Admiral of the Little Wooden Navies and Dean of the Ipsy-Wipsy Institute
L. Sprague de Camp, left, and Fletcher Pratt, 1941.
When I was eleven or twelve I uncritically, but obsessively, read every scrap of science fiction I could put my hands on. This primarily meant every back-number sf magazine I could buy for a nickel (as against the extortionate 25¢ cover price for current issues on a newsstand) in the second-hand magazine store. One of the first of those, I think, was an early Amazing Stories Quarterly, and its principal content was a novel called A Voice Across the Years.
It was, I must say now — though I didn’t realize it at the time — a quite undistinguished story, although an unusual one in two respects. In the story, a couple of human beings from Earth have somehow or other happened to land on a civilized planet far, far away, where they are welcomed by being given wardrobes of new clothing. The garments fit them perfectly, because each one was custom made by a machine that measured every part of them and then cut and stitched fabric to an exact fit.
I had not seen any such voluminous discussion of science-fictional tailoring, or indeed of any kind of haberdashery, in any other story, and I was fascinated. I am afraid that at the time I may have been suffering from the delusion that every marvelous invention I saw described in any story was probably going to become reality before long — after all, that’s what had happened with radio, the airplane, the submarine and many other marvels, hadn’t it? So I thought it likely that before long Macy’s would have these machines in their boys’ department to make my first machine-created pair of knickers. (Please remember that I was then maybe eleven years old.)
The other unusual thing about the story was its by-line. It was signed “by Fletcher Pratt and I.M. Stephens.” I had never seen a joint byline before. I had never heard of collaboration. Did it mean that two different people had somehow written a single story? And if so, how?
However they did it, it sounded sort of unpleasant to me — certainly not like anything I would ever want to do myself.
Before long, I was turning up more stories by this Fletcher Pratt person and — wouldn’t you know it? — at least some of those were collaborations, too. The one that I remember was called “The City of the Living Dead,” written with someone named Laurence Manning, and it was a real shocker. In this future-era city, there were many, many people, but all of them were hooked up to some sort of wonderful dream machines, so realistic and so wonderful that their dreams were preferable to normal waking life.
This one, I remember, appeared in a new magazine called Science Wonder Stories in a 1930 issue. Another new magazine, this one called Astounding Stories of Super Science, and also dated from 1930, had appeared. Clearly something had happened to multiply science-fiction magazines
As time passed, and I became financially able to buy my science fiction in the normal commercial, newsstand fashion, Pratt kept turning up with a series of other collaborators. Shortly after World War II finally packed itself in, there were several works with my old pre-war fellow Futurian, Walter Kubilius, then an enormously long string of them under the over-all title of Tales from Gavagan’s Bar, 
I might have neglected them, that sort of thing not really being my sort of thing, but along the way I had found out that this Pratt fellow was really a hell of a fine military and naval historian. I had discovered this for myself when I happened to pick up a copy of his A Short History of the Civil War: Ordeal by Fire, 
It wasn’t just his writing that made him famous in those circles. He had invented, and supervised the development and use of, the fleets of inch-long wooden models of every important vessel in the World Wars I and II fleets of every important naval power that formed the basis of his famous Naval War Game.
To be sure, Toys R Us will sell you all the war games you like, in dosages calculated from the eight-year-olds and up. Fletcher Pratt’s game was nothing like those.
Its players were military scholars, naval officers, war correspondents and members of naval history groups. Their games lasted for hours, sometimes many hours, and the written rules of engagement ran to many pages. To play the game required teams of players and many square feet of floor space. It required, in fact, the vast living room of the Pratt apartment on 67th Street in Manhattan, steps from Fifth Avenue and not much more than a block from the southeast corner of Central Park.
It was a very useful apartment for other purposes as well, as we discovered once Fletcher and his wife, Inga, had been integrated into the New York science-fiction community, even if it did smell somewhat of monkeys.
To be continued, eventually.
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Michael Walsh says:
Great last line … leave ‘em wanting more!
December 7, 2010, 9:06 amBill Higgins-- Beam Jockey says:
Fletcher Pratt also wrote a book on secret codes. Here’s an account of 80-year-old David Kahn, celebrated historian of cryptography, who credits Pratt’s book with inspiring him. It’s by Jonathan Pitts of the Baltimore Sun:
http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/anne-arundel/bs-ar-cryptology-1114-20101114,0,6720171.story
Quoting Pitts:
================
It isn’t everyone who can pinpoint the moment his or her life took its future shape. Kahn can. It happened when he was 13, strolling past the public library in his hometown of Great Neck, N.Y.
