Pusadian series
Encyclopedia
Fantasy
Fantasy is a genre of fiction that commonly uses magic and other supernatural phenomena as a primary element of plot, theme, or setting. Many works within the genre take place in imaginary worlds where magic is common...
stories by L. Sprague de Camp
L. Sprague de Camp
Lyon Sprague de Camp was an American author of science fiction and fantasy books, non-fiction and biography. In a writing career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, including novels and notable works of non-fiction, including biographies of other important fantasy authors...
, begun in the early 1950s and written under the influence of Robert E. Howard
Robert E. Howard
Robert Ervin Howard was an American author who wrote pulp fiction in a diverse range of genres. Best known for his character Conan the Barbarian, he is regarded as the father of the sword and sorcery subgenre....
's Conan
Conan the Barbarian
Conan the Barbarian is a fictional sword and sorcery hero that originated in pulp fiction magazines and has since been adapted to books, comics, several films , television programs, video games, roleplaying games and other media...
stories. It is also known as the Poseidonis series. It was the first post-Howard attempt at serious world-building of a fantasy setting in the Howard vein, prefiguring the numerous sword and sorcery
Sword and sorcery
Sword and sorcery is a sub-genre of fantasy and historical fantasy, generally characterized by sword-wielding heroes engaged in exciting and violent conflicts. An element of romance is often present, as is an element of magic and the supernatural...
settings of the 1960s and 1970s.
The setting
Just as de Camp attempted to do for the BarsoomBarsoom
Barsoom is a fictional representation of the planet Mars created by American pulp fiction author Edgar Rice Burroughs, who wrote close to 100 action adventure stories in various genres in the first half of the 20th century, and is now best known as the creator of the character Tarzan...
novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs
Edgar Rice Burroughs was an American author, best known for his creation of the jungle hero Tarzan and the heroic Mars adventurer John Carter, although he produced works in many genres.-Biography:...
with his "Krishna" stories
Viagens Interplanetarias
The Viagens Interplanetarias series is a sequence of science fiction stories by L. Sprague de Camp, begun in the late 1940s and written under the influence of contemporary space opera and sword and planet stories, particularly Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian novels...
, the Pusadian stories represent both a tribute to Howard's prehistoric "Hyborian Age
Hyborian Age
The Hyborian Age is a fictional period within the artificial mythology created by Robert E. Howard, in which the sword and sorcery tales of Conan the Barbarian are set....
" and an attempt to "get it right", reconstructing his model's concept logically, without what he regarded as Howard's anthropological and geological absurdities. Unlike Howard, de Camp brought a thorough knowledge of ancient history and geography to his project, along with a wealth of research on prior literary treatments of speculative prehistoric civilizations, as reflected in his definitive study Lost Continents
Lost Continents
Lost Continents: The Atlantis Theme in History, Science, and Literature is a study by L. Sprague de Camp. It is considered one of his most popular works...
(1954).
In constructing his "Pusadian Age" de Camp took Plato
Plato
Plato , was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the...
's account of Atlantis
Atlantis
Atlantis is a legendary island first mentioned in Plato's dialogues Timaeus and Critias, written about 360 BC....
and the supposed period of its existence seriously, postulating an early high civilization thousands of years before those of the Egypt
Egypt
Egypt , officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, Arabic: , is a country mainly in North Africa, with the Sinai Peninsula forming a land bridge in Southwest Asia. Egypt is thus a transcontinental country, and a major power in Africa, the Mediterranean Basin, the Middle East and the Muslim world...
ians and Sumer
Sumer
Sumer was a civilization and historical region in southern Mesopotamia, modern Iraq during the Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Age....
ians, at the time of the last ice age
Ice age
An ice age or, more precisely, glacial age, is a generic geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers...
. At that time, in accordance with actual Ice Age
Ice age
An ice age or, more precisely, glacial age, is a generic geological period of long-term reduction in the temperature of the Earth's surface and atmosphere, resulting in the presence or expansion of continental ice sheets, polar ice sheets and alpine glaciers...
geography, lower sea levels meant that Eurasia
Eurasia
Eurasia is a continent or supercontinent comprising the traditional continents of Europe and Asia ; covering about 52,990,000 km2 or about 10.6% of the Earth's surface located primarily in the eastern and northern hemispheres...
and Africa
Africa
Africa is the world's second largest and second most populous continent, after Asia. At about 30.2 million km² including adjacent islands, it covers 6% of the Earth's total surface area and 20.4% of the total land area...
were joined into a single land mass, whose coastline extended far out onto what is today the flooded continental shelf
Continental shelf
The continental shelf is the extended perimeter of each continent and associated coastal plain. Much of the shelf was exposed during glacial periods, but is now submerged under relatively shallow seas and gulfs, and was similarly submerged during other interglacial periods. The continental margin,...
.
Civilization was based in the Euskerian lands, which were dominated by the Tartessian Empire centered in what is now Spain
Spain
Spain , officially the Kingdom of Spain languages]] under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. In each of these, Spain's official name is as follows:;;;;;;), is a country and member state of the European Union located in southwestern Europe on the Iberian Peninsula...
