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The Eye of Tandyla

Field	Value
name	The Eye of Tandyla
image	[[File:The Eye of Tandyla.jpg	200px]]
caption	Virgil Finlay's illustration of
the story in Fantastic Adventures
author	L. Sprague de Camp
country	United States
language	English
series	Pusadian series
genre	Fantasy
published_in	Fantastic Adventures
media_type	Print (Magazine)
pub_date	May, 1951
preceded_by_italics	The Tritonian Ring
followed_by	The Owl and the Ape

the story in Fantastic Adventures "The Eye of Tandyla" is a fantasy story by American writer L. Sprague de Camp, part of his Pusadian series. It was first published in the magazine Fantastic Adventures for May, 1951, and first appeared in book form in de Camp's collection The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales (Twayne, 1953). The story has also appeared in the magazine Fantastic for November 1965, the anthologies Time Untamed (1967), The Magic of Atlantis (1970), Wizards (1983), and The Mammoth Book of Seriously Comic Fantasy (1999) (also published as The Mammoth Book of Comic Fantasy II), and the de Camp omnibus collection Lest Darkness Fall/Rogue Queen/The Tritonian Ring and Other Pusadian Tales (2014). It has also been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German and Russian.

Plot summary

The sorcerer Derezong Taash, in the service of King Vuar the Capricious of Lorsk, is ordered to steal a magical gem from the temple of the goddess Tandyla in Lotri. The jewel is set as an eye in the goddess's statue. Together with his apprentice Zhamel Seh, Taash undertakes the errand, which goes suspiciously well; its guardians almost seem to want it stolen, while the gem itself appears to want to stay with him. With a sense of foreboding, Taash decides he must return his prize to the temple while tricking the king into thinking he has truly supplied it, thus becoming unwittingly embroiled in a plot against the throne that reaches to the very heart of the royal family.

Chronologically, "The Eye of Tandyla" is the second of de Camp's Pusadian tales, and the first to feature his protagonists Derezong Taash and Zhamel Seh. It is set some generations after The Tritonian Ring, King Vuar of Lorsk being stated in the book to be a descendant of that novel's King Zhabutir.

Setting

In common with the other Pusadian tales, "The Eye of Tandyla" takes place in a prehistoric era during which a magic-based Atlantian civilization supposedly throve in what was then a single continent comprising Eurasia joined with Africa, and in the islands to the west. It is similar in conception to Robert E. Howard's Hyborian Age, by which it was inspired, but more astutely constructed, utilizing actual Ice Age geography in preference to a wholly invented one. In de Camp's scheme, the legend of this culture that came down to classic Greece as "Atlantis" was a garbled memory that conflated the mighty Tartessian Empire with the island continent of Pusad and the actual Atlantis, a barbaric mountainous region that is today the Atlas mountain range.

Notes

References

(1983). "De Camp: An L. Sprague de Camp Bibliography". Underwood/Miller.
{{ISFDB title. 61304

Info: Wikipedia Source

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