L. Ron Hubbard and L. Sprague de Camp were fellow science fiction and fantasy authors in the 1930s and ’40s. Both resided in New York City off and on to be near the editors of the popular fiction they so famously wrote.
They were each known for their humorous styles. “The Last Drop” is a whimsical product of their singular joint effort. It was first published in November of 1941.
Little was recorded of their relationship. But many years later, L. Ron Hubbard wrote an article mentioning de Camp that gives a flavor of the time in which this story was written. Here is an excerpt.
“I guess I must have written the line ‘By L. Ron Hubbard’ many thousands of times between 1930 and 1950.
“And every time I wrote it I had a sense of starting something pleasing, something exciting and, it worked out, something that would sell. Ninety-three and one-half percent of everything I wrote was accepted first draft, first submission.
“I wrote adventure, detective stories, air stories, science fiction, fantasy, technical articles, you name it.
“Production was about 100,000 words a month most months, done on an electric typewriter, working an average of three hours a day, three days a week.
“Arthur J. Burks, Ed Bodin, Bob Heinlein, John Campbell, Willy Ley, Isaac Asimov, these and the rest of the greats were my friends.
“I shuttled between New York and Hollywood with way stops at a hideous rainy ranch in Puget Sound.
“When I took time off, I went on expeditions to freshen up the old viewpoint.…
“The dear old days. The good old days. The exciting, hard-working, screaming rush old days.…
“Only six hundred writers total wrote the full story output of America. And only two hundred of them were the hard-core professionals.…
“Ah, the old names, L. Sprague de Camp, Fletcher Pratt, Robert Bloch, Ed Hamilton, Frank Belknap Long, dear old Edd Cartier and his fantastic beautiful illustrations, names still going, names forgotten.
“All for the ‘by line.’
“The petty squabbles, the friendly enmities.
“I look back now and love them all.
“We were quite a crew.
“We made and popularized the space age.
“We got the show on the road.
“And the other day I heard they have a personnel down in the War Department who reads everything we ever wrote, trying to see if there’s any hint or invention they’ve missed.
“Well, all those years I was also working on mental technology. The last advance had been with Freud in 1894. Because I knew that someday Man would need it if he ever got into space.
“And so I stepped off the bandwagon in 1950 and let them carry on.
“They’ve gone on splendidly, those old writers. They’ve come up to a stature more like gods than men.
“And I love them all and all my fans and wish them well and well again.”
Chris Arias was born in 1997 in Cartago, Costa Rica, a small farming town on the slopes of an extinct volcano. Chris has been passionate about art ever since he could hold a pencil in his right hand. He was inspired by the fantastic stories about goblins, witches, knights, and dragons that his mother told during their long walks through the local mountains and forests.
Chris comes from a humble family that couldn’t afford art classes during his childhood, and so he learned to draw by copying art from video games, comics, and cartoons.
It wasn’t until he entered university that he attended his first art class. In 2021 Chris graduated from UCCART with a degree in fine arts.
His passion for fantasy and science fiction and the support of his family have driven him to follow his dreams to become an artist in these genres.
Chris was a former winner of the Illustrators of the Future Contest and was first featured in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future Volume 39.
To see more of his work, go to https://www.artstation.com/chris_arias