Adventures in Fiction: Lin Carter by Ngo Vinh-Hoi Our Adventures in Fiction series is meant to take a look at the writers and creators behind the genre(s) that helped to forge not only our favorite hobby but our lives. We invite you to explore the entirety of the series on our Adventures In Fiction home page. June 9 marks the anniversary of the birth of Lin Carter, a prolific author who contributed to Appendix N. Here is some more information on this important writer. Linwood Vrooman Carter was born on June 9th, 1930 in St. Petersburg, Florida. In the august company of his fellow Appendix N authors, Lin Carter is a figure both of high esteem and some controversy. As an editor and critic, he is indispensable, most notably for his role in editing the landmark Ballantine Adult Fantasy series (BAFS), which ran from 1969-1974 and re-introduced such luminaries as Lord Dunsany, William Hope Hodgson, and Clark Ashton Smith to the fantasy-reading public. As the series gained traction, Carter also championed newer writers such as Joy Chant and Katherine Kurtz, whose long-running Deryni series was first published under the BAFS imprint. On the other hand, as a writer Lin Carter has often been painted as a hack who was unable to transcend his many influences. He has also been slammed as an opportunist for his “posthumous collaborations” with Robert E. Howard and Clark Ashton Smith. These stories were presented as newly rediscovered works that Carter completed, but they were usually entirely new pieces derived from Howard and Smith’s unfinished drafts and story fragments. Lin Carter was hardly alone in this practice however, as he was following a precedent set in the 1950s by August Derleth and L. Sprague de Camp in relation to the works of H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard respectively. You get the sense though that Carter’s “posthumous collaborations” were just as much about getting to play with the characters and settings of his literary idols as they were self-promotion. Where then does Lin Carter stand in relation to Appendix N and Dungeons & Dragons? He was first and foremost a superfan, starting from his discovery of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s The Master Mind of Mars as a boy. He became a voracious reader of science fiction and fantasy and was regular writer of fan letters to pulp magazines such as Startling Stories as early as 1943. Lin Carter’s short fiction and poetry began appearing in fanzines by 1949, much of it influenced by the otherworldly prose of Lord Dunsany. This progression from reader to commenter to full-on creator should be familiar to all dedicated RPGers. Lin Carter wrote unabashed homages to the writers he loved, but he delighted in re-combining his influences in novel ways. This was very evident in his only Appendix N-cited works, the World’s End/Gondwane Epic series. The series starts with Giant of World’s End (Belmont Books, 1969) and is set 700 million years in the future when the continents have drifted back together into the supercontinent of Gondwane and the Moon has fallen in its orbit to the point where it will soon collide with and destroy the world. The World’s End series sits squarely in the Dying Earth fantasy sub-genre epitomized by Clark Ashton Smith and Jack Vance but it is also full of sly allusions to L. Frank Baum’s Oz books. It’s not clear if Gary Gygax ever read let alone liked any of Lin Carter’s work beyond the World’s End series, but what probably appealed to Gygax the most was the crazy-quilt setting’s wide-open sense of possibility. The setting and monsters were also the main attraction of Carter’s breakthrough Thongor of Lemuria...