Alternative history is a branch of science fiction that often employs time travel. But while “classic” time travel, in the tradition of The Time Machine, is linear, with only one past, present, and future, alternative history novels employ more of a Multiverse approach. Traveling back in time, and the changes to the past that are involved with it, spin off one or more alternate timelines, where the future is different. In L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall, Professor Tancredi explains the concept to American archeologist Martin Padway as the two drive haphazardly through 1938 Rome:
“I was saying all these people who just disappear, they have slipped back down the suitcase.”
“The what?”
“The trunk, I mean. The trunk of the tree of time. When they stop slipping, they are back in some former time. But as soon as they do anything, they change all subsequent history.”
It’s a neat metaphor, and de Camp takes the rest of the novel to show how a time tree works—for no sooner is Padway dropped off at the Pantheon to look over the ruins, when lightning strikes, sending him to the same spot in the year 534. While most accidental time travelers would, after suitably freaking out, set off in search of a way back to their present, the supremely rational Padway, with very little fanfare, starts making himself at home in this new world of pagan Rome.
And it really does seem like a new world — at least it did to me, being rather ignorant of the state of affairs 6th century Italy. It turns out that this dusty little corner of history is rather interesting. The Roman Empire has technically fallen already, to the Ostrogoths, and the Ostrogoth king, Thiudahad, rules the kingdom from Rome, but Latin is still spoken and the old Roman aristocrats are still around — not to mention Greeks, Syrians, and Goths. As in many time travel novels, our hero just happens have the right skills for the time—Padway both speaks Latin and knows something about the important events that occurred during the twilight of the Western Roman Empire. But first he has to make some money, so he can keep life and limb together. So he decides to put his 20th Century knowledge to good use, by inventing … brandy? But even that is easier said than done:
He whittled a mandrel out of wood and showed Hannibal Scipio how to bend the copper stripping around it. Hannibal claimed to know all that was necessary about soldering. But when Padway tried to bend the tubing into shape for his still, the seams popped open with the greatest of ease.
Once distilled, the brandy is a hit in the Roman taverns. And once Martin Padway Latinizes his name to “Martinus” and does a bit of networking, other inventions begin to pile up quickly. Creating quality paper is a challenge that takes up much of a chapter, but it allows him to start a newspaper. There’s also experiments with clocks, gunpowder and the telegraph. In a sense, Lest Darkness Falls is a re-imagination of Mark Twain’s classic A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, set only six years previously, in AD 528. But while Twain uses Hank the Yankee mostly as a vehicle for lampooning England’s aristocratic pedigree, de Sprague’s novel is more like an exercise in engineering. And while Twain’s Arthur is a quasi-mythical king inhabiting a vague medieval era, de Camp’s novel has real historical underpinnings.
As Martinus and his amazing technologies catch the notice of higher-ups in the Roman world, historical personages begin entering the novel: Ostrogoth princess Mathaswentha, General Belisarius, whose army set out reconquer Rome for the Emperor Justinian in AD 535, and King Thiudahad himself. As events start to turn out differently than from what Martinus recalls from the history books, he begins to realize that a different branch has indeed sprouted from the trunk of the tree of time — and in the branch he inhabits, the Western Roman Empire may not fall, after all — the Dark Ages may never arrive. Vive la Multiverse!
Lest Darkness Falls is a pioneering novel in the genre of alternate history. Its publication in 1941, followed by Ray Bradbury’s short masterpiece “A Sound of Thunder” in 1952, elicited a trickle, then a flood, of alternate historical novels, a disproportionate number of which envision a history where A) the South won the Civil War or B) the Germans were victorious in World War II. So L. Sprague might be called the grandfather of alternative history, and it’s due to this and his knack for technical and historical realism that when super-geeks whisper about him, it is with a reverence hardly less than that reserved for the sacred name of H.P. Lovecraft (whose biography de Camp wrote).
While de Camp is not even close to being in the same league of the best writers of his time—Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Joyce, and even Daphne du Maurier were far beyond him in terms of style, character, and plot—for a science fiction writer of the “Golden Age” his workman-like prose is rather above par. If Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov—both of whom de Camp worked with at the Philadelphia Naval Yard during World War II—write at more of a fifth grade level, L. Sprague would be a challenge for most junior high students. His accurate knowledge of the late Roman world keeps readers engaged, and he is able to amuse us with Martin’s rising fortunes, friendships, political intrigues, and domestic squabbles (mostly surrounding his amorous but ugly servant Julia). So even if the book had not been one of the first of its kind, I would still consider it one of the best works in the genre.
Curiously, for all Martinus’ experiments, de Camp never has his hero try to invent a way back to his own time — or even wonder how a simple lightning bolt could have sent him back to the Ostrogoths. Perhaps that’s because any discussion of time travel would veer too far into the kind of schlocky pseudo-science for which he often criticized other sci-fi writers.
An aeronautical engineer by training, he wrote Lest Darkness Fall in his early 30s, and it was published in 1939, the same year he married Catherine Crook. The next year saw the release of The Wheels of If, a more ambitious alternative history novel that imagined what the world would be like if the American Revolution had failed and France had won the Napoleonic Wars. He also penned space operas and sword and sorcery, historical novels set in the ancient world, and contributed Conan the Barbarian stories after Robert E. Howard’s death in 1936—nearly 100 titles in all. Thought cold by some, his logical, analytical mind made for anti-romantic heroes, such as Martin Padway. After all his efforts to prop up the Roman Empire, Padway earns only a tongue-lashing from the girl he fancies:
Padway tried to say something sympathetic, but she flared up again. “Get out! I never want to see you again! It’ll take a squad of your barbarian soldiers to get you into our house. Get out!”
Padway got, slowly and dispiritedly. It was a complex world. Almost anything big you did was bound to hurt somebody.
Or change the course of history. But in real life—at least in the time line I’m living in—L. Sprague de Camp himself had a happy marriage, dying only seven months after his wife passed on, in 2000.
And on her birthday, at that.
Latest posts by Joel Van Valin (see all)
- Paradox Bound by Peter Clines - March 11, 2019
- Another Side of H.G. Wells - May 28, 2018
- Interview – A Few Questions for Joanna Volavka - March 26, 2018
An excellent look at a classic novel! I look forward to more installments in this series!
Though I am a bit baffled by the implication that the pulp writers weren’t up to Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, Joyce, and de Maurier’s snuff. Fitzgerald wrote for the pulps, and not always the “nice” ones. Faulkner’s dream was to write mysteries for the mystery pulps. Given Ray Bradbury, Manly Wade Wellman, and Philip Jose Farmer all wrote for the sci-fi and weird pulps. It’s not as though the pulp writers didn’t routinely match or exceed Fitzgerald, Hemmingway, and du Maurier in terms of quality, creativity, and depth. Particularly once the reader moves into the mystery, crime, and western pulps.
Good comment! I’ve always thought of Bradbury as writing slightly after the “golden age” of sci-fi of the ’20s-’40s. He has something in common with Fitzgerald in the romanticism and dream-like lyricism of his writing, though typically not as disillusioned as F. Scott. Even in his pulp writings, Fitzgerald seems to weave some kind of magic spell into his stories. (I’m from his home town of St. Paul, so ya, a bit biased!)