The Fallible Fiend

Zdim is a demon of the Twelfth Plane. At college he has studied the ways of humans on the Prime Plane, looking into their language, history and customs. For this reason Zdim has been chosen as the next candidate to be sent to earth in obedience to the summoning spell of a great enchanter. There Zdim is bound to obey, no matter how strange the commands seem to him. On arriving on Earth Zdim finds to his embarrassment that book learning has not really prepared him for the practicalities of the topsy-turvey world of the Prime Plane. Zdim the very rational, but perhaps slow thinking and literal minded academic must struggle to find his feet in the new world. Can he rise to the challenge? De Camp has written a witty, tongue-in-cheek novel that entertains, beguiles and to a degree excites the reader. The author's secret is that he writes in the first person from a demon's point of view, thus much of what we accept as normal (if not good) is seen in a new light. De Camp examines mankind's darker side, probing bigotry, greed, war and conceit, but all of this is done in a quizzical, light-hearted way that does not lecture us or make us feel we are being preached to. In this way De Camp is following in the footsteps of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels (Penguin Classics) (1726) which also lamooned man's senseless flaws. Once again like Swift, De Camp relies on changes of geographical location and the resulting changes of characters to keep the story rolling along and the reader's attention up. Like Gulliver, Zdim wanders the world from place to place learning about man's greed here and bigotry there. As a result the book is episodic, but there is some progression of character and inter-relationship of episodes that make this book more than just pulp fiction.

Whether it's SF or Fantasy, writing humorously is when de Camp is at his best. De Camp's use of language isn't what readers are use to anymore. He demands his readers' attention which isn't a bad thing at all. The language along with that `clash of cultures' theme helps bring out the humor. Zdim is a demon, conjured by a wizard, into a world where he just doesn't want to be. He's also a lousy indentured servant. He thinks-too literally-for his own good. And throughout the story he never quite gets the hang of humans or the Primal Plane (or rather the 12th plan being that he knows he's from the Primal Plane). Of course, one misadventure leads to another. The book is a short and fast read. That never goes wrong.

de Camp uses his common fantasy setting of Novaria for this book, and throws a typical plot twist by having a demon as the central character. Mind you, a demon in this sense is simply a being from another dimension, and Zdim happens to be a mild mannered, scholarly sort of being who (for instance) tries to trade off on his boyhood freindship with the magistrate to avoid the summons to serve on the human plane in exchange for iron. Zdim just wants to stay home, bite his wife, raise rabbages and help hatch the kidlings.But he is denied a wavier and whence the adventure begins.de Camp's one central grace for me is he writes about people. His villians will look at you and say, "Me, a villian? But you, dear sir, are far more a villian!" And they mean it, spouting viewpoints which are (in the villian's sense) perfectly logical (if not exactly moral). Culture clash is often the center of his stories. Take a demon skilled in logic and reason and throw him in with barbaric humans and you wind up with non stop exasperation and amazement at the duplicity involved. As Zdim points out, 'feindishly clever' is quiet a strange racial tag for the incessantly cunning and devious humans to come up with!"I endeavor to give satisfaction," is perhaps the exasperated catch phrase of the de Camp books.

After many years searching for a copy of this work, I finally came accross one a few months back. It is classic DeCamp. Who else would use a Fiend or Demon as the protagonist is a story and pull it off. How did he accomplish this you might ask? Simple, he does a wonderful job rationalizing its actions by creating a social structure in which it conforms to. By doing this he has created a Demon the reading can relate to. So when our hero is forced into enslavement in the human plane (which is much more caotic than his own) the comedic floodgates are open. As in most of DeCamp's works the humor mixed with great storytelling is unsurpassed. I recommend this work (if you can find it) to anyone who is in need for a little escapism which does not attempt to take itself too seriously.