Free (DRM-free) Lest Darkness Fall by L. Sprague de Camp [Classic Sci-Fi Time Travel]

[ATDrake]

Lest Darkness Fall & Related Stories by the late L. Sprague de Camp (ISFDB, Wikipedia, Science Fiction Encyclopedia) et al. is his vintage classic standalone time travel historical redirection science fiction novel (plus extras) starring a modern man thrown back into the last days of the Western Roman Empire, using his engineering knowledge to try and stave off the Dark Ages via jumpstarting technological progress, free courtesy of publisher Phoenix Pick Press, who are e-printing it from its 1941 edition originally out from Henry Holt.

This is their featured Free Book of the Month selection for September. This edition contains not only the original novel, but also some follow-up short stories further exploring the setting by the late SFWA Grandmaster Frederik Pohl, and also authors S. M. Stirling & David Drake, as well as a retrospective afterword by science fiction critics Alexei (ISFDB, Wikipedia) & Cory Panshin (ISFDB, Wikipedia).

Currently free through September directly @ the publisher's dedicated promo page (DRM-free ePub & Mobi available worldwide in return for your valid email address; follow the instructions to reset the price to $0.00 in the cart before checkout)

There's also a tie-in offer for the 5-book bundle of his non-sfnal standalone historical fiction novels set in Ancient Greece and Persia, for just $9. You, like me, might have already purchased the extra books when they were offered on sale alongside the previous PPP de Camp freebie, which was for An Elephant for Aristotle in 2015.

Description
Rarely do books have such a great influence on a genre as Lest Darkness Fall has had on science fiction. Frequently quoted as one of the “favorite” books of many of the masters of the field, this book by L. Sprague de Camp helped establish time-travel as a solid sub-genre of science fiction.

An indication of the influence and longevity of the book is the number of best-selling writers who have written stories in direct response to, or been influenced by, Lest Darkness Fall. This new volume includes three such stories by Frederik Pohl, David Drake and S. M. Stirling written over a period of forty-three years—a testament to the timelessness of the book.

Similar, thematically, to Mark Twain’s A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, the book tells the tale of Martin Padway who, as he is walking around in modern Rome, is suddenly transported though time to 6th Century Rome.

Once in ancient Rome, Padway (now Martinus Paduei, Quaestor), embarks on an ambitious project of single-handedly changing history.

L. Sprague de Camp was a student of history (and the author of a number of popular works on the subject). In Lest Darkness Fall he combines his extensive knowledge of the workings of ancient Rome with his extraordinary imagination to create one of the best books of time travel ever written.

[cromag]

This is one of the greats! I loved Lest Darkness Fall when I first read it, decades ago! I bought it as soon as the ebook was available.

[gbm]

I highly recommend downloading the modi file and converting it to epub using calibre if epub is your preferred format.

This is a very good deal especially since it includes The Deadly Mission of of Phineas Snodgrass by Frederik Pohl.
bernie

[DNSB]

Not sure about the .mobi format of Lest Darkness Fall with additional stories but the epub is a mess. Count it folks, 1 file for the content with none of this nonsense of splitting at chapter boundaries, no stylesheet and no style.

I love the story and purchased it as an ebook the first time I found it available and I do like the added content but the amateurishness of the production.

[svenlind]

Originally Posted by DNSB

Not sure about the .mobi format of Lest Darkness Fall with additional stories but the epub is a mess. Count it folks, 1 file for the content with none of this nonsense of splitting at chapter boundaries, no stylesheet and no style.

I love the story and purchased it as an ebook the first time I found it available and I do like the added content but the amateurishness of the production.

I remember the book from a long time ago and decided to purchase it. I paid $2 because I like to pay for services rendered.

But it is indeed a mess, at least the epub version. Formatting is very bad and you can't change the very small textsize. I tried this in the Marvin, Mapleread and Hyphen ebook readers.

Embedding a font using Calibre made it at least possible to increase the textsize. So the book is now readable.

Edit: The Calibre ebook reader could handle the original epub in my Windows PC.

[svenlind]

Originally Posted by gbm

I highly recommend downloading the modi file and converting it to epub using calibre if epub is your preferred format.

This is a very good deal especially since it includes The Deadly Mission of of Phineas Snodgrass by Frederik Pohl.
bernie

The MOBI version is indeed better formatted. So follow gbm's advice

[JSWolf]

Phoenix Pick is awful at crating eBooks.They have no clue what they are doing.

[Manabi]

Originally Posted by JSWolf

Phoenix Pick is awful at crating eBooks.They have no clue what they are doing.

Given that they do produce some decently (if not amazingly) formatted ones on occasion, I think it's more they know but just don't care. The mobi being okay while the epub is a disaster on this one is a good example. No one cared to fix the epub's problems, or no one cared to check it pre-release to discover the problems.

Edit: Also, how do you crate eBooks, do you have to print them first?

[DNSB]

Originally Posted by svenlind

I remember the book from a long time ago and decided to purchase it. I paid $2 because I like to pay for services rendered.

But it is indeed a mess, at least the epub version. Formatting is very bad and you can't change the very small textsize. I tried this in the Marvin, Mapleread and Hyphen ebook readers.

Embedding a font using Calibre made it at least possible to increase the textsize. So the book is now readable.

Edit: The Calibre ebook reader could handle the original epub in my Windows PC.

Possibly having the font sizes being in an absolute format which pretty much makes them non-scaleable.

Here's a sample:

<p style="font-size:11.5pt; line-height:120%; margin:0pt; orphans:0; text-align:justify; widows:0"><span style="color:#000000; font-family:serif; font-size:11.5pt">

Let us offer a cheer for redundancy -- how many times do you need 11.5pt as the font size -- the average through the book was 2.5 times per paragraph.

I wasted 20 minutes using Sigil and regex to clean up the book and add a stylesheet. The unpacked size of the files shrank from 1488211 to 930333 though the packed file size increased by 9KB -- repeated ASCII text compresses very well. My ereader was much happier with the final result.

[ATDrake]

Just a reminder that today will probably be the last day to pick up the freebie and/or purchase the tie-in bundle, if you haven't already.

[maddz]

Got the bundle, thanks. I've had Lest Darkness Fall & The Dragon of the Ishtar Gate for many years in print copies, but I've not come across his other historicals before.

If anyone can pm me step-by-step instructions on how to clean up the epubs, I would be grateful. It looks like I will be having a great deal of time on my hands by Christmas (redundancy), and there's only so much housework I can stand doing in one day... Cleaning up ebook files will occupy my time nicely (I need to clean up Gillian Bradshaw's Island of Ghosts which is riddled with OCR errors in the Kindle edition).