L sprague de camp biography of martin
L sprague de camp biography of martin johnson.
L sprague de camp biography of martin
Lest Darkness Fall
1941 novel by L. Sprague de Camp
Further information: Gothic War (535–554)
Lest Darkness Fall is a 1939 alternate historyscience fiction novel by the American author L.
Sprague de Camp. Lest Darkness Fall is similar in concept to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but the treatment is very different.
The later alternate history author Harry Turtledove has said it sparked his interest in the genre as well as his desire to study Byzantine history.[1]
Plot
American classical archaeologist Martin Padway is visiting the Pantheon in Rome in 1938.
A thunderstorm arrives, lightning cracks, and he finds himself transported to Rome in 535 AD. The Italian Peninsula is under the rule of the Kingdom of the Ostrogoths. The novel depicts their rule as a relatively benevolent despotism, allowing freedom of religion and maintaining the urban Roman society they had conquered, though slavery is common and torture the normal method