Fletcher Pratt (1897–1956)

Fletcher Pratt, a journalist turned freelance writer, composed Sea Power and Today's War in the summer of 1939, when war loomed on the horizon. He was revising the proofs when German tanks rolled across the Polish border. Pratt junked the original, now obsolete, preface (with its now obsolete prediction that war might be long-delayed, or even averted) and wrote a new one. The rest of the work, in Pratt's words "a purely technical study of the strength of the sea powers and of their tactics show more and strategy in the event of a general war," remains what it was in the summer of 1939.

It is, as a result, an utterly fascinating time capsule for naval historians. Its pages preserve, like a fly in amber, a view of naval strategy where guns are king, the line-of-battle is the core of the fleet, and admirals dream of the next Trafalgar or Tsushima. It is the world of Alfred Thayer Mahan, Admiral "Jackie" Fisher, and the forgotten architects of War Plan Orange, captured in the last possible moment before actual events on, under, and above the high seas began knocking holes it.

Pratt was neither a navy veteran nor a naval architect, but he was an enthusiastic naval player and designer of naval wargames. He created an elaborate set of rules for modeling fleet-size engagements with scale models (1" = 50') on room-sized mock oceans, using elaborate tables to determine the effects of each salvo. His analysis of the world's navies reflects this outlook. It is elaborately, minutely technical, and tacitly assumes that comparing "the numbers" -- speed; armor thickness;number, size, and weight of guns -- of opposing ships (considered individually and in groups) is sufficient to predict the outcomes of battles.

The human element of naval warfare enters Pratt's calculations only in the broadest possible strokes. He not only believes in the existence of "national character" -- the idea that, say, "the Germans" are rigid and precise, "the French" are bold and daring, and "the Italians" are unreliable -- but uses it to explain (or predict) how naval strategy differs (and will differ in the war-to-come). Absurd as it sounds to modern ears, you don't have to read far in the popular nonfiction of the 1920s and 30s to realize how pervasive it was.

Beyond its value as a time capsule, Pratt's book is an extraordinary example of someone so thoroughly committed to one way of viewing the world that they cannot even conceive of an alternative. His brief chapter on "New Weapons" nods at atomic propulsion, rockets, and "death rays," but his vision of future naval warfare is still built around lines of battleships seeking to, as Lord Nelson did at Trafalgar, "cross the enemy's T."

Recommended, on those terms, for anyone with a serious interest in 20th century naval history or the history of military technology. show less

The first two in a series of five novellas written by de Camp and Pratt. Titles of the available collections can get complicated, so here's the quick overview (and I'm not even going to try to sort out the correct touchstones for the different volumes):

The Incomplete Enchanter (1941) includes "The Roaring Trumpet" and "The Mathematics of Magic." The Castle of Iron (1950) is a novel-length expansion of a novella originally published in 1941. Those three stories were collected in 1975 as The show more Compleat Enchanter. The remaining stories, "Wall of Serpents" (1953) and "The Green Magicians" (1954) were collected in 1960 as Wall of Serpents. All five are gathered The Complete Compleat Enchanter (1989).

After Pratt's death in 1956, de Camp was reluctant to continue the series, believing that he could not recreate the collaborative magic on his own. He was eventually persuaded to return to the series in the 1990s, when he wrote two additional stories and allowed several other authors to write stories, some of them based on his outlines. Those stories are gathered in two collections, The Enchanter Reborn (1992) and The Exotic Enchanter (1995). One additional story by Lawrence Watt-Evans appears in a 2005 anthology of stories written in tribute to de Camp. There is no single-volume collection of the entire series.

So what are all of these stories? They are the adventures of Harold Shea, a psychologist journeying into various fictional and mythological worlds of fantasy, where he finds that his logical mind isn't always helpful. In this volume, he travels into the worlds of Norse mythology ("The Roaring Trumpet") and Spenser's The Faerie Queene ("The Mathematics of Magic").

I chose to pick up this particular combination of stories because these are the two stories included in my master list of award-nominated SF stories; both are Retro Hugo nominated novellas. I went in knowing that this sort of fantasy is not my cuppa, and these stories in particular are very much not written for someone who's not into fantasy. De Camp and Pratt do not spend a lot of time on exposition about the worlds to which Harold and his colleagues travel; it is assumed that the reader comes in with a basic knowledge of Norse mythology and Spenser's poem.

