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A review by remcovanstraten
The Castle of Iron by L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt
2.0
I abandoned this one.
Meek Harold Shea, looking for his fairy bride, first finds himself in Coleridge's Xanadu, alongside some quasi-comical sidekicks. How DeCamp and Pratt treat Xanadu is pretty racist and sexist - some of that will be inherent in the source poem, but the contemporary commentary, such as it is, doesn't make it better.
Then Shea and company get transported to the world of Orlando Furioso, where to the titular iron castle of the wizard Atlantes. At this point I started to leaf furiosoly through the book, whether there'd be any mention of Bradamante, the female knight at King Charlemagne's court. She does appear, 20 pages near the end: "The knight faulted down and Shea realized that 'he' was a handsome, brown-haired woman of show-girl size." Ah, well then.
I'm sure that DeCamp, writing his draft, found himself clever and funny, and that he and senior partner Pratt had a lot of fun writing these Harold Shea tales. I found their humour rather smug and self-congratulatory, and their protagonist pretty annoying. It's fine to do something with older source material, even to critique it - but it seems to me that DeCamp/Pratt don't really respect their sources, and are mostly out to show how clever and more refined they are. And with their 1940s attitudes, that really doesn't hold up - they have become the outmoded relics they mock.
Meek Harold Shea, looking for his fairy bride, first finds himself in Coleridge's Xanadu, alongside some quasi-comical sidekicks. How DeCamp and Pratt treat Xanadu is pretty racist and sexist - some of that will be inherent in the source poem, but the contemporary commentary, such as it is, doesn't make it better.
Then Shea and company get transported to the world of Orlando Furioso, where to the titular iron castle of the wizard Atlantes. At this point I started to leaf furiosoly through the book, whether there'd be any mention of Bradamante, the female knight at King Charlemagne's court. She does appear, 20 pages near the end: "The knight faulted down and Shea realized that 'he' was a handsome, brown-haired woman of show-girl size." Ah, well then.
I'm sure that DeCamp, writing his draft, found himself clever and funny, and that he and senior partner Pratt had a lot of fun writing these Harold Shea tales. I found their humour rather smug and self-congratulatory, and their protagonist pretty annoying. It's fine to do something with older source material, even to critique it - but it seems to me that DeCamp/Pratt don't really respect their sources, and are mostly out to show how clever and more refined they are. And with their 1940s attitudes, that really doesn't hold up - they have become the outmoded relics they mock.