by Brian Kunde
Today’s de Camp highlight is The Fringe of the Unknown (Buffalo, New York: Prometheus Books, 1983). It’s one of his collections of nonfiction, and there was just the one edition, issued simultaneously in hardcover and paperback. Not too hard to find in the online marketplace, though. Fun fact: when I was re-reading this one for this review, my son walked and asked me what book I was engaged in. I showed him the cover. “The … Fridge of the Unknown?” he asked. Genius! Imagined plot description: on Catherine’s urging, Sprague finally gets around to cleaning out the icebox…
But of course, that’s not what this book is about at all. Rather, it’s a collection of articles that the publisher formerly claimed constitute “a fascinating study … of controversial and often little-known happenings in science and technology, with an emphasis on the wayward activities of those who dabble in fringe science.” I say “formerly claimed” because the title has vanished from the Prometheus website at some point between the time I cribbed that quote for my Wikipedia article on the book and the present day. Fame is fleeting. Evidently, Prometheus has a short memory. Not sure why; it’s not the head of the poor Titan that Zeus’s eagle pecks at daily, but his liver.
The blurb still appears on the book itself, though, at least on my copy, which is the paperback version. (It may have been on one of the flaps for the hardcover.) I observe that Prometheus could have used better paper, as the pages have yellowed somewhat in the past thirty-eight years. As has the cover.
Present neglect and graceless aging aside, Prometheus Books was a good match for our author. Founded by philosopher Paul Kurtz, who was also behind the Council for Secular Humanism and the Center for Inquiry, as well as the center’s Committee for Skeptical Inquiry, PB focuses on science, free thought, skepticism, atheism, secularism and humanism (and hence, presumably, secular humanism). All interests in which de Camp shared. Over a decade later, Prometheus would go on to issue one of de Camp’s final books, The Ape-Man Within (1995).
Since I’m quoting things, I’ll also swipe from the Wikipedia article on the book to give you an idea of the content. This sounds like plagiarism, but isn’t, because I wrote the article, and if I can’t swipe from myself, who can I swipe from? Which I suppose makes me a good match for de Camp too, in the fan sense, since he also liked to reuse material. As, indeed, he does in the book., because that’s what you do when you collect up a batch of articles previously published.
The material is organized in three sections, “Our Ingenious Forebears,” “Beasts of Now and Then,” and “Scientists, Mad and Otherwise.” The articles in the first section debunk extravagant occult and pseudoscientific claims regarding ancient civilizations while highlighting these cultures’ actual accomplishments. The second section’s pieces perform much the same function in regard to biology, focusing on elephants, claims regarding survival of dinosaurs into the present day, and past extinction events. In the third, de Camp explores the distinction between science and pseudoscience as illustrated in the lives of a number of scientists holding extreme views.
The articles so bunched originally appeared from the 1950s-1970s in such periodicals (some no longer with us) as Astounding Science Fiction and its successor Analog, The Book of Knowledge Annual, Future Science Fiction, The Humanist, If: Worlds of Science Fiction, Isis, The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Science Digest, and Science Fiction Quarterly. A peculiarly fiction-tinged batch of sources for a conglomeration of nonfiction, to be sure, but science fiction magazines, then as now, often mixed factual pieces in with the fancies, the better, I suppose, to claim they were not devoid of redeeming social value. And SF authors were happy to provide them. To give just a small number of the more prominent names, Willy Ley did it. L. Sprague de Camp did it. And of course Isaac Asimov did it, to the point of overkill.
For good measure, de Camp also raided a few of his own other nonfiction books to provide content here, such as Elephant and The Day of the Dinosaur. Just to demonstrate that yes, he really did reuse material. Cheating, perhaps, but on the other hand, those books were probably out of print by then, he plainly liked what he reused, and how better to get it before the eyes of new readers? So if you want to read about such things as the use of elephants in warfare, or whence King Xerxes got his Okapi, or the sordid details of the Cope-Marsh fossil-hunting feud, or how you would (if you could) hunt dinosaur, all for the umpteenth time, this is one of the places you can do it!
A handful of illustrations repeated from the original articles clarify one point raised or another, such as the interior of the Great Pyramid of Khufu at Giza, relationships within organizations, ancient catapults, Alexandrian inventions, Claudius Ptolemaeus’s oddball notion of the Indian Ocean as a landlocked lake, the curiously canoe-like appearance of the Daedalus sea serpent, extinct species of elephant relatives, Diego de Landa’s wrong-headed Mayan alphabet, and the Mayan glyphs from which the name of the bogus lost continent of Mu were derived. All most entertaining!
I’m having a bit of fun at this book’s expense, but seriously, it’s a good one to have fun with, because it’s a fun book. All those fascinating little facts, the dropping of which makes the reading of de Camp such a rewarding experience, are here. Well, not all of them, of course. He spills plenty of them elsewhere, so don’t expect to fill up on them here alone. Let this book whet your appetite, and then go ye forth and graze on more in other such tomes. Like The Ragged Edge of Science (1980) or Rubber Dinosaurs and Wooden Elephants (1996), to name merely the two most similar, in that they, too, are collections of his nonfiction. And then, by all means, branch out more broadly. There are those assemblages of Conan-related erudition from Amra, for instance, and the more monolithic monographs on dinosaurs, elephants, ancient engineering, antique cities, human evolution, Darwin, the Scopes Trial, mythical geography, lost continents, occultism and such.
The cover design is by Gregory Lyde Vigrass, whom I’d otherwise never heard of. A modicum of research revealed him to be an instructor, still very active, at The Art Students League of New York, with a broad background in illustration and academe. His work here, I imagine, was an early instance of the former. I find his design striking, but not very imaginative. Still, if you happen to like white converging lines on a purple background, this is where to get your fix.
Atypically, there is no dedication. Plenty of room for one; the occasional excuse of “maybe there wasn’t space” won’t wash. Surely he couldn’t have run out of people?
spraguedecampfan 