I could sort of stumble through the Norse story with my Marvel Comics level of knowledge. I at least know who Odin, Thor, and Loki are, and have some vague sense of Ragnarok as an apocalyptic event. But by the time the third or fourth different set of giants show up, all of them with indistinguishable Nordic names (the letter "j" pops up in so many places where the letter "j" has no business being...), I was floundering. And I know nothing about Spenser, so most of that story was incomprehensible to me.

If you like this sort of thing, though, I think you might enjoy these stories. The prose is a touch old-fashioned, but doesn't have the heavy clumsiness that you often find in SF and fantasy of this era. And in the chapters set in our world, the banter among Harold and his colleagues zips along with a crisp energy that made me understand why some critics refer to these tales as "screwball fantasy."

Even when I was lost about the story in the fantasy worlds, I could tell that certain plot points or bits of dialogue would be funny or poignant or ominous if only I had the knowledge to appreciate them.

So I'm left with a weird critical reaction: I think these are probably good stories, even if I don't have the background to appreciate or enjoy them. show less

The Blue Star predates The Lord of the Rings: it’s fantasy from an earlier era – no dwarfs, elves or Celtic myths, and what magic there is is only slightly less abstract than the sex. Actually, the 1969 edition is labelled adult fantasy, and one of the unexpected pleasures of the book is discovering just how chaste adult fantasy could be back then.

A prologue promises an alternative universe where magic occupies the place that science occupies in ours. If that promise creates an show more expectation of something like Terry Pratchett’s Discworld, then the book will disappoint. In fact, the practitioners of magic are a tiny, proscribed minority. Our young hero starts out as an idealistic member of a revolutionary group in a land ruled by a queen (who remains an abstraction) and a repressive social order. Following orders from the Central Committee he seduces a young witch and promises fidelity in order to gain control of her Blue Star, an amulet that gives its wearer telepathic powers. There’s a love story, then, and a political story: will the seduction lead to true love? can a revolutionary movement with such a utilitarian attitude to young love really lead to freedom? The playing out of these questions is diverting enough, and the subversively anti-romantic politics are engaging, especially the section about the Amorosans, who talk the talk of everything being done in love, but are just as repressive as their enemies across the water. On the whole, though, the book didn't overwhelm me. If you can imagine a Lord of the Rings where Bilbo decides that there are more important things than destroying the ring and that the Return of the King and the defeat of Sauron, for good or bad, will happen (or not) without his help, you have some idea of the impact.

A word of warning: skip Lin Carter’s spoilerish introduction, or at least save it for after you’ve read the rest of the book. You might also want to skip the prologue, which seems to be there to justify the fantasy mode, and doesn’t do it very well. show less

Not good. I like SF/fantasy bar stories - from Callahan's Bar to Tales from the White Hart. But this one (these ones).... Part of the problem is that the authors seem to think that any story about people drinking or told by people who are drinking is inherently funny. It's not, and most of these are seriously depressing. The were-dachshund - he's a bad husband, but she's a rotten wife too. And the loose ends - does he even know he's a shape-changer? Same for a lot of others. The most show more hopeful, enjoyable one I can recall is the one about the dryad - and there is absolutely no reason to believe she would come back to him if he found her, why wouldn't she just have to move on? Not to mention, why isn't he looking for the guy (who would be much harder to hide) and why did it take him so long to check out Gavagan's? Oh, and just where did the palm tree come from - it's not mentioned ever before or after this story. The elephants are cute but where did they come from? Selective breeding - who did it, and why? And why do they just happen to be in Gavagan's? The time-travel one isn't bad, though a) it's totally unexplained (just who was that cabby?) and b) it has a bad ending (what happened to the guy?). The other one, with the guy unstuck in time - why should sobering him up send him back where he belonged? Stop him slipping, I can see, but why should it send him back? All of them are like that - I think they're meant to be witty and/or funny, but they just totally miss the point and leave me either depressed or asking questions that undermine the putative point of the story. Just...bad. show less