Lin Carter (1930–1988)

This second of Lin Carter's "Mysteries of Mars" books is dedicated to Leigh Brackett. While I have read that all the novels in this loose series were in homage to her, this one is far more similar to her style and subject matter than the previous book was.

This sort of planetary romance was already rather old-fashioned in 1974 when Carter wrote this one. Its reference to "the old NASA scientists" (95) is practically anachronistic, in that by the time of its composition, multiple Mariner show more missions had cast plenty of shade on the idea that Mars might be habitable by humans and inhabited by its own ancient humanoid race to boot.

There is a powerful "Martian Western" feel to the story, which starts with an earthman prospector rescuing a proud native who detests the interplanetary settlers. There is more than a whiff of C. L. Moore's Northwest Smith about the protagonist M'Cord. He soon joins in a sort of grail quest, where the real nature and powers of the grail are unknown, cloaked in Martian legends.

The book is short, and it read fast. I liked it, and I will read others in the series if I come across them. show less

Howard's stories about Kull of Atlantis are generally more reflective than his better-known Conan tales, and have an air of melancholy that, personally, I think contrasts well with the more conventional "hack-and-slash" elements.

Although Kull's world is not as fleshed out as Conan's Hyborian Age, this works to the tales' advantage, as it adds to the age-lost mystery and atmosphere of degeneracy of a world in its last throes, about to be washed away by geological upheavals, a slate wiped show more clean ready for a new age.

There's a fair admixture of cosmic horror of the kind H.P. Lovecraft admired in Howard's works, and also a sprinkling of the sardonic humour that fans of Howard's non-fantasy works will recognise, but which may come as a surprise to those who only know him as a Sword-and-Sorcery writer.

Whilst not as commercially successful in their day (in fact, Howard only saw three, I think, published in his lifetime) as the later Conan stories, I think the Kull stories are some of Howard's best. show less

The finale of Lin Carter's Green Star fantasy kept its heroes sequestered from one another in various hardships until the last moment, when they could be brought to a happily-ever-after. The story around Niamh the Fair was a great shout-out to ERB's Master Mind of Mars with peril rooted in medical horror. But the tension was amusingly relieved when it was revealed that the mad scientist was actually bent on decapitating himself! The newer character Zorak of Tharkoon (not to be confused with show more Zarqa the Kalood) had a didactic adventure among the dispassionate and authoritarian giant ants of the Green Star's world.

The narrating protagonist Karn fell into the clutches of a misandrist tribe of girls who abused him at length, catering no doubt to certain readers. This plotline led to a penultimate moment of farce when he was discovered by Niamh as he deigned to give the teenage amazon Varda a kiss after his many prior refusals. Although the rather lascivious treatment of the extreme youth of the characters has been a persistent feature of these books, it really stood out in this one.

The book is furnished with an appendix itemizing and detailing principal "People of the Green Star World," which repeats and extends for this fifth book a similar feature of the third. Besides the fact that it is set at the end of the book with no calls forward to it earlier in the text, the thumbnail descriptions here seem to be of little actual use to readers. It shows some lack of confidence on the part of Carter (or his editor) that the characters have been drawn strongly enough for the reader to keep them distinct.

The illustrations and cover art are by the excellent fantasy artist Michael Whelan, who would go on a short while later to do a series of wonderful paintings for the covers of a new paperback edition of the Barsoom books. The four interior illustrations are in a pointillistic style, and all the art considerably surpasses what Roy Krenkel had supplied in the earlier Green Star volumes. show less

Discoveries in Fantasy is an anthology volume of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. It brings together shorter works by four pre-Tolkien English fantasists selected and introduced by Lin Carter, mostly with the avowed intention of later publishing a full book of the work of each. All four of the writers were obscure in 1972 when this book was published, and they have remained so. Much as I like the cover art by Peter La Vasseur, it probably did little to sell the book, showing as it does a show more roc flying through an Orientalist fantasy landscape with a naked woman in its talons. (This picture does in fact illustrate one of the stories in the book, "The Bird with the Golden Beak" by Donald Corley.)

The first two stories are sinophile yarns by Ernest Bramah. Carter is wrong that Bramah's Chinese lore is entirely invented. Fo-hi, for example, was genuinely the legendary Chinese emperor responsible for formulating the trigrams. And on page 44 Bramah cleverly quotes the Tao Te Ching out of context. But any and all of this lore might well have come out of the OUP Sacred Books of the East, and probably did, so that Carter discounting the rumor of Bramah's travels to China is still reasonable. "The Vision of Yin" is actually rather replete with such references, while "The Dragon of Chang Tao" starts out sort of strangely European in its hostile regard for dragons, but eventually reaches a more sophisticated and "Chinese" relationship to them.

The third and fourth stories are drawn from the book The Twilight of the Gods by Richard Garnett. I had never heard of this book, which evidently contains most if not all of its author's fantasy output. The title is misleading, since it is not concerned with a northern Götterdämmerung, but rather with the eclipse of pagan antiquity by Christianity. These were terrific, and Garnett's book went onto my wishlist straight away. He is quite careful about his historical contexts, interpolating supernatural events to explain enigmas of the ancient world, such as Nonnus of Panopolis authoring both a thirty-book Dionysian saga and a paraphrase of the Gospel of John.

The two stories by Donald Corley are lapidary tales with a greater amount of pathos than the frequently arch fantasies from the other contributors. Carter relates that Corley was championed by Cabell, but I found Corley's tone to be the least Cabellian of all the writers here. I did enjoy these and I would read more of Corley's work if I came across it.

The last and longest story in the book is "The Miniature" by Eden Phillpotts--an author neglected by American audiences, but remembered in England, according to Carter. This one did not satisfy me. It was a resume of human history from the perspective of the Oympian deities. Some of the later points were already counter to the historical narrative in 1972, and the conclusion definitely did not hold up well as a prognosis for human society to this twenty-first century reader. The colloquies among the gods were rather flat, and I would far prefer to return to Giordano Bruno's Expulsion of the Triumphant Beast for this sort of "council of the gods" story than seek out any of the others reportedly written by Phillpotts along similar lines. show less