. To the south was the mountain range of Atlantis, inhabited by savages, beyond which lay the realm of Tartaros, and to the north Aremoria, a land of Celt
Celt
The Celts were a diverse group of tribal societies in Iron Age and Roman-era Europe who spoke Celtic languages.The earliest archaeological culture commonly accepted as Celtic, or rather Proto-Celtic, was the central European Hallstatt culture , named for the rich grave finds in Hallstatt, Austria....
-like barbarians. The northernmost known land was Thulê, a snowy land, and the southernmost Blackland, a swampy one. To the west were the islands of the Hesperides, including the island kingdom of Ogugia, beyond which lay the small island continent of Pusad, home to a patchwork of small states, of which the strongest was Lorsk. To the south of these were the Gorgades, a group of three isles inhabited by corsairs. East of Euskeria was the realm of Phaiaxia, a non-Euskerian country subject to Tartesia near the Thrinaxian Sea, and to the southeast Lake Tritonis, home to the warring Tritons and Amazons.
Much of the series' political geography was derived more or less directly from the mythologies of classical Greece and other ancient Mediterranean peoples, elements of which were plausibly portrayed as deriving from the all but forgotten predecessor civilization of the Pusadian age. In de Camp's scheme the remote successor of the Tartesian empire was the historical Spanish civilization of Tartessos
Tartessos
Tartessos or Tartessus was a harbor city and surrounding culture on the south coast of the Iberian peninsula , at the mouth of the Guadalquivir River. It appears in sources from Greece and the Near East starting in the middle of the first millennium BC, for example Herodotus, who describes it as...
, with (for example) the memory of Euskeria preserved by Euskara (the Basque country
Basque Country (historical territory)
The Basque Country is the name given to the home of the Basque people in the western Pyrenees that spans the border between France and Spain on the Atlantic coast....
) and the Scheria
Scheria
Scheria –also known as Scherie or Phaeacia– was a geographical region in Greek mythology, first mentioned in Homer's Odyssey as the home of the Phaiakians and the last destination of Odysseus before returning home to Ithaca.-Odysseus meets Nausikaa:In the Odyssey, after Odysseus sails...
of Homer
Homer
In the Western classical tradition Homer , is the author of the Iliad and the Odyssey, and is revered as the greatest ancient Greek epic poet. These epics lie at the beginning of the Western canon of literature, and have had an enormous influence on the history of literature.When he lived is...
ic legend, that of Atlantis by the Atlas Mountains
Atlas Mountains
The Atlas Mountains is a mountain range across a northern stretch of Africa extending about through Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia. The highest peak is Toubkal, with an elevation of in southwestern Morocco. The Atlas ranges separate the Mediterranean and Atlantic coastlines from the Sahara Desert...
, and that of Aremoria by the Gaul
Gaul
Gaul was a region of Western Europe during the Iron Age and Roman era, encompassing present day France, Luxembourg and Belgium, most of Switzerland, the western part of Northern Italy, as well as the parts of the Netherlands and Germany on the left bank of the Rhine. The Gauls were the speakers of...
ish peninsula of Armorica
Armorica
Armorica or Aremorica is the name given in ancient times to the part of Gaul that includes the Brittany peninsula and the territory between the Seine and Loire rivers, extending inland to an indeterminate point and down the Atlantic coast...
(Brittany
Brittany
Brittany is a cultural and administrative region in the north-west of France. Previously a kingdom and then a duchy, Brittany was united to the Kingdom of France in 1532 as a province. Brittany has also been referred to as Less, Lesser or Little Britain...
). In the tales that supposedly came down to Plato, barbaric Atlantis, imperial Euskeria, and island Pusad (or Poseidonis
Poseidonis
Poseidonis is an imagined last remnant of the lost continent of Atlantis, detailed in a series of short stories by Clark Ashton Smith. Smith based Poseidonis on Theosophical scriptures about Atlantis, and his concept of "the last isle of foundering Atlantis" is echoed by the Isle of Meneltarma in...
, as the name was remembered by the Greeks) had become confused with each other and conflated into one.
The Euskerian civilization was fueled by magic, crawling with wizards, and rife with Gods made real and potent by the beliefs of their devotees. It was also slowly degenerating as the power of magic dwindled in the face of an early flowering of iron-working, meteoric iron being the bane of magic. Simultaneously, over the course of centuries Pusad was slowly sinking. De Camp wrote his first Pusadian tales under the influence of the scientific dogma of geological gradualism
Gradualism
Gradualism is the belief in or the policy of advancing toward a goal by gradual, often slow stages.-Politics and society:In politics, the concept of gradualism is used to describe the belief that change ought to be brought about in small, discrete increments rather than in abrupt strokes such as...
which then held sway, which led him to reject the possibility of the island continent disappearing in a sudden cataclysm, as related by Plato. Later scientific discovery of the geological forces of plate tectonics
Plate tectonics
Plate tectonics is a scientific theory that describes the large scale motions of Earth's lithosphere...
have since precluded the possibility of an island continent ever having existed where he (and Plato) put it, regardless of the rate of destruction, rendering de Camp's gradualism as obsolete as Howard's catastrophism
Catastrophism
Catastrophism is the theory that the Earth has been affected in the past by sudden, short-lived, violent events, possibly worldwide in scope. The dominant paradigm of modern geology is uniformitarianism , in which slow incremental changes, such as erosion, create the Earth's appearance...
