I seem to be doing a lot of re-reading lately, while there is a pile of review stuff to do. Sometimes I’m stressed out and just want something familiar to read.
Recently, I binged on L.Sprague De Camp’s Compleat Enchanter series. That made me feel like going back to another book I’d read years ago, by the same author, Lest Darkness Fall. An interesting thing about this book is that it inspired Harry Turtledove, now best known as the king of alternative universe fiction.
It was written in the early 1940s, starting off in the late 1930s. The hero, Martin Padway, is in Italy doing research for a thesis. He is an archaeologist, so knows, not only history, but how quite a few things are made. Padway is talking to an Italian scholar who has theories about alternative universes, important to the plot, because he suggests that, if you went back into the past, you could change things without worrying that you might keep yourself from being born, because you’d just create another branch of the tree of time.
When Martin takes a walk, he is struck by lightning and finds himself in sixth century Rome, run by the Goths. He speaks Latin, so can communicate. He also eventually learns the language of the Goths.
Figuring he isn’t going back to his own time, he decides the best thing is to start a small business. He understands that it has to be something simple, because some things require the technology to build the technology to build the impressive stuff. He starts off with getting a loan to make brandy, and it goes from there. Eventually, he builds a telegraph line and a printing press, then creates paper to publish his weekly newspaper, because vellum is not easy to get hold of.
Knowing that the armies of Justinian are on their way, he decides the Goths are a lot more laid back in their attitudes and he changes the things that will happen.
This edition contains the original novella and a number of other stories by well known authors that are basically Lest Darkness Fall fan fiction. I bought it in Apple Books ebook and it wasn’t expensive. It’s also available in Kindle or print. If you haven’t read it, or not recently, it’s well worth a read.
