He won the Gandalf Grand Master Award from the World Science Fiction Convention, and was also named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Even so, his works, these days, are less well remembered than they ought to be, not least because he was modest almost to a fault. When he appeared on one of the trading cards the 2000 Worldcon put out, his quote on the back read simply, "I've been lucky." Maybe he was, but he was also very, very good.

I count him as my spiritual father. When I told him that in a letter in 1998, he replied that I gave him too much credit and myself not enough?again, utterly in character. Back in the days when I was trying to get my feet wet as a writer, I would say to my friends, "I want to be L. Sprague de Camp when I grow up." That was more than half a lifetime ago; I realize now, as I didn't then, how foolish I was. There was, and could be, only one of Sprague. Even so, in another sense I wasn't so far wrong after all. I could have picked a great many worse models, and very few better ones. I miss him.

A Land of Romance

David Drake

The marketing bullpen at Strangeco Headquarters held seventy-five desks. Howard Jones was the only person in the huge room when the phone began ringing. He ignored the sound and went on with what he was doing.

It was a wrong number?it had to be. Nobody'd be calling seriously on a Sunday morning.

Dynamic 25-year-old executive… Howard sucked in his gut as he typed, not that there was much gut to worry about. Ready to take on adventurous new challenges…

The phone continued to ring. It could be the manager of one of the Middle Eastern outlets where they kept a Friday-Saturday weekend, with a problem that only a bold?a swashbuckling?marketing professional like Howard Jones could take on. Did Strangeco have a branch in the Casbah of Algiers?