Turtledove begins with de Camp's impact on his own life. At the age of fifteen, Turtledove picked up a copy of Lest Darkness Fall at a second hand bookstore which sparked an interest in the Byzantine Empire. After Turtledove flunked out of CalTech, he pursued a history degree and eventually a doctorate at UCLA majoring in Byzantine history. There he met and eventually married Laura Frankos. As he dryly notes, other than that finding Lest Darkness Fall didn't change his life at all. (See Mary Renault in the Supervolcano trilogy for how Turtledove incorporated this aspect of his life into the fictional life of his character Bryce Miller. Renault is also mentioned later in the essay on her and de Camp giving the feeling of actually living in historical time through their historical fiction.)