rchaeologist Martin Padway is passing through Italy on his way to a dig when he is struck by lightning. Instead of killing him, the bolt hurls him into the past, to a sixth-century Rome on the verge of invasion by the Byzantine emperor Justinian. Equipped with nothing more high-tech than a wristwatch and a decent command of history and science, Martin is obliged to face the spectacularly depressing fact that he is never going home.
Young, bright and ambitious, the young castaway barely mourns his old life before embarking on a reinvention of his identity. Taking the name Martinus, he gets to work immediately on ways to turn a profit with his 20th-century knowledge. He genially wangles a loan out of a friendly banker and then sets up shop as a brewer, the inventor of an enticing "new" drink called brandy. The little security Martin achieves, though, is almost certain to be snatched away if history plays out the way he remembers—he sees Justinian as being too intolerant of foreigners and the religious plurality that reigns in Rome.
Fearing that Justinian's rule might well have him prosecuted as a sorcerer, Martin supports the Ostrogoth rulers of Italy, busily turning his mind to the task of giving Rome a technological advantage over her military foes. Meddling in politics proves harder than he initially assumes, however, and soon the once-mighty empire faces invasion from all sides. Can a few modern devices help the Romans to hold out against her many enemies, or has Martin merely accelerated the fall into darkness that he hoped so desperately to prevent?
An optimistic tale of historical intervention
L. Sprague de Camp's Lest Darkness Fall is one of the founding works of the alternate-history genre, and a historical artifact in its own right. Published in 1939, its worldview shines with an idealistic confidence in American manhood as personified by Martin Padway. Brave, intelligent and resourceful, he bests everyone he encounters. Women swoon in his presence ... and then turn out to be so irrational that he dare not entangle himself with them. Martin never questions the ethics of tampering with world events. In one throwaway moment, he casually wipes the founding of Islam out of Earth's timeline!
This self-confidence is endearing, especially since Martin is in no sense infallible. He succeeds in about half of his invention attempts, particularly failing—despite great effort—to come up with a formula for gunpowder. His forays into international diplomacy are disastrous, his skill at swordplay so poor he nearly dies. These misadventures are wrapped in vivid historical detail, bringing Rome to life around its lone transplanted American.
Alternate histories written nowadays tend to focus on the shape taken by societies after a set point of historical divergence. Lest Darkness Fall is the story of a divergence in progress—Martin is striving to change the course of a phenomenally important event in European history. The irony is that he stands a fair chance of wiping out the culture that spawned him. It is clear that he will not create a paradox or wipe out his own birth, but despite a deep attachment to his identity as an American, this novel's protagonist never flinches from actions that will certainly remove the United States from history. De Camp does not linger on this contradiction, though, instead playing up the humor and giving readers scope to share Martin's infectious spirit of adventure.
