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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
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…
We’re big fans of Lin Carter here at Black Gate. He was one of the most influential figures in 20th Century fantasy, chiefly as the editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy (BAF) line of paperback reprints, the six volumes of The Year’s Best Fantasy Stories, and the groundbreaking Flashing Swords! sword & sorcery anthologies. He was also one of the hardest working professionals in the genre. Carter edited a BAF volume every single month between May 1969 and April 1974 (65…
Poor Lin Carter: perhaps the greatest champion heroic fantasy ever had, an editor with few equals, one of the most knowledgeable fan boys in the world, but a poor writer. I think he would have liked his stories and novels to be remembered more fondly than they are. I believe Kellory the Warlock proves he had the potential to have been a better writer. Carter remains despised among the Robert E. Howard scholars for his involvement in Sprague de Camp’s Conan…
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…
I recently did a review here at Black Gate of L. Sprague de Camp’s 1976 Literary Swordsmen and Sorcerers: The Makers of Heroic Fantasy. De Camp’s book is one of the few histories of the genre of fantasy around, and it is a great and enjoyable book. But it’s not the only one, nor probably the most favored. I get the sense from others’ comments that the Best History of Fantasy title probably goes to Lin Carter’s 1973 Imaginary Worlds. Each…