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Originally Posted by Dr. Drib
I was being a little facetious with Lin Carter.
When I was a young pimple, I really enjoyed Carter's Thongor series. I was hungry for anything to do with "Swords and Sorcery." (It's a shame we now have these fat, offensive Fantasy novels, and "Swords and Sorcery" is now an almost forgotten sub-genre of Fantasy.)
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Well, not by all of us.
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I was also (back in those days) a big fan of the continuation of the Conan saga, as worked on by DeCamp, Bjorn Nyberg, Carter [and someone else?].
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Robert E. Howard?
Most of the De Camp Conan stories seem to be completions of or based upon notes left by Howard. Nyberg and Carter were De Camp's usual collaborators.
De Camp's other main collaborator was Fletcher Pratt, but he had no hand in the Conan works.
(I knew De Camp back when, too, and was a neighbor of George Scithers, whose Hugo winning fanzine Amra was devoted to S&S.)
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I credit Lin Carter with turning me on to William Hope Hodgson's work. (I assembled Night land for MobileRead; it's available as an LRF ebook.)
Lin Carter led an increasingly unhappy life. He was a hack, but I don't consider that a bad word. He deserved to make more money than he did, and often he wrote out of desperation.
Salud to Lin Carter, and to his pioneering work in the field of Fantasy.
Don
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I don't consider hack a pejorative either, but it describes a particular kind of writer who essentially turns out yard goods to editorial demand. I saw a fascinating discussion in a fanzine years back, where on of the participants was Robert Moore Williams. Williams was widely considered the arch-typical "hack" SF writer, and looked down upon by serious readers. Williams basically said "I write what the editors
pay me to write, my books
sell, and I have the royalty statements to prove it. Who pays
your grocery bills?" He said "Maybe I could write the stuff you like if an editor paid me to do it. But meanwhile, it takes talent to stink 'em up just right!"
He was quite right, though I can't read his work. But then, I'm not the audience he was writing for.
Did Lin deserve more success than he got? Hard to say. He wouldn't have gotten it writing the stuff that got published. The question is whether he could successfully sell anything else. I was sorry when he died of cancer. He was an engaging speaker and a nice guy.
______
Dennis