L. Sprague de Camp changed my life.

About how many people can you say that? Not many, not if you're honest. A favorite teacher, perhaps, who pointed you in a direction you hadn't expected to go. That's what L. Sprague de Camp (Sprague, to his friends) did for me?and he did it more than twenty years before I ever met him, and, of course, altogether without knowing he'd done it or that I even existed. Writers, especially the good ones, can be dangerous people.

I was fifteen, I think, when I found a copy of Lest Darkness Fall in the secondhand bookstore I frequented in those days. For any who may not know it, it's one of the best Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court stories ever written: right up there, in my admittedly biased opinion, with Twain's original. Before I read about Martin Padway's involuntary journey through time to the Italy of the sixth century a.d., I don't believe I'd ever heard of the Byzantine Empire. Because of Sprague, I got interested in it. If I hadn't happened across Lest Darkness Fall, I might well not have.

As things were, I got into Caltech, and flunked out at the end of my freshman year. When I got to UCLA, I'd left the sciences and become a history major?and ended up with a doctorate, Lord help me, in Byzantine history. I never would have done that had someone else picked up that book instead of me. I never would have written much of what I've written, a lot of which is either Byzantine-based or uses the historical and research skills I picked up acquiring my degree. I never would have met and married the lady who's now my wife, for we got to know each other when I was teaching at UCLA while the professor under whom I studied had a guest appointment at the University of Athens. I wouldn't have the three girls I have today.