"L. Sprague De Camp - Aristotle and the Gun" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP
Aristotle and the Gun

L. Sprague de Camp is a seminal figure, one whose career spans almost
the entire development of modern fantasy and SF. Much of the luster of the
“Golden Age” of Astounding during the late ‘30s and the ‘40s is due to the
presence in those pages of de Camp, along with his great contemporaries
Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. Van Vogt. At the same
time, for Astounding’s sister fantasy magazine, Unknown, he helped to
create a whole new modern style of fantasy writing—funny, whimsical, and
irreverent—of which he is still the most prominent practitioner. De Camp’s
stories for Unknown are among the best short fantasies ever written, and
include such classics as “The Wheels of If.” “The Gnarly Man.” “Nothing in
the Rules.” “The Hardwood Pile,” and (written in collabora-tion with Fletcher
Pratt) the famous “Harold Shea” stories that would later be collected as
The Compleat Enchanter. In science fiction, he is the author of Lest
Darkness Fall, in my opinion one of the three or four best Alternate Worlds
novels ever written, as well as the at-the-time highly controversial novel
Rogue Queen, and a body of expertly crafted short fiction such as
“Judgment Day.” “Divide and Rule,” and “A Gun for Dinosaur.”

“Aristotle and the Gun,” published in 1956, would prove to be de
Camp’s last science-fiction short story for more than a decade. After this,
he would devote his energies to turning out a long sequence of critically
acclaimed historical novels (includ-ing The Bronze God of Rhodes and An
Elephant for Aristotle, two of my favorite historical novels) and, like Isaac
Asimov (and at about the same time), a number of non-fiction books on
scientific and technical topics. He would not return to writing fantasy and SF
to any significant degree until the mid-’70s, and, although his presence
enriched several other fields, it was sorely missed in ours. Still, if de Camp
had to stop writing SF for a time, this was a good story to go out with—de
Camp at the height of his powers, writing in his usual vivid, erudite, and slyly
witty way about some of the subjects—and the historical personages—that
interested him the most.

De Camp’s other books include The Glory That Was, The Search for
Zei, The Tower of Zanid, The Great Fetish, and, with Fletcher Pratt, The
Land of Unreason. His short fiction has been collected in The Best of L.
Sprague de Camp, A Gun for Dinosaur, and The Purple Pterodactyls. His
most recent book is The Honorable Barbarian. He lives in Texas with his
wife, writer Catherine Crook de Camp.

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From:

Sherman Weaver, Librarian
The Palace
Paumanok, Sewanhaki
Sachimate of Lenape