"L. Sprague De Camp - The Best of L Sprague De Camp" - читать интересную книгу автора (De Camp L Sprague)

(c) 1976 by Lin Carter for Flashing Swords No. ~.
To Foul and Karen Anderson:
skaal.l
CONTENTS


Introduction: L. Sprague de Camp-Engineer and Sorcerer
Poul Anderson ix
Hyperpilosity 1
Language for Time Travelers 13
The Command 27
The Merman 40
Employment
The Gnarly Man 73


file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry...e%20Best%20of%20L%20Sprague%20De%20Camp.txt (1 of 149) [2/5/2004 12:29:01 AM]
 file:///D|/Documents%20and%20Settings/harry/Desktop/L%20Sprag...De%20Camp%20-%20The%20Best%20of%20L%20Sprague%20De%20Camp.txt

"Reward of Virtue" 94
Nothing in the Rules 9~
The Hardwood Pile 123
The Reluctant Shaman 149
The Inspector's Teeth 162
The Guided Man 176
"The Ameba" 207
Judgment Day 208
A Gun for Dinosaur 227
The Emperor's Fan 253
Two Yards of Dragon 269
"The Little Green Men" 295
Author's Afterword 296
L. SPRAGUE DE CAMP-
ENGINEER AND SORCERER



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.