Imaginary Worlds in Sword & Sorcery: "An earthier sort of fantasy"

Mar 12, 2015 Derek rated it liked it

Shelves: ballantine-adult-fantasy, lin-carter-you-nut

Carter is a man of strong opinions and bold statements, effusive with praise and cranky with criticism. This is not a cold and scholarly work, but directly addresses the reader in a conversational style whose enthusiasm is often contagious and bursts its levees: he can't resist gushing over works of especial value--The Sword in the Stone, in particular--even if they don't abide by his self-imposed constraints. At its warmest and best, my to-read list grew by at least a dozen items.

His opinions c Carter is a man of strong opinions and bold statements, effusive with praise and cranky with criticism. This is not a cold and scholarly work, but directly addresses the reader in a conversational style whose enthusiasm is often contagious and bursts its levees: he can't resist gushing over works of especial value--The Sword in the Stone, in particular--even if they don't abide by his self-imposed constraints. At its warmest and best, my to-read list grew by at least a dozen items.

His opinions can be quite polarizing and often intriguing. He declares The Prisoner of Zenda to be "hack-work", and now I'm intensely curious about what sort of writing that Lin Carter, of all people would decide is not up to snuff. In his mind, Tolkien has problems in prose style, and he follows this with fightin' words: "Part of the trouble with Tolkien's book may lie in what seems to me its essential shallowness. The lack of real philosophical or psychological depth in The Lord of the Rings shows up most seriously, I think, in Tolkien's failure to explore the nature of evil." (p. 117)

His points may or may not have validity, but there's a weird irony in Lin Carter--Lin Carter!!--criticizing prose style or shallowness of theme, especially when he spends so much time in his own criticism-proof Sword and Sorcery bunker, yelling "This is all just entertainment! Fun to write and fun to read!"

After long discourse reiterating the William Morris - Lord Dunsany - Robert E Howard - And So Forth progression, with eventual dive into the pulp era and Sword and Sorcery, the rest of the book is a weirdly bolted-on How To Make Your World. And this is where it gets strange.

His advice has points in the "On Thud and Blunder" sense of building verisimilitude into the writing, but the discussion turns harsh as he calls various authors to task for errors in name choices or lapses in world building. Some of this reveals a basic misunderstanding of the criticized author's goals and framework.

He reserves his worst bludgeoning for less established authors ((view spoiler)) The admonitions, especially regarding naming, are remarkably petty, and given Carter's body of work, the whole reeks of "do as I say, not as I do." He is quick to use his own work as example of a thing done right, and equally quick to call out others by name.

It got really weird as Carter spiraled completely out of control, proposing an entire soup-to-nuts invented world with nothing Terrestrial or recognizable about it. He had it in progress: it was called Khymyrium, he had published bits of it elsewhere, and it was completely unworkable in concept and execution. ...more

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Mar 12, 2016 Nomadman rated it liked it

This is very much a book of two halves. The first half, an overview of the early writers who helped to shape the modern fantasy genre, is pretty gripping stuff. Carter nails precisely what makes writers like Dunsany and Eddison so pivotal to the genre, as well as superb writers in their own right, and does so in a humorous and pithy style that clearly shows his great love and respect of the field overall.

The second half of the book, unfortunately, loses its way big time. Carter spends a couple ...more

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