The Complete Compleat Enchanter
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The Complete Compleat Enchanter is an omnibus collection of five classic fantasy stories by science fiction and fantasy authors L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, gathering material previously published in three volumes as The Incomplete Enchanter (1941), The Castle of Iron (1950), and Wall of Serpents (1960), and represents an expansion of the earlier omnibus The Compleat Enchanter, which contained only the material in the first two volumes. The expanded version also differs from the previous omnibus by omitting its afterword, de Camp's essay "Fletcher and I", and adding a new preface by David Drake. The Complete Compleat Enchanter is the first edition of the authors' Harold Shea series to be complete in one volume. It was first published in paperback by Baen Books in 1989, and has been reprinted a number of times since. The stories in the collection were originally published in magazine form in the May 1940, August 1940 and April 1941 issues of Unknown, the June 1953 issue of Beyond Fantasy, and the October 1954 issue of Fantasy Magazine.
The Harold Shea stories are parallel world tales in which universes where magic works coexist with our own, and in which those based on the mythologies, legends, and literary fantasies of our world and can be reached by aligning one's mind to them by a system of symbolic logic. Psychologist Harold Shea and his colleagues Reed Chalmers, Walter Bayard, and Vaclav Polacek (Votsy), travel to several such worlds, joined in the course of their adventures by Belphebe and Florimel of Faerie, who become the wives of Shea and Chalmers, and Pete Brodsky, a policeman who is accidentally swept up into the chaos. The five stories collected in The Complete Compleat Enchanter explore the worlds of Norse mythology in "The Roaring Trumpet," Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in "The Mathematics of Magic," Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (with a brief stop in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Kubla Khan) in "The Castle of Iron," the Kalevala in "The Wall of Serpents," and Irish mythology in "The Green Magician."
Contents:
- "Preface" (by David Drake)
- "The Roaring Trumpet"
- "The Mathematics of Magic"
- "The Castle of Iron"
- "The Wall of Serpents"
- "The Green Magician"
Following publication of The Complete Compleat Enchanter, the Harold Shea series was continued by de Camp in partnership with Christopher Stasheff and other authors in the anthologies The Enchanter Reborn and The Exotic Enchanter.
| Preceded by: none |
Harold Shea Series The Compleat Enchanter (= The Incomplete Enchanter, The Castle of Iron, and Wall of Serpents) |
Succeeded by: The Enchanter Reborn |
