Lyon Sprague de Camp is one of America's leading writers and scholars of fantasy and science fiction. His interests in technology, history, and language have also resulted in the publication of numerous works of popular science, archaeology, biography, and magic. Having begun his science-fiction career in the 1930s--one of the generation that included Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, and A. E. van Vogt--de Camp has provided a model for apprentice authors for forty years. Concerned purely with entertaining the reader, his science fiction rarely achieves the psychological or sociological depths of the greatest science-fiction novels; however, he is a master of the humorous tale, and his stories are always fast paced and satisfying. De Camp began his writing career with science fiction, and though his talents have ranged widely, he has periodically returned to the genre, accumulating twelve novels and several short-story collections. In recent years most of...