The Reluctant Shaman and Other Fantastic Tales is a collection of short stories by science fiction

Science fiction

Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 and fantasy

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...

 author 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...

, first published in paperback by Pyramid Books

Pyramid Books

Jove Books, formerly Pyramid Books, is a paperback publishing company, founded in 1949 by Almat Magazine Publishers . The company was sold to the Walter Reade Organization in the late 1960s. It was acquired in 1974 by Harcourt Brace which renamed it to Jove in 1977 and continued the line as an...

 in November 1970. An E-book

E-book

An electronic book is a book-length publication in digital form, consisting of text, images, or both, and produced on, published through, and readable on computers or other electronic devices. Sometimes the equivalent of a conventional printed book, e-books can also be born digital...

 edition was published by Gollancz

Victor Gollancz Ltd

Victor Gollancz Ltd was a major British book publishing house of the twentieth century. It was founded in 1927 by Victor Gollancz and specialised in the publication of high quality literature, nonfiction and popular fiction, including science fiction. Upon Gollancz's death in 1967, ownership...

's SF Gateway imprint on September 29, 2011 as part of a general release of de Camp's works in electronic form. The pieces were originally published between 1939 and 1958 in the magazines Thrilling Wonder Stories

Wonder Stories

Wonder Stories was an early American science fiction magazine which was published under several titles from 1929 to 1955. It was founded by Hugo Gernsback in 1929 after he had lost control of his first science fiction magazine, Amazing Stories, when his media company Experimenter Publishing went...

, Unknown

Unknown (magazine)

Unknown was an American pulp fantasy fiction magazine, published from 1939 to 1943 by Street & Smith, and edited by John W. Campbell. Unknown was a companion to Street & Smith's science fiction pulp, Astounding Science Fiction, which was also edited by Campbell at the time; many authors and...

, and Fantastic Universe

Fantastic Universe

Fantastic Universe was a U.S. science fiction magazine which began publishing in the 1950s. It ran for 69 issues, from June 1953 to March 1960, under two different publishers. It was part of the explosion of science fiction magazine publishing in the 1950s in the United States, and was moderately...

. The collection has also been translated into French

French language

French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...

 and 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....

.

The book contains short fantasies by the author, most of them with contemporary settings, although the final piece is one of his "Pusadian

Pusadian series

The Pusadian series is a sequence of fantasy stories by L. Sprague de Camp, begun in the early 1950s and written under the influence of Robert E. Howard's Conan stories. It is also known as the Poseidonis series...

" tales set in an antediluvian world patterned after 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 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....

.

Contents

• "The Reluctant Shaman"

Virgil Hathaway, an Algonquian Indian running a souvenir shop in Gahato, New York, is stuck with the task of babysitting a band of stone-throwing sprites from the Iroquois country. When they begin terrorizing the town in their efforts to be "helpful" he has to bone up quickly on Iroquoian magic in order to control them.

• "The Hardwood Pile"

When Dan Pringle's Gahato sawmill processes a tree harboring a dryad, the spirit, having no other home, remains with the resulting pile of lumber, "haunting" it to prevent its dispersal. A running conflict between the two ensues, ending only when Pringle agrees to sell the whole pile to renovate the dance floor of a local bar, at which his antagonist then becomes an employee.

• "Nothing in the Rules"

Accusations of foul play ensue when a mermaid is entered at a swim meet, but the strategem appears perfectly legal. No such ploy ever having been envisioned, it turns out that nothing in the rules states a contestant can't have a tail, or even has to be human...

• "The Ghosts of Melvin Pye"

A shady landlord's best tenant gives notice because the home he rents is being haunted by the spirit of a former resident. Skeptical, the landlord puts a private detective on the case, then a swami, and finally a psychiatrist, as it turns out the ghost has a split personality; one trouble-making and aggressive, and the other timid and inoffensive. The psychiatrist attempts to solve the problem by reintegrating the spirit's two identities, but the consequences are unexpected.

• "The Wisdom of the East"

An artist who signs up for a yoga course is intrigued to discover that his guru possesses actual mystic powers. Unable to endure the difficulties of the class, he switches teachers, only to find his new master an unprincipled, lecherous predator with designs on the female students. The trouble is that he is an adept in Eastern sorcery as well...

• "Mr. Arson"

Carl Grinnig accidentally conjures up a Saldine or fire-elemental while taking a correspondence course on Nigromancy. The Saldine, Mr. Arson, plans to unleash his fellow Saldines on the human world, and his control of heat and flame appears to make him unstoppable - until the author of the course pamphlets figures out how to give him more than he can handle.

• "Ka the Appalling
  Ka 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...
  
  "

In a prehistoric civilization forgotten by history, Gezun of Lorsk is saved from a mob in the city of Typhon by the larcenous wizard Ugaph, and enters his service. After Ugaph is nearly caught attempting to rob the Temple of Ip, he and Gezun plot to con the Typhonians by pretending to represent a new god, Ka the Appalling, who requires offerings. Unfortunately, they do too good a job at making their invented god real in the minds of their marks...

Trivia

The characters of Virgil Hathaway and Henri Michod from in "The Reluctant Shaman" and "The Hardwood Pile", set in the fictional town of Gahato in upstate New York, were much later reused by de Camp in two of his tales of W. Wilson Newbury

The Purple Pterodactyls

The Purple Pterodactyls is a collection of short stories by science fiction and fantasy author L. Sprague de Camp. It was first published in hardcover by Phantasia Press in January, 1980, and in paperback by Ace Books in April of the same year...

, "The Huns" (1978) and "Darius" (1977).

Awards

The anthology placed eleventh in the 1971 Locus Poll Award for Best Anthology/Collection

Locus Award

The Locus Award is a literary award established in 1971 and presented to winners of Locus magazine's annual readers' poll. Currently, the Locus Awards are presented at an annual banquet...

.