Book review: The Ancient Engineers (2005)

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.)

Thanks for those pointers, it looks like he wrote five "nongenre" novels, 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... and http://www.amazon.com/review/RG20DEV8YLX39/ref=cm_cr_rdp_per...

Thanks, that encyclopedia sounds interesting.

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

It's a fun little book.

Shorter but less colorful Kirkus review: https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book-reviews/l-sprague-de-camp...