Harold Shea is a psychologist who dreams of adventure, but never gets beyond learning to fence and occasionally showing up at staff meetings dressed in horseback riding garb. But when he learns that his boss, Dr. Reed Chalmers, has developed a theory which allows a person to transport himself to any world he can imagine, Harold Shea decides to give it a whirl. This volume includes all the De Camp and Pratt Enchanter stories.
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Whoopee! De Camp and Pratt's Enchanter stories are all back in print at once. Legendary among sf and fantasy buffs as some of the brainiest, cheeriest, most affectionate exploitations of traditional and literary mythology, they're about a passel of scientifically savvy psychologists ensconced at a private psychiatric hospital in 1940s Middle America, who discover how to adjust reality via symbolic logic so they can travel to realms otherwise visitable only imaginarily. The youngest and brashest of them leads the way to the world of the Norse gods. In subsequent jaunts to the environs of Spenser's Faerie Queene, Ariosto's Orlando Furioso, the Finnish Kalevala, and the Irish Táin, his colleagues join him, and a denizen or two of the worlds visited come to this reality, too. Blending vigorous adventure and incidental humor, the stories, two more of which de Camp wrote four decades after Pratt's death in the 1950s, are like Indie Jones' exploits without the cussing and sneering. Their most obvious ancestor may be Mark Twain's Connecticut Yankee, but unlike the rigidly antitraditional Twain, de Camp and Pratt love what they make fun of. Olson, Ray
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved
About the Author
L. Sprague de Camp was born in New York in 1907 and died in 2000. He got a BS in Aeronautical Engineering from Cal Tech in 1930 and later earned his MS. Before WWII he was one of the new writers recruited by John W. Campbell to launch the Golden Age of Astounding and became a distinguished writer of short SF. He was a Lieutenant Commander in the US Naval Reserve in WWII. After the war and for the next fifty years he was a full-time professional writer, mostly of SF and fantasy. He wrote over 100 SF&F books, several hundred stories, and many non-fiction works in history, science, and biography.
De Camp is a winner of the Hugo and also a Grand Master Nebula.
L. Sprague de Camp spoke several languages and traveled world-wide. He has been chased by a hippopotamus in Uganda and by sea lions in the Galapagos Islands, seen tiger and rhinoceros from elephant back in India, been bitten by a lizard in the jungles of Guatemala, and spent Easter on Easter Island in the South Pacific. His autobiography, Time and Chance, published by Donald M. Grant in 1996 won the 1997 Hugo Award for best non-fiction.
Besides his solo works, de Camp is well-known for his fantasy collaborations with Fletcher Pratt and many books, mostly non-fiction, written with his wife Catherine Crook de Camp.
De Camp is a winner of the Hugo and also a Grand Master Nebula.
L. Sprague de Camp spoke several languages and traveled world-wide. He has been chased by a hippopotamus in Uganda and by sea lions in the Galapagos Islands, seen tiger and rhinoceros from elephant back in India, been bitten by a lizard in the jungles of Guatemala, and spent Easter on Easter Island in the South Pacific. His autobiography, Time and Chance, published by Donald M. Grant in 1996 won the 1997 Hugo Award for best non-fiction.
Besides his solo works, de Camp is well-known for his fantasy collaborations with Fletcher Pratt and many books, mostly non-fiction, written with his wife Catherine Crook de Camp.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Harold is a psychologist who dreams of adventure,
By Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Mathematics of Magic (L. Sprague De Camp) (Hardcover)
Harold is a psychologist who dreams of adventure, but when his boss develops a theory which lets a person transport himself into any world he can imagine, he finds himself on the adventure of a lifetime - one in which he travels through mythology's finest gods and adventurers. DeCamp and Pratt's 'Enchanter' stories follow his fantasy encounters and makes for engrossing, fun reading especially recommended for fantasy libraries also holding DeCamp's works.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
3.5 stars,
This review is from: The Mathematics of Magic (L. Sprague De Camp) (Hardcover)
Back in the 1940s and 1950s, L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt co-wrote five fantasy stories about psychologist Harold Shea and his colleagues for the pulp magazines. The Mathematics of Magic: The Enchanter Stories of de Camp and Pratt collects all five of these original Enchanter stories, plus an introduction by Christopher Stasheff (who edited many of the later Enchanter stories written by other authors), an article written by de Camp about Fletcher Pratt and their collaboration, two additional Enchanter stories written by de Camp after Pratt's death in 1956, and two essays by SF writer Jerry Pournelle called "Arming the Incomplete Enchanter" and "Rearming the Incomplete Enchanter," in which he lovingly criticizes Harold Shea for his choices about what to take with him on his adventures (I must say that I agree with Dr. Pournelle).
