Years ago, I wrote a pretty scathing review of Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, Mark Twain’s opus in which a clever young American is magically transported back to Arthurian England where he uses his wit and ingenuity to confound, defeat, and educate the poor benighted medievals of the Round Table. Yet, hovering beneath the surface of Twain’s work was a deep-seated animus toward the Catholic Church, as Twain himself would later admit.
Lest Darkness Fall is a pulpy 20th century rendition of Connecticut Yankee written by sci-fi stalwart L. Sprague de Camp in 1939. Despite it's surface resemblance to Twain's work, Lest Darkness Fall is considered one of the prototype works in the genre of alternative history. It tells the story of Martin Padway, an early middle-aged American classicist who, while ambling through Rome, finds himself transported through time to the 530s AD when Ostrogoths ruled formerly Roman Italy. Realizing that he has arrived at one of the pivotal moments in human history—immediately prior to the Gothic Wars which would usher in the Dark Ages—Padway decides that it is his duty to attempt to change the course of history…lest darkness fall.
Utilizing his knowledge of classical history and ancient languages, Padway soon makes friends in 6th century Rome. However, his blunders in navigating the cultural terrain of late Roman civilization nearly cost him his neck. But once he’s settled in, Padway does what Americans do when they want to get ahead in life: start a business. Introducing a sequence of novel inventions into Roman society, Padway soon finds that he has come to the attention of powerful people, for better or worse.
Unlike Twain’s effort which was long on ridicule and short on actual historical research into the period, Sprague de Camp clearly read his Procopius before writing Lest Darkness Fall. Many of the obscure characters he develops in the story—from Urias, the nephew of Vittiges, to Theodegliscus, the son of Theodahad—were real historical figures though little known outside the circle of those who have read Procopius’s History of the Wars. It was this attention to historical detail that grabbed me and kept me reading even when faced with a few rather tawdry scenes which are annoyingly typical of the genre and the time period in which it was written.
Why did I read this book? Well, as a student of
late Roman history in general, and the Justinianic period in particular, Lest
Darkness Fall kept coming up on various reading lists. I had put off reading it
because I didn’t want it to cross-contaminate my own series on Belisarius. It turns
out that I shouldn’t have worried. Belisarius only makes a few fleeting
appearances in Lest Darkness Fall, and his portrayal is pretty one-dimensional.
While doing some research for this review, I found out a few pretty interesting things about L. Sprague de Camp. Though born in New York and raised in California, de Camp spent most of his life in the Philadelphia area. During World War II, he served at the Philadelphia Navy Yard as part of a rather unique naval engineering lab where he toiled alongside fellow sci-fi legends Robert Heinlein and Isaac Asimov. After the war, de Camp and his wife Catherine settled in Villanova where they lived for nearly 40 years before retiring in Plano, Texas.
While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend Lest Darkness Fall for a Catholic audience as the story's hero has a distinctly secular moral compass, for anyone with a genuine and abiding interest in the Justinianic period, it will be a quick, fun jaunt through 6th century Italo-Gothic Italy with many familiar names brought to life.
