Ballantine Adult Fantasy

I first read The Lord of The Rings in the summer of 1970, around the time of the beginning of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series, and for several years thereafter I read a large proportion of the volumes in the series.

It's hard to remember now, but what we now think of as a fantasy "genre" was at the time really bits and scraps of different types of books; Carter's series (seeking to ride the wave of Tolkien popularity) pulled a lot of disparate elements together with one label:

• Lusus naturae type authors who wrote fiction with fantastic elements but had no (or limited) successors (and who typically drew on multiple sources for their forebears): Morris, Dunsany, Eddison (actually published by Ballantine before the series formally began), Cabell, Mirrlees.


• Authors who published in the American pulps, principally Weird Tales or Unknown: Lovecraft, Smith, Pratt, DeCamp, Bok, Munn.


• Authors drawing on Norse sagas as inspiration: Anderson, to a degree Morris (who was very much a rediscoverer of the Norse corpus but who produced something only partially influenced by it).


• Translations/expansions of older or traditional works: (the Mabinogion, Orlando Furioso, much of Dragons, Elves and Heroes, sort of Anderson's Hrolf Kraki book, which draws directly on traditional sources but retells them).


• What would, post-Said, be called "orientalist" works, whether drawing on the Arabian Nights or on Chinese sources: Bramah, Meredith, Beckford, Crawford.


• New authors with inspiration from general mediaeval sources (Kurtz) or Arthuriana (Laubenthal).


• Authors who were inspired by fairy tales (Macdonald, who is also the only one of the entire set I can think of who was even a small influence on Tolkien).

There wasn't much holding this all together except for the fact that all the books had some form of magic in them. Carter's own perspective (as expressed in his history Imaginary Worlds, part of the series) was strongly coloured by the pulp / sword and sorcery tradition.

It might be worth pointing out that the most prominent sword and sorcery authors (Howard (1927-1934 for Kull and Conan), Leiber (Fafhrd and the Grey Mouser works are dated 1958-1988; Leiber also published in Unknown in the 1940's), C.L. Moore, Moorcock (Elric: 1963-1991), Merritt, 1917-1934) never appeared in the series, at least as principal authors (some were possibly anthologized in Carter's anthologies of short stories and excerpts).

Only a few of the authors wrote new works for the series, notably Anderson, Kurtz, Laubenthal, Munn (although Merlin's Ring was actually published after the formal end of the series), and Walton, and of them Anderson and Munn already were established speculative fiction writers. Only Kurtz really was launched into an ongoing career as a fantasy writer. (Chant was published by George Allen and Unwin in the UK before the Ballantine publication.)

The series was always, to my recollection, shelved as part of the SF section. The creation of the modern marketing "genre" of fantasy as a niche distinct from SF really had to wait for the late 1970's, when Ballantine / Del Rey published The Sword of Shannara (1977, exceptionally Tolkien-derivative) and Lord Foul's Bane (secondary-world fantasy with Tolkien-inspired elements but with more original elements as well). Locus established its separate Fantasy novel category for the 1978 awards, dropped it again in 1979, and brought it back in 1980.

(Zelazny's Amber series (1970-1978, for the first series) and other fantasies are certainly part of the modern genre but were more tightly associated with Zelazny's overall New Wave oeuvre than with a general fantasy model until the genre as a whole had solidified.)

Because most of the works in the series were reprints, many are available online, mainly via Gutenberg. Of the rest, only a small subset are in print. Below is a list of the series, with links to online versions and notes regarding availability of other titles.

