Search Results for: Lin Carter

Vintage Treasures: Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy edited by Lin Carter

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Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy, Volume 1 (Ballantine Books, 1972). Cover by Gervasio Gallardo Over the decades we’ve spent a lot of pixels at Black Gate talking about Lin Carter’s groundbreaking Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. He was under contract to produce a book a month for editors Ian and Betty Ballantine, and that’s exactly what he did for five years and 65 titles, almost all reprints of out-of-print fantasy novels and original anthologies. For the most part my favorites…

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Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds #3: Tricks of the Trade and Reflections

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Lin Carter is above all else good company. He’s looking back one generation to what is now our genre’s Heroic Age, a wild and woolly era of unbounded creativity separated from us by a gulf of a century — I am reminded of when, as a teenager, I bought a drink for an elderly jazz musician, who in turn told me about going out on the town with Fats Waller, and the perils of playing for Jelly Roll Morton.

Lin Carter’s Imaginary Worlds #2 World Building and Naming

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Imaginary Worlds (Ballantine Books, June 1973). Cover by Gervasio Gallardo So I had great fun reading Carter’s snarky, anecdotal, history of the Fantasy genre, Imaginary Worlds (1973), but I had actually come to the book for his thoughts on writing the Fantasy, and in particular Sword and Sorcery. In hindsight, perhaps this was more of by way of exorcism. Carter was adamant that Sword and Sorcery should have no content whatsoever: “It is a tradition that aspires to do little more than…

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Time to Revise Your Lin Carter Bibliography

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Among the couple of boxes of fanzines I picked up a few weeks ago was this oddity. It’s the first (and I suspect only) issue of The Brythunian Prints, dated June 1967. I’ve not been able to find out any information at all on this title. It was a sword and sorcery fanzine, “published by the Brythunian Troop of the Hyborean Legion.” The editors (Ken Hulme, Jim Feerhmeyer and Greg Shank) dedicate the issue “to L. Sprague de Camp and George…

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Young Magicians edited by Lin Carter

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The Young Magicians Lin Carter, ed. Ballantine Books October 1969, 280p. $0.95 Cover art by Sheryl Slavitt I apologize for having taken so long to get this post done. I’ve been on the road for over half the weekends since the end of April, mostly family trips for graduations or dive meets my son was competing in. I thought I would have a little more time when the second summer session started since I would be teaching, but that hasn’t…

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: Dragons, Elves, and Heroes edited by Lin Carter

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Dragons, Elves, and Heroes Edited by Lin Carter Ballantine Books (277 pages, October 1969, $0.95) Cover art by Sheryl Slavitt It’s been a while since my last post, and no, I haven’t fallen off the face of the Earth, run away to join the circus, or been abducted by aliens. Although there have been times I’ve considered that circus thing. Or maybe gypsies. No, I’m just overloaded this semester (my day job is in academia), which hasn’t left a lot of…

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Thongor of Lemuria – Part One by Lin Carter

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If I didn’t know better, I’d swear Lin Carter’s Thongor of Lemuria novels were a deliberate exercise in camp. The first two novels in the seven book series, Thongor And The Wizard of Lemuria (1965) and Thongor And The Dragon City (1966), are so frenetic and exaggerated there are times it’s difficult to believe they were intended to be taken seriously. I struggle to believe that Carter hadn’t meant for me to laugh when I read that Thongor distrusted magic because of…

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Vintage Treasures: Weird Tales #1, edited by Lin Carter

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If you’ve hung around Black Gate for any length of time, you’ve heard us talk about Weird Tales, the greatest and most influential pulp fantasy magazine every published. Weird Tales has died many times, and crawled out of the grave and shambled back to life just as often (if you’re a Weird Tales fan, you’ve heard countless zombie metaphors about your favorite magazine). When the pulp version of the magazine died in September 1954 after 279 issues, many believed it…

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Spawn of Cthulhu edited by Lin Carter

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The Spawn of Cthulhu H. P. Lovecraft and Others Lin Carter, ed. Ballantine Books (274 pages, October 1971, $0.95) Cover by Gervasio Gallardo Lin Carter edited more than one anthology for the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Up until now, I’ve not discussed any of them. One reason is that where I am sequentially, there have only been two. The other reason is it’s easier to discuss a single novel than the contents of an anthology. I’m going to break with…

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