Lin Carter’s Year’s Best Fantasy Stories
While people disagree on the quality of Lin Carter’s writing, most people agree he was a fine editor and tireless supporter of the fantasy field. Volumes edited by Carter brought quite a few new authors to my attention, as well as feeding me a steady diet of works by writers I already loved.
From 1975 to 1988, DAW books presented a yearly anthology called The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories. Lin Carter edited the first six and I own and have read all but #3, which I ordered recently but was sent the wrong book.
Arthur W. Saha took over as editor after that. I only have one of his volumes. I don’t know why the editorial switch, but Carter may have been suffering from ill health around that time. He died in 1988. I first read the three with Robert E. Howard content, but later read a couple of others. Here are my thoughts.
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The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 1, edited by Lin Carter (DAW, October 1975). Cover by George Barr
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 1
Contains “The Temple of Abomination” by Robert E. Howard, a Cormac Mac Art story, and pieces by Marion Zimmer Bradley, Lloyd Alexander, Clark Ashton Smith (fragment completed by Carter), Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd/Gray Mouser), Lin Carter (Thongor), Hannes Bok, L. Sprague de Camp, Pat McIntosh, Charles R. Saunders (Imaro, & apparently the first story Saunders ever wrote), and Jack Vance (Dying Earth).
Most of these are decent stories. The Saunders tale shows a lot of power and promise but also feels like a very early effort. The de Camp tale is told in his often used tongue-in-cheek style, which I have to admit doesn’t do much for me.
It’s generally considered a faux pax these days to include your own story in such an anthology, particularly in something called “Best,” but Carter often did and the publisher didn’t seem to have a problem. He was probably a decent sales draw.
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The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 2, edited by Lin Carter (DAW, August 1976). Cover by George Barr
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 2
Contains:
The Year in Fantasy, by Carter
“The Demoness” by Tanith Lee, beautifully written and probably my favorite story in the collection
“The Night of the Unicorn” by Thomas Burnett Swann, very short and something of a magical realism story; it was quite good
“Cry Wolf by Pat McIntosh, a werewolf tale
“Under the Thumbs of the God”s by Fritz Leiber, a good Fafhrd/Gray Mouser tale
“The Guardian of the Vault,” by Paul Spencer, a very good story with a twist ending
“The Lamp from Atlantis,” by L. Sprague de Camp, which was interesting but far longer than needed
“Xiurhn,” by Gary Myers, a Lovecraftian tale
“The City in the Jewel” by Lin Carter, a long and quite good Thongor story
“In ‘Ygiroth” by Walter C. DeBill, Jr., a decent piece
“The Scroll of Morloc” by Clark Ashton Smith & Lin Carter, which wasn’t terribly well done
“Payment in Kind” by Caradoc A. Cador, which was well written and intriguing but with an ending I didn’t get
“Milord Sir Smiht, the English Wizard” by Avram Davidson, which was glacially slow and left me scanning it
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The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 3, edited by Lin Carter (DAW, November 1977). Cover by Josh Kirby
The Year’s Best Fantasy 3
I haven’t read this but thought I’d include the TOC for those who are interested. Contains:
The Year in Fantasy essay by Carter
“Eudoric’s Unicorn” by de Camp
“Shadow of a Demon” by Gardner F. Fox (Niall of the Far Travels)
“Ring of Black Stone,” by Pat McIntosh
“The Lonely Songs of Laren Dorr” by George R. R. Martin
“Two Suns Setting” by Karl Edward Wagner (Kane story)
“The Stairs in the Crypt” by Clark Ashton Smith and Lin Carter
“The Goblin Blade by Raul Garcia Capella
“The Dark King,” by C. J. Cherryh
“Black Moonligh” by Lin Carter
“The Snout in the Alcove” by Gary Myers
“The Pool of the Moon” by Charles Saunders
and the usual essay by Carter on the year’s best fantasy books.
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The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 4, edited by Lin Carter (DAW, December 1978). Cover by Esteban Maroto
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 4
Contains “Nekht Semerkeht” by Robert E. Howard, which was a partial story completed very well by Andrew Offutt. It also has stories by Poul Anderson, Grail Undwin, Clark Ashton Smith, Lin Carter, Avram Davidson, Phyllis Eisenstein, Tanith Lee, Ramsey Campbell, Pat McIntosh, and Philip Coakley.
