{"product_id":"lest-darkness-fall-and-timeless-tales-told-in-tribute-1","title":"Lest Darkness Fall and Timeless Tales Told in Tribute","description":"\u003cp\u003eFew books have shaped a genre the way Lest Darkness Fall has shaped science fiction. L. Sprague de Camp's novel helped establish alternate history as a subgenre, and the masters of the field have named it a favorite ever since.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eRome, 1938. The archaeologist Martin Padway is standing near the Pantheon when lightning cracks - and drops him into the Rome of 535, a city sliding toward the Dark Ages.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003ePadway decides to stop it. He starts small: a copper still, a loan from a Syrian banker whose clerks he wins over by teaching them Arabic numerals and double-entry bookkeeping. Then a printing press. A newspaper. A semaphore telegraph strung across Italy. Then a deposed Gothic king who makes him quaestor - and Belisarius, the finest general in Byzantium, marching to take Rome back.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThematically close to Mark Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court, but built on real scholarship. De Camp was a serious student of history and the author of several popular works on the subject. He knew how sixth-century Rome actually worked, down to its banking, and he joined that knowledge to an extraordinary imagination to produce one of the finest time-travel novels ever written.\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe book's influence shows in the writers who answered it. The original tribute volume reprinted three stories - by Frederik Pohl, David Drake, and S. M. Stirling - written over forty-three years. This edition adds two brand-new stories by Harry Turtledove and David Weber, plus an afterword by Alexei and Cory Panshin, adapted from their Hugo-winning The World Beyond the Hill.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Phoenix Pick","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50369613136229,"sku":"9781649732064","price":34.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0852\/0538\/5573\/files\/imageloader_a8a3bb12-103c-4f4f-9097-755cd0d05cc3.jpg?v=1790530541","url":"https:\/\/paralleluniversebooks.com\/products\/lest-darkness-fall-and-timeless-tales-told-in-tribute-1","provider":"Parallel Universe Books","version":"1.0","type":"link"}