A book lay in a display case, and the title caught his eye. ” ‘Secret and Urgent!’ Did that draw me in!” he says in a phone interview from Great Neck, where he still lives.
Kahn devoured the breezy work (its subtitle: “The Story of Codes and Ciphers”), his mind reeling at how the author, a man named Fletcher Pratt, laid out some of the classic processes for breaking ciphers.
[...Later, Pitts describes a talk Kahn gave to the National Security Agency...]
When it was over, more than one audience member sought him out to say, in effect, that Kahn was their own Fletcher Pratt, his first book their “Secret and Urgent!”
“I read ‘The Codebreakers’ and decided to go into codes,” he remembers one young cryptologist saying. “You changed my life.’ ”
December 7, 2010, 9:27 am================
Rich Rostrom says:
Ah, the Fletcher Pratt naval wargame. The “Splashmarks” club in Chicago played FP games once a month for many years. We used to rent gyms and church auditoriums (I was the treasurer). I still have a modest collection of 1/1200 ship models, and “ship cards” and other paperwork for the game. Heck, I think I can still recall Pratt’s formula for a ship’s “point value”.
I know JW Campbell was one of the players.
Today is Pearl Harbor Day.
In “Grumbles From the Grave”, there’s a letter from Heinlein dated January 4, 1942. In it RAH rebukes “yourself [Campbell], Pratt, and company” for wild (and in RAH’s opinion destructive and irresponsible) talk about the Pearl Harbor disaster, and for excusing themselves as Navy fans and ship lovers.
December 7, 2010, 12:40 pmDwight Decker says:
For what it’s worth, one of the pulp-reprint outfits recently put out a facsimile reprint of PLANET STORIES #1 (Winter, 1939), and one of the stories therein is “Expedition to Pluto” by Fletcher Pratt and Laurance Manning. Ah, they just don’t write ‘em like they used to… (Female newscaster traveling with the expedition complains when one of the crewmen, someone she knew in school, tries to keep her “out of the control room so I wouldn’t hurt myself! Wake up, Mr. Longworth, this is 2432; you’re still living back in the nineteen-hundreds, when woman’s place was in the home.”)
December 7, 2010, 1:21 pmStefan Jones says:
And of course, another SF great, H.G. Wells, wrote an early set of ground-combat miniatures rules. A much simpler and game-like game, with no real attempt at simulation; Pratt’s game probably helped inspire the simulation-heavy war games popular in the 60s and 70s.
December 7, 2010, 4:14 pmGreg Costikyan says:
Actually, TRU carries very little that can be termed a ‘wargame’ today; you need to go to specialist hobby game shops for that. (Or download sites for the digital variety.) However, gamers consider Pratt’s Naval Rules historically important to evolution of both military miniature and board wargaming. The ’63 article you link to is, however, somewhat risible in its claim that the Naval Rules were then the “most complicated game in the world;” by tabletop gaming standards, they’re pretty light, and by 1963, Avalon Hill was already publishing board wargames of a higher degree of complexity. But then, what you can you expect from Sports Illustrated.
December 7, 2010, 4:18 pmBill Higgins-- Beam Jockey says:
Dwight Decker reads this blog! Cool!
December 7, 2010, 4:54 pmDwight Decker says:
Of course I read this blog. Our genial host is giving us a postgraduate course in the history of science fiction. Secrets are revealed, mysteries are solved, people long gone live again in memory, and the price of admission for all this wonder is no more than the effort to type a web address. That’s what’s REALLY cool!
December 8, 2010, 8:48 amJames Davis Nicoll says:
Oh, I remember selling Platt’s Naval Rules (in a small stapled booklet, back when staples were still acceptable in commercial products) in my game store back in the 1980s.
Am I right in remembering that it had a section advising against allowing women – specifically wives, I think – to play, on the grounds that they win too often?
December 8, 2010, 10:54 amGreg Morrow says:
Pratt’s other collaboration with De Camp was an important foundational document for me in fantasy. By which I mean, I was twelve, it was awesome, and I’ll argue to the death that it is still awesome.
December 8, 2010, 2:26 pmjim fuerstenberg says:
A group of friends and I used to play (in the 1970s) using Fletcher Pratt’s rules…we had a fleet of 1:1200 scale ships…and large basement floors available…we did play another group in a competition on the floor of a gymnasium once. Great fun.
January 6, 2011, 12:17 pmjim fuerstenberg says:
Just read RR’s comment…we were in the same group.
January 6, 2011, 12:18 pmAnton Sherwood says:
There’s a novel in which a time traveler’s scheme fails because the only book he’s read on the relevant history is (iirc) Pratt’s, which omits John Brown’s raid on Harpers Ferry. Who wrote that one?
March 21, 2011, 12:13 am