Search Results for: Ballantine Adult Fantasy west

Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Doom that Came to Sarnath by H. P. Lovecraft

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The Doom that Came to Sarnath H. P. Lovecraft Ballantine Books (280 pages, February 1971, $0.95) Cover art by Gervasio Gallardo The Doom That Came to Sarnath was the second volume of H. P. Lovecraft stories published under the BAF imprint. It served as a bridge between the Dunsanian fantasies of The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath and the Cthulhu Mythos related titles that followed. Many of the stories in this volume weren’t published until years after they were written…

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: Land of Unreason by Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp

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Land of Unreason Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp Ballantine Books (240 pages, January 1970, $0.95) Cover art by Donna Violetti Lin Carter ended the inaugural year of the BAF series with a reprint of a novel from the pulp Unknown, Hannes Bok’s The Sorcerer’s Ship. His first selection for the series’ first full calendar year was another tale from Unknown (the October 1941 issue), a collaboration between Fletcher Pratt and L. Sprague de Camp. Land of Unreason followed…

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: Deryni Rising by Katherine Kurtz

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Deryni Rising Katherine Kurtz August 1970 271 p., $0.95 Cover art by Bob Pepper When Lin Carter started the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line, he began by reprinting works that were obscure and/or considered classic in the field at that time, but as he wrote in the introduction to Deryni Rising, he had hoped from the very beginning to be able to publish high quality new works as well. The first original fiction he published was Deryni Rising, the first novel…

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Sorcerer’s Ship by Hannes Bok

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The Sorcerer’s Ship Hannes Bok Ballantine, 205 p., December 1969, $0.95 Cover Art by Ray Cruz First, I’d like to apologize to John and everyone else who reads these posts for taking so long to get this one done. I was on the road quite a bit from the end of May up through the Fourth, but I thought I would be able to get this particular post done quickly. Then things started happening. Car repairs, then house repairs, and…

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The Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series: The Silver Stallion by James Branch Cabell

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The Silver Stallion James Branch Cabell Ballantine, 1969, $0.95 Cover art by Bob Pepper Internal illustrations by Frank C. Pape So now we come to one of the better known (some would say infamous) authors in the Ballantine Adult Fantasy line. James Branch Cabell is, to the best of my knowledge, the only author in the lineup who had a book (Jurgen) as the centerpiece of an obscenity trial. James Branch Cabell was born in Virginia on April 14, 1879….

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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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Prologomenon to Fantasy

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One of the things that I frequently blather about is that, when I was growing up in the 1970s, “fantasy,” as it’s understood today didn’t really exist, at least not as a mainstream, popular genre. Don’t get me wrong: the ’70s were a decade of fantasy par excellence, especially literary fantasy, from reprintings of earlier works, such as the Lancer Books Conan series (begun in 1966) and the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (begun in 1969), to the Tolkien imitators, like…

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The Best of Modern Arabian Fantasy, Part II: Judith Tarr and Alamut

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No series on the best of modern Arabian fantasy would be complete without going back to the book that many credit with starting the whole trend, Alamut by Judith Tarr. I had the privilege of talking with Judy about the book and her process for research and writing, and her answers are insightful and fascinating. In what follows, I ask how she took her strong academic background and applied it to building the world and characters that captured the fascination…

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Selling SF & Fantasy: 1969 Was Another World

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I think what many aspiring writers today fail to grasp — very much as a result of not having been there — is that 1969 was another world. Books were sold and distributed very differently. Big chain bookstores barely existed. There were many times more distributors than there are today. Science fiction mass-market paperbacks could be found in drugstores or bus stations, as could the digest magazines. It was the time of the much maligned “science fiction ghetto” but really…

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Worlds Within Worlds: The First Heroic Fantasy (Part I)

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Who was the first person to write high fantasy? It seems like a simple enough question. By “high fantasy” I mean a story set in a world that is not this one. John Clute, in The Encyclopedia of Fantasy, defines high fantasies as stories “set in otherworlds, specifically secondary worlds, and which deal with matters affecting the destiny of those worlds.” In this definition, ‘Secondary worlds’ is Tolkien’s useful term for a fictional, self-consistent world with its own geography and…

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