Lin Carter

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Linwood Vrooman Carter

Lin Carter from the cover of Apostle of Letters: The Life and Works of Lin Carter, Wild Cat Books, 2005
Born June 9, 1930(1930-06-09)
St. Petersburg, Florida
Died February 7, 1988 (aged 57)
Montclair, New Jersey
Pen name Lin Carter
Occupation Science Fiction Writer, Editor, Critic
Nationality United States
Genres Science fiction, Fantasy

Linwood Vrooman Carter (June 9, 1930–February 7, 1988) was an American author of science fiction and fantasy, as well as an editor and critic. He usually wrote as Lin Carter; known pseudonyms include H. P. Lowcraft (for an H. P. Lovecraft parody) and Grail Undwin.

Contents

[edit] Life

Carter was born in St Petersburg, Florida. He was an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy in his youth, he became broadly knowledgeable in the field. He was also quite active in fandom.

Carter served in Korea, after which he attended Columbia University. He was a copywriter for some years before writing full-time. He married twice, first to Judith Ellen Hershkovitz (married 1959, divorced 1960) and later to Noel Vreeland (married 1963, while they both worked for Prentice-Hall publishers; divorced 1975). During much of his writing career he lived in Hollis, New York.

He was a member of the all-male literary banqueting club the Trap Door Spiders, which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery solvers the Black Widowers. Carter himself was the model for the Mario Gonzalo character. He was also a member of the Swordsmen and Sorcerers' Guild of America (SAGA), a loose-knit group of Heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose work he anthologized in the Flashing Swords! series.

In later life Carter saw his popularity sag and his standard of life severely lowered when he developed oral cancer and had to endure extensive surgery to have it removed. Only his status as a Korea veteran enabled him to receive treatment, which failed to cure his illness and left him disfigured. Carter increased his alcohol intake, becoming a borderline alcoholic and further weakening his body, already ravaged by his cancer and therapy. The disease subsequently resurfaced, spreading to his throat and leading to his death in 1988. He resided in East Orange, New Jersey in his final years, and died in nearby Montclair, New Jersey.

[edit] Writing career

Early in his efforts to establish himself as a writer Carter gained a mentor in fellow author L. Sprague de Camp, who critiqued his first novel in manuscript. Due in large part to their later collaborations, mutual promotion of each other in print, joint membership in both the Trap Door Spiders and SAGA, and complimentary scholarly efforts to document the history of fantasy, de Camp is the person with whom Carter is most closely associated as a writer. A falling-out in the last decade of Carter's life did not become generally known until after his death.

Carter had a marked tendency toward self-promotion in his work, frequently citing his own writings in his nonfiction to illustrate points and almost always including at least one of his own pieces in the anthologies he edited. The most extreme instance is his novel Lankar of Callisto, which features Carter himself as the protagonist.

As a fiction writer most of Carter's work was derivative in the sense that it was consciously imitative of the themes, subjects and styles of other authors he admired. He was quite explicit in regard to his models, usually identifying them in the introductions or afterwords of his novels, and introductory notes to self-anthologized or collected short stories. His best-known works are his sword and planet and sword and sorcery novels in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. His first published book, The Wizard of Lemuria, first of the "Thongor the Barbarian" series, combines both influences. His other major series, the "Callisto" and "Zanthodon" books, are direct tributes to Burroughs' Barsoom series and Pellucidar novels, respectively.

Other works pay homage to the styles of contemporary pulp magazine authors or their precursors. Some of these, together with Carter's models, include his "Simrana" stories (influenced by Lord Dunsany), his horror stories (set in the "Cthulhu mythos" of H. P. Lovecraft), his "Green Star" novels (uniting influences from Clark Ashton Smith and Edgar Rice Burroughs), his "Mysteries of Mars" series (patterned on the works of Leigh Brackett), and his "Prince Zarkon" books (based on the "Doc Savage" series of Kenneth Robeson). Later in his career Carter assimilated influences from mythology and fairy tales, and even branched out briefly into pornographic fantasy.

Some of Carter's most prominent works were what he referred to as "posthumous collaborations" with deceased authors, notably Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. He completed a number of Howard's unfinished tales of Kull and Conan the Barbarian, the latter often in collaboration with L. Sprague de Camp. He also collaborated with de Camp on a number of pastiche novels and short stories featuring Conan. The posthumous collaborations with Smith were of a different order, usually completely new stories built around title ideas or short fragments found among Smith's notes and jottings.

Carter is also notorious for his unfinished projects. A number of his stand-alone books contained obvious hooks for sequels that were never written. He regularly announced plans for future works that never came to fruition, and several of his series were abandoned due to lack of publisher or reader interest or to his deteriorating health. Among these are his "Thongor" series, to which he intended to add two books dealing with the hero's youth; only a scattering of short stories intended for the volumes appeared. His "Gondwane" epic, which he began with the final book and afterwards added several more covering the beginning of the saga, lacks its middle volumes, his publisher having canceled the series before he managed to fill the gap between. Similarly, his projected Atlantis trilogy was canceled after the first book, and his five-volume "Chronicles of Kylix" ended with three volumes published and parts of another.

