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. Plot summary Geophysicist Gordon Graham is a participant in the Gamanovia Project, whose mission is to increase the land area of the overpopulated twenty-second century Earth by creating new continents through the manipulation of geological forces. The project's initial goal is to raise a new land mass to be called Gamanovia around the existing Ascension Island in the South Atlantic. The name of the proposed new continent was chosen to honor fifteenth century Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama, the first European to navigate the region's waters, and for João da Nova, who discovered Ascension Island a few years later. A sinister group concealing itself under the mask of the bogus Churchillian Society, supposedly dedicated to proving that the works of twentieth-century dramatist George Bernard Shaw were actually written by Winston Churchill, is attempting to discover the secrets of the project. The Churchillian Society's "cover" purpose is a spoof on the present-day body of thought similarly dismissing William Shakespeare's authorship of the Shakespeare plays on the grounds that he, as a commoner, could not possibly have written great literature. When Graham becomes involved with Jeru-Bhetiru, an alien woman from the country of Katai-Jhogorai on the planet Krishna, the society attempts to blackmail him into serving them by kidnapping and threatening to kill her. Instead, Graham allies himself with World Federation constable Reinhold Sklar and Jeru's fiancé Varnipaz bad-Savarun, a diplomat from the Krishnan kingdom of Sotaspe, to thwart the plotters. The enemy is gradually revealed as a rogue band of Thothians from the Procyonic star system, hoping to seize the new continent by claiming Ascension, which currently lacks any sovereign government. Graham and his cohorts find themselves in a tight race against time, in which the labyrinthine bureaucracies of the future Earth prove almost as much an impediment as the enemy, and the hypnotic powers of the reptilian alien Osirians bring about treachery within their own ranks. An added problem