{"id":631,"date":"2008-09-13T10:47:43","date_gmt":"2008-09-13T10:47:43","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog-test\/?p=631"},"modified":"2024-01-30T20:24:00","modified_gmt":"2024-01-31T01:24:00","slug":"de_camp_darkness","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2008\/09\/de_camp_darkness\/","title":{"rendered":"de Camp, L. Sprague: <cite>Lest Darkness Fall<\/cite>"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;d been vaguely meaning to read <strong>L. Sprague de Camp&#8217;s <cite>Lest Darkness Fall<\/cite><\/strong> for a while, and <a href=\"http:\/\/www.tor.com\/index.php?option=com_content&amp;view=blog&amp;id=3543\">Jo Walton&#8217;s post about it on Tor.com<\/a> brought it back to mind. It&#8217;s a very short book and seemed like moderately light reading.<\/p>\n<p>My opinion of it is much closer to <a href=\"http:\/\/scienceblogs.com\/principles\/2007\/01\/l_sprague_de_camp_lest_darknes.php\">Chad&#8217;s<\/a> than Jo&#8217;s: some good bits, but too much of its time for me to really get into. As Chad notes, the characterization is thin at best (particularly, I think, of the women); I also had the sense that the political plot would have worked much better if I knew more history. And a really egregious bit of Eurocentrism at the end left a bad taste in my mouth.<\/p>\n<p>I do like the technical, rather than political, aspects of the book (minor spoiler, ROT13: V jnf fhecevfrq naq cyrnfrq gung ur qvqa&#8217;g trg thacbjqre jbexvat), in the same way that I liked the nonfiction <a href=\"http:\/\/www.steelypips.org\/weblog\/2006\/07\/landels_engineering.php\"><cite>Engineering in the Ancient World<\/cite><\/a>. If that&#8217;s your kind of thing, you might just stick to the first half of the book, which I probably should have done.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;d been vaguely meaning to read L. Sprague de Camp&#8217;s Lest Darkness Fall for a while, and Jo Walton&#8217;s post about it on Tor.com brought it back to mind. It&#8217;s a very short book and seemed like moderately light reading. My opinion of it is much closer to Chad&#8217;s than Jo&#8217;s: some good bits, but &hellip; <\/p>\n<p class=\"link-more\"><a href=\"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/2008\/09\/de_camp_darkness\/\" class=\"more-link\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\"> &#8220;de Camp, L. Sprague: <cite>Lest Darkness Fall<\/cite>&#8220;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[48,15],"tags":[189],"class_list":["post-631","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-sf-and-fantasy","tag-de-camp-l-sprague"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=631"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2591,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/631\/revisions\/2591"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=631"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=631"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/steelypips.org\/weblog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=631"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}