Search Results for: Ballantine Adult Fantasy

The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: Lilith by George MacDonald

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Lilith George MacDonald Ballantine Books (274 pages, September 1969, $1.25) Cover art by Gervasio Gallardo Lilith was the fifth volume in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. The cover is one of the darkest in the series to date. The back cover shows the inside of an attic. I normally post an image of the back cover, but I won’t here. It’s almost a monochrome and it’s dark. In many ways, Lilith was different from the few that came before it. For…

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Wood Beyond the World by William Morris

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The Wood Beyond the World William Morris Ballantine Books (237 pages, June 1969, $0.95) Cover art by Gervasio Gallardo With this installment in my reviews of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, we come to the first volume by a man who has one of the worst reputations for prose in the series. I’m talking of course about William Morris. Lin Carter published four of Morris’s works in five volumes; The Well at the World’s End came in at two volumes….

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The King of Elfland’s Daughter by Lord Dunsany

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The King of Elfland’s Daughter Lord Dunsany Ballantine Books (242 pages, June 1969, $0.95) Cover art by Bob Pepper The second volume Lin Carter chose for the Adult Fantasy line was Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter. In my opinion, it is it far superior to Fletcher Pratt’s The Blue Star. The “Lord” in the author’s byline isn’t an affectation. Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett was the 18th Baron Dunsany (1878-1957). He was a tall, lean man. His accomplishments…

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt

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The Blue Star Fletcher Pratt Ballantine Books (242 pages, May 1969, $0.95) Cover art by Ron Walotsky Lin Carter chose Fletcher Pratt’s novel The Blue Star to be the inaugural title in Ballantine’s Adult Fantasy series. I’ve found nothing that explicitly says why this novel rather than another, but a remark in his introduction provides a clue. Prior to this publication, The Blue Star had only been published in an omnibus edition along with Fritz Leiber’s Conjure Wife and James…

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Lin Carter and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series

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Many fantasy fans don’t realize how good they have it these days. Fantasy stories dominate the best seller lists, set box office records, and are some of the highest rated programs on television. This hasn’t always been the case. In the years following the Second World War, fantasy in popular culture went into a decline. The reasons for this are beyond the scope of this post, primarily because I don’t want to write a doctoral thesis. Once was enough. What…

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Mars Missions, Vengeful Djinn, and Haunted Dolls: The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1952, a Retro-Review

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The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, April 1952 (Mercury Press). Cover by George Salter In its early years, one of the most notable characteristics of The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction was its regular use of reprints — fantastical stories from outside the genre, often by very well-known writers, given exposure to SF and Fantasy readers. Another notable characteristic was covers by its art director, George Salter. Both aspects are features of this issue — indeed, this seems almost…

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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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IMHO: A PERSONAL HISTORY OF SWORD & SORCERY AND HEROIC FANTASY

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The Evolving and Cloned Barbarian Conan, King Kull, Cormac, Bran Mak Morn — names that conjure magic, characters often imitated, but never duplicated. These creations of Robert E. Howard (circa 1930) started the Sword and Sorcery boom of the 1960s and early 1970s. Then there are the barbarian warriors inspired by Howard — “Clonans,” as one writer recently referred to these sword-slinging, muscle-bound characters. A fair observation, but in some cases, not so true. I prefer to think of these…

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The Golden Age of Science Fiction: Betty and Ian Ballantine

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The Balrog Award, often referred to as the coveted Balrog Award*, was created by Jonathan Bacon and first conceived in issue 10/11 of his Fantasy Crossroads fanzine in 1977 and actually announced in the final issue, where he also proposed the Smitty Awards for fantasy poetry. The awards were presented for the first time at Fool-Con II at the Johnson County Community College in Overland Park, Kansas on April 1, 1979. The awards were never taken particularly seriously, even by…

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