1. The Blue Star, Fletcher Pratt.


2. The King of Elfland's Daughter, Lord Dunsany.


3. The Wood Beyond The World, William Morris.


4. The Silver Stallion, James Branch Cabell.


5. Lilith, George Macdonald.


6. Dragons, Elves, and Heroes, Lin Carter, ed.


7. The Young Magicians, Lin Carter, ed.


8. Figures of Earth, James Branch Cabell.


9. The Sorcerer's Ship, Hannes Bok.


10. Land of Unreason, Fletcher Pratt & L. Sprague de Camp.


11. The High Place, James Branch Cabell. "In print" in a facsimile edition.


12. Lud-In-The-Mist, Hope Mirrlees. In print.


13. At The Edge of The World, Lord Dunsany.


14. Phantastes, George Macdonald.


15. The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath, H.P. Lovecraft.[2]


16. Zothique, Clark Ashton Smith.[1]


17. The Shaving of Shagpat, George Meredith.


18. The Island of the Mighty, Evangeline Walton.[4]


19. Deryni Rising, Katherine Kurtz. In print.


20. The Well at the World's End, Vol. 1, William Morris.


21. The Well at the World's End, Vol. 2, William Morris.


22. Golden Cities, Far, Lin Carter, ed.


23. Beyond the Golden Stair, Hannes Bok.


24. The Broken Sword, Poul Anderson. Available as e-book.


25. The Boats of the `Glen Carrig', William Hope Hodgson.


26. The Doom that Came to Sarnath, H.P. Lovecraft.[2]


27. Something About Eve, James Branch Cabell.


28. Red Moon and Black Mountain, Joy Chant.


29. Hyperborea, Clark Ashton Smith.[1]


30. Don Rodriguez: Chronicles of Shadow Valley, Lord Dunsany. May.


31. Vathek;, William Beckford.


32. The Man Who Was Thursday, G.K. Chesterton.


33. The Children of Llyr, Evangeline Walton.[4]


34. The Cream of the Jest, James Branch Cabell.


35. New Worlds for Old, Lin Carter, ed.


36. The Spawn of Cthulhu, Lin Carter, ed.[2]


37. Double Phoenix, Edmund Cooper & Roger Lancelyn Green.


38. The Water of the Wonderous Isles, William Morris.


39. Khaled, F. Marion Crawford.


40. The World's Desire, H. Rider Haggard & Andrew Lang.


41. Xiccarph, Clark Ashton Smith.[1]


42. The Lost Continent, C.J. Cutcliffe-Hyne.


43. Discoveries in Fantasy, Lin Carter, ed.


44. Domnei, James Branch Cabell.


45. Kai Lung's Golden Hours, Ernest Bramah.


46. Deryni Checkmate, Katherine Kurtz. In print.


47. Beyond the Fields We Know, Lord Dunsany.[3]


48. The Three Imposters, Arthur Machen. June.


49. The Night Land, Vol. 1, William Hope Hodgson.


50. The Night Land, Vol. 2, William Hope Hodgson.


51. The Song of Rhiannon, Evangeline Walton.[4]


52. Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy #1, Lin Carter, ed.


53. Evenor, George Macdonald. (Collection: "The Golden Key", "The Wise Woman", "The Carasoyn" (available as e-book))


54. Orlando Furioso: The Ring of Angelica, Volume 1, Translation by Richard Hodgens. (Available at Gutenberg by a different translator)


55. The Charwoman's Shadow, Lord Dunsany.


56. Great Short Novels of Adult Fantasy #2, Lin Carter, ed.


57. The Sundering Flood, William Morris.


58. Imaginary Worlds, Lin Carter.


59. Poseidonis, Clark Ashton Smith.[1]


60. Excalibur, Sanders Anne Laubenthal.


61. High Deryni, Katherine Kurtz. Available as e-book.


62. Hrolf Kraki's Saga, Poul Anderson.


63. The People of the Mist, H. Rider Haggard.


64. Kai Lung Unrolls His Mat, Ernest Bramah. Available as e-book.


65. Over The Hills and Far Away, Lord Dunsany. [3]

Notes:

[1]Clark Ashton Smith's fantasies have been collected in a five-volume set, which presumably includes all the titles published in the Ballantine Series as well as others.

[2]Lovecraft stories are available in widely mixed collections. I would assume that most of the works anthologized in the series (which were non-Cthulhu mythos, as Ballantine published a separate Cthulhu mythos series at that time) are available in one collection or another.

[3]The Dunsany anthologies selected works from various Dunsany books; most, if not all of these are available on Gutenberg, but determining an exact correlation would be laborious.

[4]All of the Walton translations of the Mabinogion are available in a single volume, Mabinogion Tetralogy

Now the media is doing it...

From the National Post, quoting Mayor Tory: "that's an issue that is not a municipal issue, per say...".

Where does this come from? It shrieks of barbarism. I assume it is the Post writer's error, and not derived from a printed statement of Tory's.

The expression is per se, literally "through itself", meaning "as such" or "in itself". "Per say" is meaningless.

I have seen individuals make this mistake, and held my tongue. But a newspaper should know better.

ETA: The Globe got it right; the Star and the CBC do not quote that statement in their coverage of the story.