.
The stories
The Pusadian stories consist of the novel The Tritonian RingThe Tritonian Ring
The Tritonian Ring is a fantasy novel written by L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the magazine Two Complete Science Adventure Books for Winter, 1951, and first appeared in book form in de Camp's collection The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales...
, set early in the course both of Pusad's foundering and the discovery of iron and its inimical effect on magic, and seven short stories which take place some generations later. The protagonist of The Tritonian Ring is Prince Vakar of Lorsk, the predominant nation of Pusad, who undertakes a quest to save his land from the anger of the gods that takes him through much of the then-known world. Of the short stories, five feature Gezun, also of Lorsk, kidnapped from his native country by slave raiders to become a roving adventurer. Neither is a hero of the Conan stripe, as de Camp's estimation of heroics is more realistic than Howard's, and includes a healthy dose of skepticism regarding human motivations. Though Gezun's life story unfolds over the course of the tales featuring him in Conan-like fashion, it is no Horatio Alger progression to kingship like Conan's. Rather, it is a perpetual contest of wits against the world as Gezun seeks his fortune, and finds that fortune elusive. Practically speaking, he is a prehistoric con-man, which is essentially de Camp's definition of an adventurer.
The complete Pusadian tales have never been published together. The collection The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales
The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales
The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales is a 1953 collection of stories by science fiction and fantasy author L. Sprague de Camp, first published in hardcover by Twayne Publishers...
(1953) gathers together the title novel and three of the short stories, and the later collection Die Chronik von Poseidonis (1978) joins the same three short stories with two of the others, albeit all in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
translation. The Tritonian Ring has also been published by itself on a number of occasions.
Critical reception
Groff ConklinGroff Conklin
Edward Groff Conklin was a leading science fiction anthologist. He edited 40 anthologies of science fiction, one of mystery stories , wrote books on home improvement and was a freelance writer on scientific subjects as well as a published poet...
, reviewing the Twayne edition, described De Camp's work as "in the Conan
Conan
-People:* Conan O'Brien , American talk show host* Saint Conan , bishop of the Isle of Man* Conan I of Rennes , king of Brittany* Conan of Cornwall , medieval bishop...
tradition in every sense of the word, though better written."
The stories
- The Tritonian RingThe Tritonian RingThe Tritonian Ring is a fantasy novel written by L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the magazine Two Complete Science Adventure Books for Winter, 1951, and first appeared in book form in de Camp's collection The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales...
(1951) - "The Eye of TandylaThe Eye of Tandyla"The Eye of Tandyla" is a fantasy story written by L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the magazine Fantastic Adventures for May, 1951, and first appeared in book form in de Camp's collection The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales...
" (1951) - "The Owl and the ApeThe Owl and the Ape"The Owl and the Ape" is a fantasy story written by L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the magazine Imagination Stories of Science and Fantasy for November, 1951, and first appeared in book form in the de Camp's collection The Tritonian Ring and Other...
" (1951) - "The Hungry HercynianThe Hungry Hercynian"The Hungry Hercynian" is a fantasy story written by L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the magazine Universe Science Fiction for December, 1953, and first appeared in book form in the anthology The Spell of Seven, edited by de Camp...
" (1953) - "The Stone of the Witch QueenThe Stone of the Witch Queen"The Stone of the Witch Queen" is a fantasy story written by L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the magazine Weirdbook for fall 1977...
" (1977) - "Ka the AppallingKa the Appalling"Ka the Appalling" is a fantasy story written by L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the magazine Fantastic Universe for August, 1958, and first appeared in book form in the anthology The Young Magicians, edited by Lin Carter...
" (1958) - "The Rug and the BullThe Rug and the Bull"The Rug and the Bull" is a fantasy story written by L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the anthology Flashing Swords! #2, edited by Lin Carter...
" (1974) - "The Stronger SpellThe Stronger Spell"The Stronger Spell" is a fantasy story written by L. Sprague de Camp as part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the magazine Fantasy Fiction for November 1953, and first appeared in book form in de Camp's collection The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales...
" (1953)
Collected editions
- The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian TalesThe Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian TalesThe Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales is a 1953 collection of stories by science fiction and fantasy author L. Sprague de Camp, first published in hardcover by Twayne Publishers...
(1953) (includes The Tritonian Ring, "The Stronger Spell," "The Owl and the Ape," and "The Eye of Tandyla") - Die Chronik von Poseidonis (1978) (includes "The Eye of Tandyla," "The Owl and the Ape," "The Hungry Hercynian," "Ka the Appalling," and "The Stronger Spell")