The Continent Makers is a science fiction novella by American writers L. Sprague de Camp, part of his Viagens Interplanetarias series. It was first published in the magazine Thrilling Wonder Stories in the issue for April, 1951. It first appeared in book form in the collection The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens, published in hardcover by Twayne Publishers in 1953, and in paperback by Signet Books in 1971. It has also been translated into Portuguese, Dutch, and Italian.
Cover of the April, 1951 issue of Thrilling Wonder Stories, illustrating The Continent Makers
The Viagens Interplanetarias series is a sequence of science fiction stories by L. Sprague de Camp, begun in the late 1940s and written under the influence of contemporary space opera and sword and planet stories, particularly Edgar Rice Burroughs's Martian novels. Set in the future in the 21st and 22nd centuries, the series is named for the quasi-public Terran agency portrayed as monopolizing interstellar travel, the Brazilian-dominated Viagens Interplanetarias. It is also known as the Krishna series, as the majority of the stories belong to a sequence set on a fictional planet of that name. While de Camp started out as a science fiction writer and his early reputation was based on his short stories in the genre, the Viagens tales represent his only extended science fiction series.
The Continent Makers and Other Tales of the Viagens by L. Sprague de Camp, Twayne Publishers, 1953