Other than “Nekht Semerkeht,” the two best tales were Campbell’s (which appeared in Swords Against Darkness), and Anderson’s story, “The Tale of Hauk.” Avram Davidson’s story was “Hark! Was that the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?,” which was a play on Edgar Rice Burrough’s work. I found it pretty goofy. Smith’s story was “Lok the Depressor,” good but not outstanding.
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The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 5, edited by Lin Carter (DAW, January 1980). Cover by Penalva
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 5
It contains “Lord of the Dead” by Howard, which is primarily a crime story with fantastic elements. It also contains a Conan pastiche by de Camp and Carter, and stories by T. H. White, Tanith Lee, Pat McIntosh, Craig Shaw Gardner, Adrian Cole, Janet Fox, David Malory, Grail Undwin, Marvin Kaye, and Evangeline Walton.
“Astral Stray” by Adrian Cole was the best thing here outside of Howard. I’ve always liked Cole’s work a lot.
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The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 6, edited by Lin Carter (DAW, November 1980). Cover by Josh Kirby
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 6
This is a pretty good collection, even if it doesn’t contain a Robert E. Howard tale. We have:
The Year in Fantasy by Carter
“Garden of Blood” by Roger Zelazny (Dilvish)
“The Character Assassin” by Paul H. Cook
“The Things That Are Gods” by John Brunner
“Zurvan’s Saint” by Grail Undwin
“Perfidious Amber” by Tanith Lee
“The Mer She” by Fritz Leiber (Fafhrd/Gray Mouser)
“Demon of the Snows” by Carter (Thongor)
“The Pavilion Where All Times Meet” by Jayge Carr
“Cryptically Yours” by Brian Lumley
“Red as Blood” by Tanith Lee
“Sandmagic” by Orson Scott Card
The Year’s Best Fantasy Books by Carter
“Sandmagic” is worth the price by itself.
Now for a surprise about The Year’s Best Fantasy series. You may notice that Grail Undwin appeared in a bunch of these Carter edited collections, although I remember nothing about the stories. Well, this fact actually calls into question Carter’s suitability as an editor for this kind of “Best of” collection, because — it appears — Grail Undwin was a secret pseudonym of Carter.
I first heard this from G. W. Thomas but it certainly has the ring and scent of truth. If it is, Carter managed not only to get one of his stories under his own name into each of these anthologies, but he got a secret one in as well (and no doubt got paid for it).
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The The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 9, edited by Arthur W. Saha (DAW, October 1983). Cover by Sanjulian
The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories 9
Edited by Art Saha. Cover by Sanjulian.
Contains stories by John Kessel. R. A. Lafferty, Michael Shea, Harlan Ellison, Richard Christian Matheson, Parke Godwin, Jor Jennings, Jane Yolen, Suzette Haden Elgin, and Tanith Lee.
Saha took a much wider view of fantasy than Lin Carter and some people probably liked that. I didn’t. I wanted adventure and this presented very little of that, and most of the stories were set in much more modern milieus and tended toward the humorous.
In retrospect, I’m sure these were perfectly good stories but they just weren’t what I was looking for and were a drastic change from the stuff Carter had chosen. I haven’t picked up any more of the Saha edited volumes.
Charles Gramlich administers The Swords & Planet League group on Facebook, where this post first appeared. His last article for us was a a review of Superman/Tarzan: Sons of the Jungle by Chuck Dixon and Carlos Meglia. See all of his recent posts for Black Gate here.
Not only was he appearing as himself and as “Grail Undwin”, but all of the Clark Ashton Smith stories were actually “posthumous collaborations” with Carter, to greater or lesser (usually the latter) effect.
Having said which, while I wouldn’t necessarily agree that these anthologies collected the BEST fantasy stories, they were usually pretty entertaining, and I should give them a revisit one of these years.
I still have my copy of #4.
Carter has a short extra section where he just rips into Sword of Shannara as the biggest Tolkien rip off imaginable.
And to this day, I still say “Fu*k you, Lin.”
I … on the one hand, yes, but on the other hand, I can kind of see where he was coming from — Carter wrote a LOT of pastiche, as he’d be the first to admit, but he was writing stories in the style of Burroughs and Howard, not doing beat-by-beat direct retellings of A Princess of Mars or People of the Black Circle.
