In the introduction to his collection of short stories The Wheels of If, and Other Science fiction (1948), de Camp insists that his stories are no more than entertainments, that "social significance ... is just the thing I studiously avoid in my stories." He goes on to say, "These yarns are meant purely to amuse and entertain, and neither to instruct, nor to incite, nor to improve."

From 1948 to the present, critics have usually taken de Camp's assertion at face value and have applied it to all of his fiction. For instance, in reference to the above quotation, fellow author Brian M. Stableford declares that the "manifesto might stand for all his work," with a few exceptions in his "later work." Such a view of de Camp's fiction is ingenuous. Note what Mark Twain says at the beginning of the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884): "Persons attempting to find...