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.
Carter was born in St. Petersburg, Florida. He was an avid reader of science fiction and fantasy in his youth and became broadly knowledgeable in the field. He was also quite active in fandom.
Carter served in the United States Army (Infantry, Korea, 1951-53), after which he attended Columbia University (1953-54). 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). He was an advertising and publishers copywriter (1957-69). From 1969 he was a freelance writer and editorial consultant. 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 , a loose-knit group of Heroic fantasy authors founded in the 1960s, some of whose work he anthologized in the Flashing Swords! series. In the 1970's Carter issued his own fantasy fanzine, titled Kadath after H.P. Lovecraft's fictional setting (see The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath).
In 1985, his standard of life was severely reduced 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.
In the last year before his death, he had begun to reappear in print with a new book in his Terra Magica series, a long-promised Prince Zarkon pulp hero pastiche, Horror Wears Blue, and a regular column for Crypt of Cthulhu magazine . Despite these successes, Carter had 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.
The editor of Crypt of Cthulhu, Robert M. Price, had published a Lin Carter special issue - Vol 5, No 2 (whole number 36; Yuletide 1985). Price, who was appointed Carter's literary executor, was preparing a second all-Carter issue when Carter died; it was turned into a memorial issue - Vol 7, No 4 (whole number 54 Eastertide 1988).
A longtime sf and fantasy fan, Carter first appeared on the scene with his entertaining letters in Startling Stories in the late 1940s. He did not break into professional print until 1957 with a Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction story, though he had earlier issued two volumes of fantasy verse, Sandalwood and Jade (1951) (technically his first book) and Galleon of Dream (1955).
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 (1965), first of the "Thongor the Barbarian" series, combines both influences. Although he wrote only six Thongor novels, the character appeared in Marvel Comics's Creatures on the Loose for an eight-issue run in 1973-74 and was often optioned for films, although none were produced.
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.
Unknown to many of his fans is the fact that Carter was a major scripter for ABC's original Spider-Man animated TV show during its moody, fantasy-oriented second season in 1968-69.
Unfinished projects
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). A fourth episode was published posthumously in Fungi #17, a 1998 fanzine. His most comprehensive account of the project appeared in the Art of Fantasy in 1973. While he continued to make claims for its excellence throughout his lifetime, the complete novel never appeared.
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 (A Look Behind "The Lord of the Rings") and H. P. Lovecraft (A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos) were followed up by the wide-ranging 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.
His greatest influence in the field may have been as an editor for Ballantine Books from 1969-1974, when 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, Joy Chant, and Sanders Anne Laubenthal.
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.
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.
Black Legion of Callisto (1972)Callisto Volume 1 (2000 - omnibus including Jandar of Callisto and Black Legion of Callisto)
Sky Pirates of Callisto (1973)
Mad Empress of Callisto (1975)
Mind Wizards of Callisto (1975)
Lankar of Callisto (1975)
Ylana of Callisto (1977)
Renegade of Callisto (1978)
The Green Star
Under the Green Star (1972)
When the Green Star Calls (1973)
By the Light of the Green Star (1974)
As the Green Star Rises (1975)
In the Green Star's Glow (1976)
The Mysteries of Mars
The Valley Where Time Stood Still (1974)
The City Outside the World (1977)
Down to a Sunless Sea (1984)
The Man Who Loved Mars (1973)
Zarkon-Lord of the Unknown
The Nemesis of Evil (1975)
Invisible Death (1975)
The Volcano Ogre (1976)
The Earth-Shaker (1982)
Horror Wears Blue (1987)
Zanthodon
Journey to the Underground World (1979)
Zanthodon (1980)
Hurok of the Stone Age (1981)
Darya of the Bronze Age (1981)
Eric of Zanthodon (1982)
Other novels
Destination Saturn (1967) (with Donald Wollheim writing as David Grinnell)
The Flame of Iridar (1967)
Time War (1974)
Tower at the Edge of Time (1968)
Tower of the Medusa (1969)
Fantasy
Thongor
The Wizard of Lemuria (1965; revised/expanded as Thongor and The Wizard of Lemuria (1969))
Thongor of Lemuria (1966; revised/expanded as Thongor and the Dragon City (1970))
Thongor Against the Gods (1967)
Thongor in the City of Magicians (1968)
Thongor at the End of Time (1968)
Thongor Fights the Pirates of Tarakus (1970)
Note: Carter's literary executor Robert M. Price has written two Thongor stories, "Witch of Lemuria" [1] and "Mind Lords of Lemuria"[2].
