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Harold Shea is the protagonist of five science fantasy stories by the collaborative team of L. Sprague de Camp and Fletcher Pratt, as well as later stories by de Camp alone, Christopher Stasheff, Holly Lisle, John Maddox Roberts, Roland J. Green, Frieda A. Murray, Tom Wham, and Lawrence Watt-Evans. De Camp and Stasheff collectively oversaw the continuations. The series is also known as the " Enchanter" series, the " Incomplete Enchanter" series (after the first collection of stories) or the " Compleat Enchanter" series.
In the original five stories, psychologist Harold Shea and his colleagues Reed Chalmers, Walter Bayard, and Vaclav Polacek (Votsy) travel to various parallel worlds where ancient myths or old literature are reality. In the course of their travels, other characters are added to the main cast, notably Belphebe and Florimel, who become the wives of Shea and Chalmers, respectively, and Pete Brodsky, a policeman who is accidentally swept up into the chaos. In the later continuations, the most notable additions to the cast are the recurring villain Malambroso and Voglinda, the young daughter of Shea and Belphebe.
Much of the series' attraction stems from the interaction of the psychologists' logical, rationalistic viewpoints with the wildly counterintuitive physics of the worlds they visit. Their attitudes provide something of a deconstructionist look at the basic rationales of these worlds, hitherto unexamined either by their inhabitants or even their original creators. They allow the reader to view these worlds from a fresh viewpoint. The "worlds" so examined include not only the Norse world of "The Roaring Trumpet", but also the worlds of Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene in "The Mathematics of Magic", Ludovico Ariosto's Orlando Furioso (with a brief stop in Samuel Taylor Coleridge's Xanadu from "Kubla Khan") in "The Castle of Iron", the Kalevala in "The Wall of Serpents", and, at last, Irish mythology in "The Green Magician".
With "The Green Magician" the original collaboration ended, Pratt's early death precluding any additional entries. A final planned story set in the world of Persian mythology was never written, nor was a projected response to L. Ron Hubbard's misuse of their hero in his novella The Case of the Friendly Corpse (1941). (De Camp would finally address the latter issue in "Sir Harold and the Gnome King".)
Reviewing the 1950 edition of The Castle of Iron, Anthony Boucher and McComas described the series as "a high point in the application of sternest intellectual logic to screwball fantasy"."Recommended Reading," F&SF, December 1950, p.104 Damon Knight characterized the series as "relaced, ribald adventure ... priceless," saying that "no fantasy reader should be without them.""The Dissecting Table", Worlds Beyond, December 1950, p.114 In 1977 Richard A. Lupoff described the series as "whole planes above the hackneyed gut-spillers and skull-smashers that pass for heroic fantasy.""Lupoff's Book Week", Algol 28, 1977, p. 56.
The initial impulse for the continuation may have been the successful adaptation of the characters into Tom Wham's authorized gamebook adventure Prospero's Isle, published by Tor Books in October 1987 (the basis of "Harold Sheakespeare"), to which de Camp had contributed an admiring introduction. This may have encouraged him to wrap up long-unresolved loose ends from the original series, such as the stranding of Walter Bayard in the world of Irish mythology, and to resolve the unaddressed complication introduced by L. Ron Hubbard's "borrowing" of Harold Shea for use in his novel The Case of the Friendly Corpse. Both of these goals he accomplished in Sir Harold and the Gnome King (1990 chapbook). When the decision was made to continue the series further, this story was revised slightly to reconcile it with the other new stories, though the fit is somewhat awkward.
Once the loose ends are resolved, most of the action in the second sequence involves Shea and Chalmers' quest across several universes to rescue Florimel, who has been kidnapped by the malevolent enchanter Malambroso. After Florimel is finally recovered, a similar effort must be made to recover Shea and Belphebe's daughter Voglinda, likewise seized by the unrepentant Malambroso. A final tale sends Shea and Belephebe on an unrelated adventure precipitated by the foolishness of Shea's colleague Polacek.
Milieus encountered in the second series include the worlds of Irish myth and the Orlando Furioso (again) in "Professor Harold and the Trustees", L. Ron Hubbard's setting from The Case of the Friendly Corpse and L. Frank Baum's land of Oz in "Sir Harold and the Gnome King", the classical China epic novel Journey to the West in "Sir Harold and the Monkey King," the romantic fantasies of Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote (with the unique twist of its being Quixote's version of reality rather than Cervantes') in "Knight and the Enemy", Virgil's Graeco-Roman epic the Aeneid in "Arms and the Enchanter", the old Tale of Igor's Campaign in "Enchanter Kiev," Bhavabhuti's Baital Pachisi (or "Vikram and the Vampire"), a proto- Arabian Nights collection of tales, in "Sir Harold and the Hindu King", Edgar Rice Burroughs' Barsoom in "Sir Harold of Zodanga", and William Shakespeare's The Tempest in "Harold Sheakespeare".
There exists one additional contribution to the series; "Return to Xanadu" by Lawrence Watt-Evans, which revisits the world of Kubla Khan and transfers a minor character appearing therein to that of The Arabian Nights by the agency of an unnamed magician who appears to be intended to represent L. Sprague de Camp himself. "Return to Xanadu" was first published in edited by Harry Turtledove and published by Baen Books in 2005.
The Incomplete Enchanter and The Castle of Iron have also been issued together as The Compleat Enchanter (1975); Wall of Serpents has also been issued under the title The Enchanter Compleated (1980); all three volumes of the original series have also been issued together as The Complete Compleat Enchanter (1989). The original tales and de Camp's additions from the 1990s were issued together as (2007).
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