Lin Carter - Writing Career

Writing Career

A longtime science-fiction 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). An early collaborative story, The Slitherer from the Slime (with Dave Foley, printed as by 'H.P. Lowcraft') (Inside No 53 (Sept 1958) is a sort of parody of H. P. Lovecraft.

Early in his efforts to establish himself as a writer Carter gained a mentor in fellow author L. Sprague de Camp, who critiqued his novel The Wizard of Lemuria in manuscript. (Though this was the seventh novel Carter had written, it was the first to find a publisher, appearing from Ace Books in March, 1965). 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 was a prolific penman. He claimed that after his first book appeared in print (The Wizard of Lemuria) in March 1965, something like twenty-five books appeared bearing his name before The Wizard of Lemuria was revised and reissued in 1969 as Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria, which means Carter averaged about six books published per year during that four-year period.

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.

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.

Carter was not reluctant to attack organized religion in his books, notably in his World's End epic, in "Amalric the Man-God" (both promising but never finished), and in "The Wizard of Zao", portraying religions as cruel & repressive, and the hero has to escape from the inquisitions of said religions.

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, Robert E. Howard, and James Branch Cabell. 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.