In 1978 a Thongor movie was in production for release in 1979. It was titled Thongor in the Valley of Demons; however the movie was never produced.
Conan
Conan (1967) (with Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp)
Conan of the Isles (1968) (with L. Sprague de Camp)
Conan the Wanderer (1968) (with Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp) [O/N+ Conan the Adventurer (Howard & de Camp) + Conan the Buccaneer (Carter & de Camp);= The Conan Chronicles 2 (1990)]
Conan of Cimmeria (1969) (with Robert E. Howard and L. Sprague de Camp) [O/2N+ Conan the Freebooter (Howard & de Camp);= The Conan Chronicles (1989)]
Conan the Buccaneer (1971) (with L. Sprague de Camp)
Conan of Aquilonia (1977) (with L. Sprague de Camp)
Conan the Swordsman (1978) (with L. Sprague de Camp and Björn Nyberg)
Conan the Liberator (1979) (with L. Sprague de Camp)
Conan the Barbarian (1982) (with L. Sprague de Camp)
Sagas of Conan (2004) (with L. Sprague de Camp and Björn Nyberg)
The Chronicles of Kylix
The Quest of Kadji (1971)
Amalric (unpublished in complete form)
"The Higher Heresies of Oolimar" (1973)
"The Curious Custom of the Turjan Seraad" (1976)
The Wizard of Zao (1978)
Kellory the Warlock (1984)
Gondwane
The Warrior of World's End (1974)
The Enchantress of World's End (1975)
The Immortal of World's End (1976)
The Barbarian of World's End (1977)
The Pirate of World's End (1978)
Giant of World's End (1969)
Terra Magica
Kesrick (1982)
Dragonrouge (1984)
Mandricardo (1987)
Callipygia (1988)
Oz
Published posthumously by Tails of the Cowardly Lion and Friends
The Tired Tailor of Oz (2001)
The Merry Mountaineer of Oz (collection of four complete Oz novels: The Awful Ogre of Ogodown, High Times on Tip Top Mountain, The Wooden Soldier of Oz, No Joy in Mudville) (2004)
Other novels
The Black Star (1973)
Found Wanting (1985)
Lost World of Time (1969)
The Star Magicians (1966)
Tara of the Twilight (1979)
Collections
King Kull (1967) (Robert E. Howard)
Beyond the Gates of Dream (1969)
Lost Worlds (1980)
The Complete Mythos Fiction of Lin Carter (1997)
Poetry
Sandalwood and Jade: Poems of the Exotic and the Strange (St Petersburg, FL:Sign of the Centaur Press, 1951; 100 copies).
Galleon of Dream: Poems of Fantasy and Wonder (NY: Sign of the Centaur Press, 1955; 200 copies)
A Letter to Judith (New York, 1959; 500 copies).
Dreams from R'lyeh (Arkham, 1975)
Non-fiction
A Look Behind "The Lord of the Rings" (1969) (Ballantine)
A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos (1972) (Ballantine)
the Art of Fantasy (1973) (Ballantine Adult Fantasy)
The World of Tolkien Illustrated (text by Carter, paintings by David Wenzel, 1977)
Anthologies edited
Ballantine Adult Fantasy series
Dragons, Elves, and Heroes (1969)
The Young Magicians (1969)
Golden Cities, Far (1970)
New Worlds for Old (1971)
The Spawn of Cthulhu (1971)
Discoveries in Fantasy (1972)
Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy I (1972)
Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy Volume II (1972)
