A significant contributor to Fantasy, Science Fiction (his Hyperpiliosity is my favorite Science Fiction Short Story, with nary a robot nor raygun in sight), Historical Fiction, & History.
Of particular intrest to the SDMB, was his lifelong Fight Against Ignorance, bebunking pseudoscience & pseudohistory.
A fine example of this is his The Ancient Engineers, a book booth well-researched yet charmingly readable. I strongly recommend it.
Finally, he was the single greatest biographer of the great Fantasy authors, writing of most in short articles, but authoring definitive biographies of Robert E. Howard & H.P. Lovecraft.
I’ve been a big fan of his for ages. Besides debunking and science fiction/fantasy, he also wrote quite a bit of good science and history (his The Great Monkey Trial is the best single book on the Scopes trial that I’ve read) and tried his hand half a dozen times at historical fiction. Sadly, it wasn’t popular enough, but I think his Dragon of the Ishtar Gate is a classic, and a truly underappreciated work was his The Bronze God of Rhodes, a very well-informed book on the building of the Collosus of Rhodes. It reminds me a lot of Ken Follett’s The Pillars of the Earth (about the building of a cathedral), especially in the way that about half the book is taken up with setting up the circumstances under which the construction takes place.
I met him once and spent quite a bit of time talking with him at a small local con about 25 years ago.
It’s too bad he died a couple of years ago. The great ones from the classic days of science fiction are almost all gone. Jack Williamson just died a couple of weeks ago.
Lest Darkness Fall just showed up in a crossword I was doing, I was happy to see. de Camp was, I think, the best of the Unknown fantasy school, with fantasies set in more interesting worlds than King Arthur. He had an important article in late '30s or early '40s Astounding called “Language for Time Travelers,” trying to get fantasy authors (and readers) to understand how language changed.
He was perhaps the most scrupulously scientific of sf writers, refusing to put ftl travel in a story, and having a whole series about the relationship of an Earth dominated by Brazil and interstellar travel slower than light and very lengthy.
I hadn’t heard of Williamson’s death, but it’s hardly unexpected. There goes our last link with the Golden Age.
Lest Darkness Fall kicks ass. Makes a great party game: “So. Say you were struck by lightning, and dropped into sixth-century Rome. What would YOU be able to do? Make a radio? I don’t think so. Deconstruct the poetry of T.S. Eliot? No. Program computers? Huh. No, YOU wouldn’t even be able to speak the freakin’ LANGUAGE.”
I spent a bunch of money several years ago buying a copy of Tales from Gavagan’s Bar, and I still haven’t read it. Should I drop everything and do so?