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Lin Carter

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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. After serving in Korea, he attended Columbia University. He was a copywriter for some years before writing full-time.

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 an author, 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. Carter is most closely associated with fellow author L. Sprague de Camp, who served as a mentor and collaborator and was a fellow member of both the Trap Door Spiders and SAGA.

A chain smoker, Carter developed cancer in the mouth in later life and had to endure disfiguring surgery to have it removed. Never really eradicated, the disease subsequently spread to his throat, leading to his death in 1988.

Carter as author

Carter is best known for planetary romances and heroic fantasy in the tradition of Edgar Rice Burroughs and Robert E. Howard. His earliest published novel, The Wizard of Lemuria, first of the sword and sorcery "Thongor the Barbarian" series, combines both influences. His best known series, the "Callisto" and "Zanthondon" books, are direct tributes to Burroughs' Barsoom series and Pellucidar novels, respectively. With L. Sprague de Camp, he compiled several books of Howard's Conan the Barbarian tales; finishing and extending many of them, and also writing pastiche novels and short stories.

Other works of Carter's pay homage to the styles of contemporary pulp magazine authors or their precursors, including Lord Dunsany and H. P. Lovecraft (in various short stories), Clark Ashton Smith (in his "Green Star" novels), Leigh Brackett (in his "Mysteries of Mars" series) and Kenneth Robeson (in his "Prince Zarkon" books). Later in his career he assimilated influences from mythology and fairy tales, and even branched out briefly into pornographic fantasy.

Carter claimed to be working on 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, which he began about 1959. 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 investment later devised by Emma Bull and Will Shetterly for their "Liavek" series of shared world anthologies. At least three excerpts from Khymyrium were published by Carter as separate short stories during his lifetime ("Azlon" and "The Mantichore" in 1969 and "The Sword of Power" in 1971); additional information on the work appeared in Imaginary Worlds in 1973. The complete novel never appeared, although Carter continued to make claims for its excellence throughout his lifetime.

Khymyrium was just one of his unfinished projects, several of his ambitious series having been abandoned due to lack of publisher or reader interest or to his deteriorating health. He regularly announced plans for future works that never came to fruition.

For instance, he intended to add two books to his Thongor series dealing with his hero's youth, but only a scattering of short stories intended for the volumes appeared. He began his Gondwane epic with the final volume, afterwards adding several covering the beginning of the saga, but his publisher cancelled the series before he managed to fill the gap between. Similarly, his projected Atlantis trilogy was cancelled after the first book. His five-volume Chronicles of Kylix ended with three volumes published and parts of another. A number of his stand-alone books contained obvious hooks for sequels that were never written.

Carter as critic and editor

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, 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 (the Flashing Swords series), He also editing a number of new anthologies of classic and contemporary fantasy for Ballantine and other publishers. He also edited several anthology series, including Flashing Swords! 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.

Posthumous revival

Wildside Press began an extensive program returning much of Carter's fiction to print in 1999.

Bibliography

Novels

Callisto

  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)

The Chronicles of Kylix

Gondwane

The Green Star

Hautley Quicksilver

The History of the Great Imperium

The Mysteries of Mars

Terra Magica

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)

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)

Zarkon-Lord of the Unknown

Other works

Collections

Poetry

Collaborations

Non-fiction

Edited

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