I think Carter was a good writer but a genius editor and his work really needs to be appreciated.
He did so much for modern fantasy and saved many greats from pure obscurity by re-publishing them. However, his own work was diminished by this since he was again a good writer, but he saved from obscurity people who were off the scale and compared to them his work was seen as very basic and low talent. Clark Ashton Smith, Lord Dunsany…
He also did a lot of “Genre” writing such as Sword and Planet, Heroic Fantasy/Sword and Sorcery, Lovecraftian Horror… This led to trollish mockery worthy of today’s internet. Let’s see – the standards sci-fi and fantasy is held to… If it’s a “Crime” to make your own heroic Thud and Blunder story or ordinary man down on his luck gets whisked to fantastic world and saves human like alien princess… Well shouldn’t Fabio be on Death Row for being a “Gentleman Pirate” in 100+ book covers? No disrespect to the latter, just scifi/fantasy is always demanded be “New” somehow while the rest of literature lives off of its cliches which define it, especially the newer Noir/Pulp genre.
He also gave Frazetta the boost needed to get real creative when he’d hit the same slump (1960s) that declined Men’s Adventure fiction. Just after Frazetta got heat over LOTR illustrations that “Who is THAT supposed to be!?” and a Roman one “A real Roman soldier would wear…” and NO he was NOT going to re-do that image… Lin Carter wrote “Just send us your experimental paintings, I’ll have my writers hack out a story to MATCH them…!” knowing about anything from him would SELL covers! This led to tons of his memorable work like flame demon, spider in the drain, in search of the unknown…
I have to say I have always looked askance at editors who include their own stories in “Best of” collections. Fred Pohl had the grace to apologize when he included “The Gold at the Starbow’s End” in the one Best of the Year anthology he did for Ace — he explained that a) he had run out of money and he was the only person he’d ask to take a smaller advance, and b) he sincerely thought it was one of the best stories of the year. (He was right about that!)
It’s even worse if you are ALSO including your stories under an unacknowledged pseudonym. And it’s also terrible to pass off posthumous collaborations as stories wholly written by the dead writer. I really cannot excuse that behavior by Carter. And I don’t think he was all that big a name.
We disagree strongly about Avram Davidson. “Hark! Was that the Squeal of an Angry Thoat?” is great fun — one of my favorite Davidson stories — the goofiness is a feature not a bug. And I also love “Milord Sir Smiht the English Wizard”, one of the best of the Eszterhazy stories.
Carter was a decent editor when picking other people’s stories, and some of those books are quite good. Can’t go wrong with Tanith Lee, that’s for sure!
Our high school library had volume 6 and I loved the story “Cryptically Yours” which chronicled a collection of letters between 2 wizards. I must have read it while at school because there is no way I’d bring home a book with that Josh Kirby cover (or should I say “uncover”). My mom had a hard enough time getting over the copies of Dragon magazine she’d find in my room (ha). Thanks for another great article Charles.
Great post! Since I was born in 1974, I was too young to read the Carter volumes when they were first published, and I started out with Arthur Saha’s volume 11 when I was, fittingly, 11 years old. (I was a precocious reader.) That cover by Vicente Segrelles is one of the most memorable from my late childhood, though I longed to read a story that would match it.
I had little historical context for fantasy literature as a preteen, but this anthology did help raise my expectations for imaginative storytelling (along with DARK FORCES, edited by Kirby Macauley, which I bought at a flea market at age 12). In retrospect, I went on to become a huge fan of Tanith Lee, Steve Rasnic Tem, and Michael Swanwick, to name just three from volume 11. Gardner Dozois and Gene Wolfe too!
Dark Forces was such a great anthology! I picked it up from the library solely on the basis of New! Stephen! King! Story! (The Mist, which to this day might still be my favorite King) but almost every story in it was great, and although I didn’t realize it at the time, it was my first introduction to a whole bunch of outstanding authors including Gene Wolfe and Karl Edward Wagner.
I had read a couple of years ago that “Grail Undwin” was in fact Lin Carter. So, out of curiosity, I pulled out my copies of Carter’s “Best of” collections (I still have them) to see how he introduced the stories. Of course, he sang the praises for “Grail”, even comparing “her” in the sixth volume to Leigh Brackett. To me, that took a lot of chutzpah!