The five original Enchanter stories are: 1. "The Roaring Trumpet" (Unknown, May 1940) -- This first story explains how Dr. Reed Chalmers, Harold Shea's director at the mental institution, develops a scientific technique for visiting imagined parallel universes. Harold, who styles himself an adventurer and is learning how to fence and ride horses, decides he'd like to go to ancient Ireland to look for his dreamgirl. But when he tries Dr. Chalmers' technique, he accidentally ends up in the world of Norse mythology just before Ragnarök. 2. "The Mathematics of Magic" (Unknown, October 1940) -- Harold Shea and Dr. Chalmers visit the land of Spenser's The Faerie Queene where they must act chivalrously and where they meet Belphebe and Florimel who later become their wives. 3. "The Castle of Iron" (Unknown, April 1941) -- While experimenting with his techniques, Dr. Chalmers accidentally whisks Belphebe off to another world. When police officer Pete Brodsky comes to investigate the disappearance, he is swept away, along with Harold and his colleagues Walter Bayard and Vaclav Polacek to Coleridge's Xanadu. From there, Harold and Polacek ("the Bouncing Rubber Czech") are imported to the world of Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso where Chalmers and the ladies are, while Walter and Pete the cop, a good Presbyterian, are left in a harem in Xanadu. 4. "The Wall of Serpents" (Fantasy Fiction, June 1953) -- Trying to retrieve Shea's colleagues and the cop from the various universes they're stuck in, Harold and Belphebe end up in the Finnish epic The Kalevala. 5. "The Green Magician" (Beyond Fiction, 1954) -- Trying to get back to Ohio, Harold, Belphebe, and Pete end up in the Ulster Cycle of Irish mythology where everyone decorates their dining halls with the heads of their enemies. They try to avert war between Cuchulainn and Queen Maev. The two later stories written by de Camp after Pratt's death have previously been collected in two Baen editions (The Enchanter Reborn, 1992 and The Exotic Enchanter, 1995) along with Enchanter stories written by Lawrence Watt-Evans, Christopher Stasheff, Holly Lisle, John Maddox Roberts, Roland J. Green & Frieda A. Murray, and Tom Wham: 6. "Sir Harold and the Gnome King" -- Harold Shea goes to L. Frank Baum's Oz to find the Gnome King's Magic Belt because he thinks it will help him retrieve Walter Bayard from ancient Ireland. 7. "Sir Harold of Zodanga" -- "Professor Doctor Sir Harold Shea" visits Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom. It took me weeks to get through the 504 pages of The Mathematics of Magic: The Enchanter Stories of de Camp and Pratt. It's not that I didn't enjoy the Harold Shea stories (some are actually novellas), because I did. They (especially the de Camp and Fletcher collaborations) are clever, witty, irreverent, and fun. I liked all of the main characters, and the secondary characters were also entertaining. The writing isn't anything glorious (1940s SFF isn't known for its glorious writing), and it will sometimes make you cringe (such as when Shea says to Belphebe "it is damn white of you"). The plots are often ridiculously silly, but they're still amusing, effectively blending deadpan and slapstick humor. However, after a few hundred pages, the 1940s slang has become tiresome and the conceit starts to wear thin. I read the stories back to back because I had the book on loan from the library (I even had to renew it), but these stories probably worked better in their original serialized format -- when you read one and take a break for a few months before picking up another. The Mathematics of Magic: The Enchanter Stories of de Camp and Pratt is a great purchase because it collects all the Harold Shea stories, which are classics of fantasy literature, but I recommend reading them one at a time as a comical break from more serious fare.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Still full of wonder after 38 years,
By J. B Kraft "lonestargazer" (Palestine, TX United States) - See all my reviews (VINE VOICE) (REAL NAME)
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: The Mathematics of Magic (L. Sprague De Camp) (Hardcover)
I first bought these wonderful stories in a paperback release when I was in college, and loved them then. Sometimes, you go back to revisit a cherished book from an earlier era, and you may find it has lost something -- like unexpectedly running into an old flame at a funeral, only to wonder what you ever had in common with them.
I got the same sense of wonder reading these volumes (in this excellent hardbound volume) that I did in college. It helps if you are familiar with Norse mythology, or the Song of Roland, or Spencer's Faerie Queene, but the premise that magic operates according to discernable psychological laws in another dimension is a favorite of mine, and here it rises to an art form. Into these worlds go primarily two modern academics who have exotic adventures and meet amazing characters. Don't let the arcane language (at times) be offputting or the somewhat antique views and customs of the "modern world". These are just wonderful stories, in and of themselves, which largely loveable characters.
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