林·卡特

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. In the 1970s he was editor of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, which introduced readers to many overlooked classics of the fantasy genre.

Life

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 both fields. He was also active in fandom.

Carter served in the United States Army (infantry, Korea, 1951–53), and then attended Columbia University and took part in Leonie Adams's Poetry Workshop (1953–54). He was an advertising and publishers' copywriter from 1957 until 1969, when he took up writing full-time. He was also an editorial consultant. During much of his writing career he lived in Hollis, New York.

Carter was married twice, first to Judith Ellen Hershkovitz (married 1959, divorced 1960) and second to Noel Vreeland (married 1963, when they were both working for the publisher Prentice-Hall; divorced 1975).

Carter was a member of the Trap Door Spiders, an all-male literary banqueting club which served as the basis of Isaac Asimov's fictional group of mystery-solvers, the Black Widowers. Carter was the model for Asimov's character Mario Gonzalo. Carter 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.

In the 1970s Carter published one issue of his own fantasy fanzine Kadath, named after H. P. Lovecraft's fictional setting (see The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath). About 3,000 copies were printed; however, the printer was in a dispute with the binder, who held the copies. While Carter paid the printer, the printer decamped to California. When Carter went to see the binder, he was told that the copies had been kept for a while, but then most had been thrown out. Carter believed that only about 30 copies of the issue survived. It contained Carter's Cthulhu Mythos story "The City of Pillars" (pp. 22–25).

Carter resided in East Orange, New Jersey, in his later years, and drank and smoked heavily. It was probably smoking that gave him oral cancer in 1985. Only his status as a Korean War veteran enabled him to receive extensive surgery. However, it failed to cure the cancer and left him disfigured.

Carter held gatherings of writers under the aegis of 'the New Kalem Club' (in tribute to the original Kalem Club) - meetings which were attended by Robert M. Price, S. T. Joshi, Peter Cannon and others, including occasionally Frank Belknap Long.

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 the magazine Crypt of Cthulhu.

Writing career

A longtime science fiction and fantasy fan, Carter first appeared in print with letters to Startling Stories and other pulp magazines in 1943 and again in the late 1940s. He issued two volumes of fantasy verse, Sandalwood and Jade (1951), technically his first book, and Galleon of Dream (1955) (see Poetry in Bibliography below) His first professional publication was the short story "Masters of the Metropolis", co-written with Randall Garrett, and published by Anthony Boucher in The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, April 1957. Another early collaborative story, "The Slitherer from the Slime" (Inside SF, September 1958), by Carter, as "H. P. Lowcraft", with Dave Foley, is a parody of H. P. Lovecraft. The story "Uncollected Works" (Fantasy and SF, March 1965) was a finalist for the annual Nebula Award for Best Short Story, from the SF and fantasy writers, the only time Carter was a runner-up for a major award.

Early in his efforts to establish himself as a writer, Carter gained a mentor in L. Sprague de Camp, who critiqued his novel The Wizard of Lemuria in manuscript. The seventh novel Carter wrote, 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 complementary 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 writer, producing an average of six books a year from 1965 to 1969. He also wrote a nearly monthly column, "Our Man in Fandom", in If, edited by Frederik Pohl, and was a major writer on ABC's original Spider-Man animated TV show during its fantasy-oriented second season in 1968–69.

Carter frequently cited his own writings in his non-fiction and almost always included at least one of his own pieces in each of the anthologies he edited. The most extreme instance of his penchant for self-promotion is in the sixth novel in his Callisto sequence, Lankar of Callisto, which features Carter himself as the protagonist.

Carter was not reluctant to attack organized religion in his books, including in his unfinished World's End, in "Amalric the Man-God" (also unfinished), and in The Wizard of Zao. He portrayed religions as cruel and repressive, and had his heroes escape from their inquisitions.