Adventures in Fiction: L. Sprague de Camp By Jeff Goad Did you know that L. Sprague de Camp coined the terms “extraterrestrial” and “E.T.”? It’s true! While the noun existed before de Camp, he was the first to use it to describe alien life in a 1939 article for Astounding Science Fiction. This is one of many examples of how De Camp’s impact on the genres of science fiction and fantasy far exceed his level of contemporary fame. It is easy to draw a straight line between de Camp and the eccentric renaissance men who populate his stories. Besides authoring more than 100 books, he was also an aeronautical engineer, surveyor, patent expert, and a school principal, among other things. His writing career began in the field of nonfiction when he published Inventions and Their Management in 1937. Later that same year his short stories began to appear in Astounding Stories and by 1939 he had published his first novel. By the mid-1940s he was already a prolific writer and joined the Trap Door Spiders, a males-only social club which Fletcher Pratt had formed so he could spend time with Dr. John D. Clark without Clark’s wife, whom they all detested. The invitation-only membership consisted of primarily writers and scientists and some of the more notable members included Isaac Asimov, Lin Carter, Lester Del Rey, and Theodore Sturgeon. De Camp was a huge fan of the sword and sorcery genre and in 1963 he compiled and edited the first-ever collection of such stories in the book Swords and Sorcery featuring Poul Anderson, Lord Dunsany, Robert E. Howard, Henry Kuttner, Fritz Leiber, H.P. Lovecraft, C.L. Moore, and Clark Ashton Smith. By the mid-1960s, he had become a founding member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers’ Guild of America (or SAGA). It was started by Lin Carter, John Jakes, and himself and would eventually include many of the authors found in the Appendix N such as Poul Anderson, Fritz Leiber, Michael Moorcock, Andre Norton, and Jack Vance. One of the ways in which de Camp had the most impact on the genre is through his work on the Conan stories. The works of Robert E. Howard had mostly fallen into obscurity but in 1966 he started working with Lancer to republish the Conan stories in the order in which they could have happened...