). Introducing Reginald Rivers, time safari operator extraordinaire, who learns the most dangerous game ain’t the critters he’s accustomed to hunting in the Cretaceous.
• “The Honeymoon Dragon” (from Rivers of Time, 1993). Here Rivers and his wife visit his native Australia for their time traveling, and almost get et by a giant prehistoric Komodo Dragon. Yep, another Reginald Rivers story. This is beginning to look like an all time-themed collection, isn’t it? But no, it will stray at the end; the time-themed collection would have to await the second NESFA volume. Think of this one as a dress rehearsal. Here’s where this collection goes off the rails, actually. The first three and the last two stories are top notch de Camp, but this one and the next are distinctly middle grade. Not a thing wrong with them, but they suffer by comparison. And if you have to have more Reginald Rivers stories, why not go right to the complete edition of the same, Rivers of Time (Baen, 1993)?
• “The Mislaid Mastodon” (from Analog, May 1993, previously collected in Rivers of Time, 1993). This Rivers tale reads like a rewrite of the classic “Employment,” in that a prehistoric fuzzy elephant is revived or brought back to the present, whereupon vested business interests react negatively. It’s a decent scenario, but “Employment” was the better treatment of it.
• “Nothing in the Rules” (from Unknown, July 1939, previously collected in The Reluctant Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales, 1970, and The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, 1978). The time theme is discarded as whoever assembled the collection suddenly remembers that de Camp wrote fantasy, too. This is his classic contemporary fantasy of a mermaid getting entered in a swim meet. Could and should have been filmed as a screwball comedy; it would have made a good one.
• “Two Yards of Dragon” (from Flashing Swords! #3: Warriors and Wizards, 1976, previously collected in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, 1978, and The Incorporated Knight, 1987). The first Eudoric Dambertson tale, of a would-be knight in the magical parallel earth of the Neo-Napolitanian Empire. And there’s a dragon in it, which made it popular enough to reprint pretty much everywhere. Which means there was really no need to reprint it here.
We have now reached the end of the content. This book carries no dedication, because the author was deceased, and had no way of knowing before he went it would be issued a couple years later. But, really, the introduction, Harry Turtledove’s love letter, is the real dedication—to de Camp himself!
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