A Chicago Archaeologist in King Thiudahad’s Court: A Look at L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall by Bill Ward In a flash, unassuming archaeologist Martin Padway finds himself displaced in time, slipping from the Rome of Mussolini’s Italy in 1938 into the Rome of the sixth century, AD 535 to be exact. With nothing but the contents of his pockets, a lifetime of learning, and off-the-charts levels of audacity, he sets about not only securing a life for himself, but staving off the collapse of the entire classical world. Fortunately for Western Civilization Martin Padway – who will no doubt be revered in some alternate historical timeline as Martinus Paduei – has an almost John Carter-like suite of superpowers at his disposal. Padway is no fighter, however, and his power has nothing to do with gravity (though he does happen to spill the beans on Einstein’s General Relativity a millennium and a half early…), but rather consists of an encyclopedic knowledge of Procopius’ Gothic Wars, enough Classical Latin and Modern Italian to pidgin his way through the language of the day, and a pretty sharp memory of High School chemistry. It’s a good thing, too, because all of Italy is about to be plunged into a destructive, decades-long war that will achieve nothing in the long-term beyond a further degradation of civilization itself, and Martin must scramble to prevent, even reverse, the coming fiasco . . . Lest Darkness Fall. A classic of time travel and alternate history science fiction, L. Sprague de Camp’s Lest Darkness Fall is a bit of an anti-Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court. Both stories involve irrepressibly competent protagonists bringing anachronistic progress to the benighted past, and both are played to comic effect. But Twain’s tale is a scathing satire of the unquestioned idea of progress of his own day, as rational Yankee-ingenuity despoils the majesty of a romantic age of myth. De Camp’s novel takes the opposite view, his rational man-of-action is presented as unquestionably correct in his motives and outlook, from his Gibbonesque view of religion to his embrace of realpolitik, Gothic Kingdom-style. There is little self-reflection and even less irony in Padway’s story as he diligently seeks to alter the past, but that’s just fine, as de Camp moves from one crisis to another in this fast-moving celebration of 20th...