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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. He was married during part of his writing career, but the marriage eventually failed.

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 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 assimulated 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. At least three excerpts were published as separate stories ("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.

Carter as editor and critic

While his fiction was often derivative, Carter was influential as a pioneering historian of fantasy, whose early studies of the works of J.R.R. Tolkien and H.P. Lovecraft 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. A tendency toward self-promotion in his non-fiction does not detract from its importance.

Carter was also a fantasy anthologist of note (the Flashing Swords series), and, as an editor for Ballantine Books, brought several obscure yet important books of fantasy back into print under the "Adult Fantasy" line, including works by Dunsany, Morris, Smith, James Branch Cabell, Hope Mirrlees, and Evangeline Walton, as well as helping new authors break into the field, such as Katherine Kurtz and Joy Chant. He also edited a number of new anthologies of classic and contemporary fantasy. Later he went on to edit the first six volumes of The Year's Best Fantasy Stories for DAW Books.

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, an anthology series edited by Carter from 1975-1980. He also edited a revival of the classic fantasy magazine Weird Tales, also as an anthology series, 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)
  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

Collaborations

Non-fiction

Edited

External link

1930 births | 1988 deaths | American fantasy writers | American science fiction writers | Science fiction editors | Science fiction fans | American short story writers

リン・カーター | Картер, Лин

 

This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the "Lin Carter".

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