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The Wheels of If
Pocket Book soft cover
- GenresScience Fiction
191 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1940
22 people want to read
About the author
L. Sprague de Camp
764 books314 followersLyon Sprague de Camp was an American author of science fiction, fantasy and non-fiction literature. In a career spanning 60 years, he wrote over 100 books, both novels and works of non-fiction, including biographies of other fantasy authors. He was a major figure in science fiction in the 1930s and 1940s.
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
December 8, 2019
This is THE BOOK that started it all for me. Went to the bookmobile by my house in the summer of 1959. The cover of this book grabbed my attention. Took it home and devoured it, though it was way above my reading comprehension level and I grasped little of it at age 12. When I put it down I was a different person, changed in the brain, to become a person who would forever be on the quest for "what if?". The Wheels of If transported me into a world of infinite possiblilities and in that moment I became the inveterate scifi reader I am today, which over the years formed the life I have led, the education I got, the friends I have, the movies I love, and the eager hope for the coming of the new and the strange. Thank you Mr. deCamp.
December 12, 2019
Let's call it a 2.5?
The hard bit about sci-fi is that it so often is either deeply hard-boiled or deeply self-indulgent. De Camp's collection of stories is thankfully in the former realm, but the ideal would be something a bit apart from either.
It's the hard bit because good sci-fi needs to ask "what if." The title story, as you might imagine, has this in spades: the entire concept is about parallel existence, what would happen if something small was different in history. More specifically, it touches on what would occur if someone got unstuck from his own reality and began living as the men he would have been in alternate ones. This roulette wheel approach leads to a fairly interesting set of events, mornings in surprising realities, long term "vacations" in the body of others. De Camp wisely gives us a series of false starts before settling on an alternate world where our narrator is captive, allowing us to get into a long form story before the ever-changing conceit gets tiring. The issue, however, comes down to the solution. The idea of the alternate universes, after all, needs to be explored in a story, and that story has our protagonist living a double life, ascending through politics in the new world, and generally taking the long, bureaucratic way around resolving his predicament. It becomes amazing how dry the tale becomes. And therein is the other hard bit of the hard boiled: often, too much detail is given. In "The Merman," we go through every motion of a day when a man finds he can suddenly only breathe underwater, down to the specifics of breathing and the difficulties of eating lunch (with a fairly absurd ending, to boot). "The Warrior Race" tells of wars won by the slow decay of ideals, and "The Best Laid Scheme" imbues more action in the turning of time travel watches than the chase occurring by their aid. Detail added to create a level of realism often simply recreates the tedium of reality.
While "The Wheels of If" was where the highlights were, I think "The Gnarly Man" was likely the strongest story in the collection overall, with its evolutionary mystery, inevitable betrayal, and relatively minimal lawyer talk (though sadly, a fairly one-dimensional female lead). Overall, though, this wasn't meant for me.
The hard bit about sci-fi is that it so often is either deeply hard-boiled or deeply self-indulgent. De Camp's collection of stories is thankfully in the former realm, but the ideal would be something a bit apart from either.
It's the hard bit because good sci-fi needs to ask "what if." The title story, as you might imagine, has this in spades: the entire concept is about parallel existence, what would happen if something small was different in history. More specifically, it touches on what would occur if someone got unstuck from his own reality and began living as the men he would have been in alternate ones. This roulette wheel approach leads to a fairly interesting set of events, mornings in surprising realities, long term "vacations" in the body of others. De Camp wisely gives us a series of false starts before settling on an alternate world where our narrator is captive, allowing us to get into a long form story before the ever-changing conceit gets tiring. The issue, however, comes down to the solution. The idea of the alternate universes, after all, needs to be explored in a story, and that story has our protagonist living a double life, ascending through politics in the new world, and generally taking the long, bureaucratic way around resolving his predicament. It becomes amazing how dry the tale becomes. And therein is the other hard bit of the hard boiled: often, too much detail is given. In "The Merman," we go through every motion of a day when a man finds he can suddenly only breathe underwater, down to the specifics of breathing and the difficulties of eating lunch (with a fairly absurd ending, to boot). "The Warrior Race" tells of wars won by the slow decay of ideals, and "The Best Laid Scheme" imbues more action in the turning of time travel watches than the chase occurring by their aid. Detail added to create a level of realism often simply recreates the tedium of reality.
While "The Wheels of If" was where the highlights were, I think "The Gnarly Man" was likely the strongest story in the collection overall, with its evolutionary mystery, inevitable betrayal, and relatively minimal lawyer talk (though sadly, a fairly one-dimensional female lead). Overall, though, this wasn't meant for me.
March 30, 2024
I came across a very old and worn copy of this that fell apart page by page as I read it. The stories in it are very classic old school science fiction. If you can get your hands on a copy that won’t disintegrate while you read it take that opportunity.
October 28, 2018
An entertaining collection of de Camp's best known short stories
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews