à la Barsoom, together with denizens who could have stepped straight from the dead sea-bottoms of that war-like world, and you have a colorful mix of culture, biology and history.
Quite apart from the Hyborian/Barsoomian connection, Lin Carter also drew heavily on the pulp tradition for the Thongor saga, a tradition that goes back through many of the writers and magazines that he promoted so ardently and successfully in his work as an editor. And he did not confine himself simply to the heroic elements of pulp, but drew on such diverse sources as H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, A. Merritt and Clark Ashton Smith, to name but a few. The devout fan of pulp fiction will quickly recognise these elements in the Thongor saga and indeed, part of the fun of reading the work is in checking out the sources! One example from this volume is the story, “The City in the Jewel,” in which Thongor finds himself in an enclosed world more in keeping with Dunsany than Howard, a direct contrast to some of the other stories.
Magic vies with technology, too. There are crumbling citadels, reeking with old sorceries and demonic powers, juxtapositioned with decadent super-science straight out of Edmond Hamilton or Van Vogt.5 This Lemuria is a potpourri of pulp ingredients, wildly improbable, scornful of boundaries, reminiscent of the old Saturday morning movie serials, with their fabled “cliff-hangers.” Burroughs used this technique to perfection in his own plots, and in Thongor we see the same style at work, so much so in places that one would almost expect Tarzan himself to swing out from the jungle to add weight to Thongor’s cause.
With the boom in heroic fantasy and sword and sorcery that came in the sixties, Thongor was by no means the only muscular barbarian to batter his way pell-mell through a catalogue of adventures. Conan spearheaded the advance, of course, but there was also Brak the Barbarian, creation of John Jakes, whose world and exploits therein mirrored those of Conan and Thongor and which were no less dynamic. An entire sub-genre sprang up, with an odd preponderance of “K” warriors—Kothar, Kyrik, Kandar, Kavin and Lin Carter’s own Kellory.6 Many of these fitted into a standard set of rules, with villains, monsters and beautiful maidens who were interchangeable and who could have comfortably slipped across from one series to another, like a wandering troupe of actors, taking the stage as and when required.
Yet the success of this itinerant band of heroes opened the way for other, more ambitious characters, still toiling away within the genre, but thrusting its boundaries ever wider into more imaginative and exotic terrain. Cugel the Clever, Jack Vance’s lovable villain from the revived Dying Earth series, Karl Edward Wagner’s turbulent, passionate Kane saga (Wagner himself wrote a couple of fabulous Howard pastiche novels), Fritz Leiber’s highly polished and amusing Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser stories and Michael Moorcock’s brooding, sombre Elric and Eternal Champion novels—all wonderful examples of the development of the genre. It is a less active genre these days, but it still has its wonders, the most outstanding example of which is surely the superb Nifft the Lean series from Michael Shea.
Lin Carter first enjoyed success with Thongor, but his zealous enthusiasm could never have been confined to one character and he was soon to produce a whole wave of sagas, each of them no less heavily influenced by writers like Burroughs, Howard, Vance and others. Burroughs very obviously remained the main source of this inspiration, directly or indirectly. The Callisto series is, for some critics, too close to Burroughs and Barsoom for comfort, whereas the Green Star series, with its homage to Amtor (Venus) introduces enough variety to hold its own with Thongor. Another writer that Lin Carter greatly admired and praised was Leigh Brackett, whose own Martian stories were inspired by Barsoom. She created a Mars of her own, an evocative variation on the original theme (as did C. L. Moore with some of her outstanding Northwest Smith yarns) and Lin Carter pastiched their work with his own Mars quartet, although he drew, as always, on several other celebrated sources for his mixture. The first three of this series, The Man Who Loved Mars, The Valley Where Time Stood Still and The City Outside the World, are considered by many to be among his best works.
Young Thongor brings together for the first time the short stories that Lin Carter wrote about Thongor, published between 1974 and 1980. He had intended to write more Thongor material, referring to “…the first and second volumes of the completed saga, which I plan to call Thongor of Lost Lemuria and Thongor in the Land of Peril…”7 but other projects occupied him up until his death in 1988 so that he never fulfilled that ambition. Like one of his idols, Robert E Howard, Lin Carter left a number of notes and plots among his papers and, perhaps ironically, we have used these to round out this book, which we hope will serve as an appetizer for the rest of the saga.
During his heyday in the 70s, Thongor featured in a comic book series, albeit a brief 8-issue run,8 and there was even some serious discussion about a film.9 The latter, though, never got made, which may be as well, as sword and sorcery never translated to the big screen very well in those days!
Robert Price, joint executor of the Lin Carter estate, himself a worthy scribe and editor, has written “Silver Shadows” from a title Lin coined for a Thongor tale he never got around to writing and has written “The Creature in the Crypt” from an abandoned Thonor synopsis. There is an even deeper irony here, for this story was published by Lin Carter as “The Thing in the Crypt,” a Conan yarn and part of the Conan volume,10 although it actually began life as a plot for the Thongor saga! And to round out the collection, Robert Price has written “Mind Lords of Lemuria,” a stirring yarn that captures both Carter’s style and not a little of the mighty Valkarthan’s panache. It also more than hints at the bizarre deep past of Lemuria, linking it to the Mythos cycles in a way that I am certain Lin Carter would heartily have approved of.
What follows, then, is the beginning, an appetizer for even greater exploits, a feast of heroic fantasy on the grand scale.
—ADRIAN COLE
1 The Wizard of Lemuria, first published by Ace Books (NY) 1965, revised and reprinted by Berkeley (NY) as Thongor and the Wizard of Lemuria in 1970.
2 From Lin Carter’s own introduction to the Thongor stories in Lost Worlds, published by DAW Books (NY) 1980.
3 Imaginary Worlds, published by Ballantine (NY) 1970
4 The Hyborian Age was originally published in book form in Skull-Face and Others by Robert E Howard, Arkham House (Sauk City), 1946 and part one was reprinted in Conan, Lancer Books (NY) in 1967, edited by Lin Carter and L. Sprague de Camp.
5 Edmond Hamilton’s The Star Kings, 1949 and A.E. Van Vogt’s The Book of Ptath, 1953 in Unknown Worlds.
6 The five Kothar novels (Belmont/Tower, NY, 1969-1970) and four Kyrik novels (Leisure Books, NY, 1975-1976) are from the busy pen of Gardner Fox, Kandar’s only novel (Paperback Library, NY, 1969) from Ken Bulmer, Kavin’s two novels (Lancer, NY, 1969 and 1972) from David Mason and Kellory from Lin Carter himself (Doubleday, NY, 1984).
7 Imaginary Worlds, published by Ballantine (NY) 1970.
8 Thongor was the main feature in Marvel’s Creatures on the Loose, issues 22 through 29, March 1973 to May 1974. Issues 22 and 23 saw an adaptation of Thieves of Zangabal, with a script by George Alec Effinger