Preface
David Drake
Thirty-nine issues of UNKNOWN (I’m including those after the title change to UNKNOWN WORLDS) were published from March 1939 to October 1943. Like its sister magazine, ASTOUNDING (far and away the most important SF magazine of the day), UNKNOWN was edited by John W. Campbell.
Isaac Asimov and Manly Wade Wellman are among the writers of that period who believed UNKNOWN’s literary standards to be even higher than those of ASTOUNDING. Certainly there is no other magazine in the SF/fantasy genre whose contents over a comparable run have been reprinted in so high a percentage as those of UNKNOWN.
The stereotypical UNKNOWN story is a fantasy which includes some humor and which is constructed according to rules as rigorous as those John Campbell was applying to science fiction at the time. (The time, for those of us willing to categorize, was the Golden Age of Science Fiction.)
There are major exceptions to every item within the above generalization. UNKNOWN printed science fiction; in fact, the magazine was designed around SINISTER BARRIER, an SF novel by Eric Frank Russell. Not all of the contents showed a light touch (find the humor in, for instance, Carillon of Skulls by Lester del Rey). And there were stories which weren’t especially rigorous or even especially good. As an editor once pointed out to me, he wasn’t hired to print blank pages . . . but sometimes the only choice is a story you’d just as soon have seen in the competition.
Despite those caveats, the stereotype of rigorous fantasy with humor is a pretty accurate description of what you’d find if you flipped through UNKNOWN at random. The pieces which best typify “the UNKNOWN story” both in style and in writing quality are the Harold Shea stories by (as they then were billed) Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp.
These stories. You hold in your hands what are probably the best stories to come from what is probably the best magazine in the genre.
Fine, and SILAS MARNER is a classic too. Why would you want to read the Harold Shea stories now?
Because they’re fun. Because all the virtues they had forty-odd years ago are still virtues today.
These are fast-paced adventure novellas in which fairly ordinary folks from the present day transport themselves into myth worlds populated by monsters and villains, wizards and heroes—including some characters who mix several of the categories.
And that’s important too, because the characters behave refreshingly like people instead of fitting neatly into one or another stereotype. Heroes can be hot-tempered, stupid, and arrogant. Villainous wizards may turn out to be intelligent, success-oriented fellows, so similar to modern academics that it can be a little difficult to pick sides in the struggle between good and evil. A modern man doesn’t become a mythic hero simply because he’s dropped into a heroic myth—but he may be able to learn some of the attributes of heroism that remain valid in his world as well.
The rigor of the stories appears in two fashions: the authors display expert knowledge of the myths which form the framework for the novellas; and they display expert knowledge of the real conditions of the worlds on which the myths are based.
These real worlds provide the story backgrounds, and (as somebody who tries to do that sort of thing himself) I cannot praise Pratt and de Camp too highly for the way they succeeded at the job. You won’t learn what the house of a wealthy Norse farmer looked like by reading the Eddas; but you can get a great description here, in The Roaring Trumpet.
The Harold Shea stories are historically accurate, but they sure aren’t stuffy. When a band of Frost Giants appears, for instance, they talk and act like Brooklyn gangsters.
Generations of bad writers from William Morris to the present have insisted that characters in heroic fantasy must speak only in pseudo-Elizabethan; Sprague de Camp was one of the first to publicly defend the use of colloquial English (in a letter to the editor of Argosy regarding The Harp and the Blade by John Myers Myers) in heroic settings.
However, he and Pratt had already used similar colloquialisms in The Roaring Trumpet. The effect is humorous—but it’s also a reminder that these characters are making choices not so very different from those being made in our consensus reality.
Good and Evil don’t always point themselves out unequivocally. There are reasons to co-exist with the Fire Elves and with the Pinochet government; but the dungeons of Muspellheim and Santiago are reasons not to do so. Muspellheim is here, described with a precision which demonstrates that the authors were as familiar with human inhumanity as they were with Elizabethan social structure.
And those unobtrusive lessons may be the best part of some of the most entertaining fantasy stories you’ll ever have a chance to read.
—Dave Drake