The most intriguing of these unfinished projects is Carter's self-proclaimed magnum opus, an epic literary fantasy entitled Khymyrium, or, to give it its full title, Khymyrium: The City of the Hundred Kings, from the Coming of Aviathar the Lion to the Passing of Spheridion the Doomed. It was intended to take the genre in a new direction by resurrecting the fantastic medieval chronicle history of the sort exemplified by Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britanniae and Saxo Grammaticus's Gesta Danorum. It was also to present a new invented system of magic called "enstarment", which from Carter's description somewhat resembles the system of magical luck investment later devised by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly for their "Liavek" series of shared world anthologies. Carter claimed to have begun the work about 1959, and published at least three excerpts from it as separate short stories during his lifetime – "Azlon" in The Young Magicians (1969), "The Mantichore" in Beyond the Gates of Dream (also 1969) and "The Sword of Power" in New Worlds for Old (1971). His most comprehensive account of the project appeared in Imaginary Worlds: the Art of Fantasy in 1973. While he continued to make claims for its excellence throughout his lifetime, the complete novel never appeared.

[edit] Career as editor and critic

While his fiction was often derivative, Carter was influential as a critic of contemporary fantasy and a pioneering historian of the genre. His book reviews and surveys of the year's best fantasy fiction appeared regularly in Castle of Frankenstein, continuing after that magazine's 1975 demise in The Year's Best Fantasy Stories. His early studies of the works of J. R. R. Tolkien (Tolkien: A Look Behind "The Lord of the Rings") and H. P. Lovecraft (Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos) were followed up by the wide-ranging Imaginary Worlds: the Art of Fantasy, a study tracing the emergence and development of modern fantasy from the late nineteenth century novels of William Morris through the 1970s.

As an editor for Ballantine Books from 1969-1974, Carter brought several obscure yet important books of fantasy back into print under the "Adult Fantasy" line. Authors whose works he revived included Dunsany, Morris, Smith, James Branch Cabell, Hope Mirrlees, and Evangeline Walton. He also helped new authors break into the field, such as Katherine Kurtz and Joy Chant.

Carter was a fantasy anthologist of note, editing a number of new anthologies of classic and contemporary fantasy for Ballantine and other publishers. He also edited several anthology series, including the Flashing Swords! series from 1973-1981, the first six volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy Stories for DAW Books from 1975-1980, and an anthology format revival of the classic fantasy magazine Weird Tales from 1981-1983.

Together with SAGA he sponsored the Gandalf Award, an early fantasy equivalent to science fiction's Hugo Award, for the recognition of outstanding merit in authors and works of fantasy. It was given annually by the World Science Fiction Society from 1974 to 1980, but went into abeyance with the collapse of Carter’s health in the 1980s. Its primary purpose continues to be fulfilled by the initially rival World Fantasy Awards, first presented in 1975.

[edit] Posthumous revival

Wildside Press began an extensive program returning much of Carter's fiction to print in 1999. Most of its Carter titles are now themselves out of print.

[edit] Bibliography

[edit] Science fiction

[edit] Hautley Quicksilver

[edit] The History of the Great Imperium

[edit] Callisto

Main article: Callisto series
  1. Jandar of Callisto (1972)
  2. Black Legion of Callisto (1972)
    Callisto Volume 1 (2000 - omnibus including Jandar of Callisto and Black Legion of Callisto)
  3. Sky Pirates of Callisto (1973)
  4. Mad Empress of Callisto (1975)
  5. Mind Wizards of Callisto (1975)
  6. Lankar of Callisto (1975)
  7. Ylana of Callisto (1977)
  8. Renegade of Callisto (1978)

[edit] The Green Star

Main article: Green Star Series
  1. Under the Green Star (1972)
  2. When the Green Star Calls (1973)
  3. By the Light of the Green Star (1974)
  4. As the Green Star Rises (1975)
  5. In the Green Star's Glow (1976)

[edit] The Mysteries of Mars

[edit] Zarkon-Lord of the Unknown

  1. The Nemesis of Evil (1975)
  2. Invisible Death (1975)
  3. The Volcano Ogre (1976)
  4. The Earth-Shaker (1982)
  5. Horror Wears Blue (1987)

[edit] Zanthodon

  1. Journey to the Underground World (1979)
  2. Zanthodon (1980)
  3. Hurok of the Stone Age (1981)
  4. Darya of the Bronze Age (1981)
  5. Eric of Zanthodon (1982)

[edit] Other novels

[edit] Fantasy

[edit] Thongor

  1. The Wizard of Lemuria (1965; expanded as Thongor and The Wizard of Lemuria (1969))
  2. Thongor of Lemuria (1966; expanded as Thongor and the Dragon City (1970))
  3. Thongor Against the Gods (1967)
  4. Thongor in the City of Magicians (1968)
  5. Thongor at the End of Time (1968)
  6. Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus (1970)

[edit] Conan

[edit] The Chronicles of Kylix

[edit] Gondwane

[edit] Terra Magica

  1. Kesrick (1982)
  2. Dragonrouge (1984)
  3. Mandrigardo (1987)
  4. Callipygia (1988)

[edit] Oz

Published posthumously by Tails of the Cowardly Lion and Friends

[edit] Other novels

[edit] Collections

[edit] Poetry

[edit] Non-fiction

[edit] Anthologies edited

[edit] Ballantine Adult Fantasy series

Main article: Ballantine Adult Fantasy series

[edit] Flashing Swords!

Main article: Flashing Swords!

[edit] Weird Tales

Main article: Weird Tales (anthology series)

[edit] The Year's Best Fantasy Stories

Main article: The Year's Best Fantasy Stories (series)

[edit] Other anthologies

[edit] References

  • Carter, Lin (1973). Imaginary Worlds: the Art of Fantasy. Ballantine Books. 
  • Servello, Stephen J. (2005). Apostle of Letters: The Life and Works of Lin Carter. Wild Cat Books. 

[edit] External links

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