Harold Shea underwhelms me.

[geoffrey]

All the way back to the 1974 D&D boxed set, Gary extolled the Harold Shea stories of L. Sprague de Camp & Fletcher Pratt. I own a paperback volume entitled The Complete Enchanter which includes the following Harold Shea novels:

The Roaring Trumpet
The Mathematics of Magic
The Castle of Iron

Awhile back I read The Roaring Trumpet, and I found it forgettable. I have now read the first 40% or so of The Mathematics of Magic, and I am once again not enjoying the story (beyond a few light chuckles). I get no sense of wonder, no sense of fantasy (as I do with Tolkien, Lewis, MacDonald, Howard, Lovecraft, CAS, M. R. James, Blackwood, Dunsany, Machen, etc.). It all just seems so...dry.

What does everything else think about the Harold Shea stories?

[Morandir]

Not the most memorable, I'd agree, but EGG seemed to love his "modern folk transported to lost/magical worlds" stories.

One thing is that when reading the Wilderness Encounters section of the LBBs for the first time, I was reminded of the section in The Complete Enchanter where the characters are in the Faerie Queen world - a place filled with fantastic castles whose inhabitants are obsessed with knightly honor and jousting and all the like. I'm not sure if that was the actual inspiration or not, but it definitely stuck out to me.

[Falconer]

It’s no Worm Ouroboros, but it did delight me as a kid. Even back then, I thought it was mostly unfunny. But it’s a nerd’s perfect escape fantasy. Travel to some of the greatest fantasy worlds, master magic, marry a babe. Any of you guys watch The Big Bang Theory?

Shea = Leonard
Chalmers = Sheldon
Belphebe = Penny
Votsy = Howard

Sorta-kinda, right?

[Zenopus]

I read those first three last year. A bit slow-going for me in parts but overall I enjoyed them and thought they were quite different from fantasy that came before it. The ideas about traveling to other universes through logic alone and using sympathetic magic were quite interesting.

I haven't read the last two yet. The fifth one was reprinted in early issues of Dragon magazine b/c it was out of print at the time.

Holmes cited a different de Camp story in his FRPG book: Solomon's Stone.
I wrote a few posts about Holmes & de Camp last year:
Holmes on Solomon's Stone by de Camp
De Camp's Great Stone Skull
Conan on the River of Doom
Holmes & de Camp in Dragon Magazine

[Zenopus]

Also worth quoting T. Foster here on the particular influence these books had on Gygax:

de Camp & Pratt, "Harold Shea" series - this series was the inspiration for AD&D's material spell components (sympathetic magic); the plot of the G series modules ("Against the Giants") was directly inspired by the first Harold Shea book (The Incomplete Enchanter); plus the irreverent and deliberately anachronistic tone of these books (the Giants speak like New York gangsters, etc.) seems influential on Gygax's occasional similarly irreverent tone

www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=186802

[Otto Harkaman]

I enjoyed it way back in the seventies, I still have a copy on my bookshelf.

[jasonzavoda]

I enjoyed the first two Enchanter stories quite a bit, though it has been some time since I've read them. They are light and whimsical and I think that any deep and serious examination of them misses their point.

They contain a number of interesting and neat ideas and they seem perfectly suited to Gygax's vision of AD&D. The plane travelling story from Gygax's book Night Arrant seems to use some of the ideas presented in the Harold Shea Enchanter series and I'd recommend them to anyone as either enjoyable stories or a bit of a window on what inspired AD&D. Personally, as stories, I'd put them at a mark above Eddison's interesting but ponderous works or even a smidgen above Jack Vances Dying Earth tales as stories and below Dying Earth as a resource for gaming ideas.

[Otto Harkaman]

Found a BBC radio dramatization of Spenser's The Faerie Queene. I always wanted to read it after reading the second Enchanter story. I didn't know how bawdry it was going to be! ha ha

[Otto Harkaman]

Just noticed that LibriVox has audio books of The Faerie Queene. I find it fun to listen to stuff like this because I would never know how to pronounce several of the names.

librivox.org/the-faerie-queene-book-1-by-edmund-spenser/

[Otto Harkaman]

Been getting into the second story and now that I have some idea of the Faerie Queene I am finding it more enjoyable. Interesting how de Camp and Pratt interweave their literary wit. I remember reading an interview somewhere about how they wrote these stories together.

Its lighthearted and definitely doesn't take itself seriously. I find the prose fun to read. I would have liked to ask Gary some questions. Like did you get the idea of encounters from this story? The two lead protagonists get into some discussion about the nature of the world they are travelling in. They observe that they are constantly going from one encounter to another but that this was the nature of Spenser's poem.

[Otto Harkaman]

I wonder if Gary got the idea for the various Bigby spells from the second story "The Mathematics of Magic"

"Thank you, Harold," said Chalmers from the floor where the table had been. Florimel was beside him. He was squeezing the neck of a bottle in both hands. The large joints of those hands were familiar. Shea realized that the disembodied pairs that had wrought such havoc among the enchanters were outsize copies of his partner's.
"Nice work, Doc," remarked Shea. To Artegall he said: "Don't. He's on our team."
Chalmers gave a hand to Florimel. "You observe," he remarked. "the improvement in my technique, although, goodness gracious! I didn't expect the hands to be quite as efficacious as that!" He looked round the room, where nearly half the corpses showed marks of strangulation.

[Falconer]

Definitely.