

Book review: The Ancient Engineers (2005) - walterbell
http://snoqualmie.cementhorizon.com/archives/004093.html

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abecedarius
The author also wrote historical fiction set in antiquity with plenty of
engineering: _The Arrows of Hercules_ and _The Bronze God of Rhodes_ (and
others with fewer machines or that I haven't read).

I liked this book too. There's another section though where he confidently
attributes 19th- and 20th-century progress to a strong patent system. (I don't
expect newer books are more accurate on the whole; but it's harder to see
their biases.)

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walterbell
Thanks for those pointers, it looks like he wrote five "nongenre" novels,
[http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/ea.cgi?18](http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-
bin/ea.cgi?18) . I was looking at his time-travel collection, _Years in the
Making_.

Separately, Charles Singer edited a 1950's _History of Technology_
encyclopedia which is well respected:
[http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2013/07/28/the-history-of-
th...](http://www.hyperorg.com/blogger/2013/07/28/the-history-of-the-history-
of-technology/) and
[http://www.amazon.com/review/RG20DEV8YLX39/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per...](http://www.amazon.com/review/RG20DEV8YLX39/ref=cm_cr_rdp_perm?ie=UTF8&ASIN=019858105X)

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abecedarius
Thanks, that encyclopedia sounds interesting.

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justin66
The author is pretty off-base by calling L. Sprague de Camp "strange."

It's a fun little book.

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walterbell
Shorter but less colorful Kirkus review: [https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-
reviews/l-sprague-de-camp...](https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-
reviews/l-sprague-de-camp-14/the-ancient-engineers-2/)

