The Mathematics of Magic: The Enchanter Stories of L. Sprague De Camp and Fletcher Pratt - Hardcover

Olson, Mark L.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1886778655 ISBN 13: 9781886778658

Publisher: Nesfa Pr, 2007

Synopsis

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.

About this title

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.

From Booklist

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
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About this edition

• Publisher: Nesfa Pr
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 1886778655
• ISBN 13: 9781886778658
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 504