Introduction

Notes Introduction 1. Weird Tales, during the Farnsworth Wright editorial years (1926– 39), and Unknown, later Unknown Worlds (1939–43), are the most noteworthy of these, though there were a host of others. This will be covered in some detail in Chapter 6. 2. Oddly, little of this work had appeared in the rapidly growing mass- market pocket paperback medium prior to the 1960s; Jack Vance’s The Dying Earth seems alone in this regard. 3. Though other publishers did release relevant titles, the three most noteworthy here are Lancer Books, Pyramid Books, and Ace Books. 4. Circa 1960, Fritz Leiber, L. Sprague de Camp, Jack Vance, and Poul Anderson were most well- known (and in demand) as science fiction writers, and while they did return to fantasy with the Sword and Sorcery revival, their output of science fiction, possibly excepting de Camp, remained far greater. 5. By contrast, releases by Ace, Lancer, and Pyramid—and, later, DAW and Pocket Books— were tagged “SF” even into the second half of the 1970s. 6. Carter was not, technically, the first to demarcate the terrain so: L. Sprague de Camp does so almost identically in the introductions to his two Pyramid Books anthologies, Swords and Sorcery (1963) and The Spell of Seven (1965), though he uses the labels “Sword and Sorcery” and the qualified “Heroic Fantasy.” But Carter’s accountings go into far greater detail than de Camp’s two- page introductions and were repeated over and over again through doz- ens of BAFS introductions and two books, supported by a publisher who was trying to do something “different.” And with Carter, the label became, simply, “fantasy.” 7. New titles did appear in the series, were welcomed when they were considered to be of quality in keeping with other series titles, and were— on the basis of frequency of reprintings— among the better- selling titles. But while Ballantine had cornered the market on reprinted material, most often by deceased authors, they had to compete with other publishers for new work by active authors. There were 11 new titles published in the BAFS, including the first three volumes of Katherine Kurtz’s voluminous Deryni series, Joy Chant’s Red Moon and Black Mountain, three of Evan- geline Walton’s four books treating The Mabinogion, and Poul Anderson’s Hrolf Kraki’s Saga. 202 NOTES 8. I include here the works that Ballantine published before the series proper but were kept in print in tandem with the series— appearing with them on the advertising pages in Ballantine releases and so on—and of which Carter wrote, “They are all books I would certainly have urged Ballantine to pub- lish” (1Carter 268). 9. One novel and one novella by Pratt/de Camp, as well as one solo Pratt novel; a couple of scattered short stories by Howard, de Camp, and Vance; nothing at all by Leiber. 10. The BAFS included three MacDonald volumes, though Carter favored Mor- ris’s romances as fantasy’s “first” rather than MacDonald’s Phantastes and Lilith due to the latters’ visionary frames; Lewis and Merritt were often cited by Carter (and rotated into his “list”), but since their relevant work was available elsewhere, little was included in the BAFS. 11. The assumption that stories involving wizards or dragons or magic swords were by their nature suited to children, often coupled with an aggressively derisive attitude, was something that the phenomenon that culminated in the BAFS had to deal with. No doubt Ballantine’s label “Adult Fantasy” reflects this. Nevertheless, works from Victorian author George MacDonald’s Curdie books, to The Hobbit and the Narnia series, to Ursula Le Guin’s initial Earth- sea trilogy have been seminal in the development of the genre. Of course, the “children’s” aspect of these books was often tiptoed around (genre paperback editions would appear with no note of YA origins, as with the Bantam editions of Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy) or even dismissed (the three stories included in Evenor, a BAFS George MacDonald collection, were published for children in the nineteenth century, but Carter insists they are “too serious, too meaning- ful,” to be considered children’s fairy tales; 3Carter ix). 12. Among the reasons for this, probably the most notable was the sale of Bal- lantine Books and its ultimate acquisition by Random House, which took bottom-line publishing decisions out of the hands of genre afficianados like Betty and Ian Ballantine and put them in the hands of the executives of what was emerging as one of the major corporate publishing conglomerates of the United States. While the BAFS had not been a huge money-maker (it had not, for example, found the secret to following up on Tolkien’s mass success), it had done reasonably well— but reasonably well was clearly not good enough for Random House. In addition, reprints by dead authors are a nonrenewable resource, and once the stores of Morris, Dunsany, Cabell, and Eddison began to deplete, interest and sales began to flag somewhat. The “slowdown” in the series did precede the arrival of Random House on the scene. 13. Abetted by the folding of Lancer Books, after a decline, in the mid-1970s and the realignment of Pyramid Books following its sale to Harcourt Brace Jovanovich (another up- and- coming corporate publishing conglomerate) in 1975. 14. Ursula Le Guin’s Earthsea trilogy was published by Bantam in the fall of 1975, and Patricia McKillip’s The Forgotten Beasts of Eld by Avon, also in the fall of 1975. NOTES 203 15. Pratt/de Camp’s The Compleat Enchanter, comprising all the Unknown Har- old Shea stories, published in two volumes previously; Pratt’s The Well of the Unicorn; and H. Warner Munn’s Merlin’s Godson, comprising King of the World’s Edge (originally published in Weird Tales in 1939) and The Ship From Atlantis, to which the BAFS Merlin’s Ring had been a sequel. 16. The selections were clearly culled from the more successful titles, and the pre- Tolkien works included Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter and The Charwoman’s Shadow, a single- volume edition of William Morris’s The Well at the World’s End (an exception in maintaining the BAFS cover art and Carter’s introduction), Eddison’s The Worm Ouroboros and Zimiamvia trilogy, Hope Mirrlees’s Lud- in- the- Mist, and, in the early 1980s, James Branch Cabell’s six titles. Tolkien’s work, of course, remained perennially available. 17. A slight hedge— The Island of the Mighty (originally titled The Virgin and the Swine), Walton’s treatment of the Fourth Branch, had been published in 1936, and the other three were drafted, but not published, in the years immediately following. But even though drafted decades before, these latter three— The Children of Llyr, The Song of Rhiannon, and Prince of Annwn— were of course revised and became BAFS first publications. 18. Terry Brooks’s The Sword of Shannara, which hovered near the top of trade paperback bestseller lists for most of the second half of 1977, and Stephen Donaldson’s first Thomas Covenant trilogy, whose paperback editions were issued in the summer of 1978. Both were published by del Rey/Bal- lantine, and both spawned countless sequels and prequels; together, the two launched fantasy’s final jump to bestseller- genre status. 19. The Boyer and Zahorski anthology, Fantasists on Fantasy (1984), is a good barometer: less than half of the authors precede the genre period, most of those do not work within a conceptual framework that more than rubs elbows with the BAFS template, and the specific literary form discussed tends to be fairy tale/story or romance rather than “fantasy”—a point to which I will return. 20. Works such as Andrew Lang’s Pantouflia books, Barrie’s Peter Pan, and Mac- Donald’s “The Golden Key” and “The Giant’s Heart.” MacDonald’s Lilith is the only modern work not published for young readers, and associated in some capacity with the genre (it was included in the BAFS), to which he refers. Other references tend toward older, traditional works, such as the Egyptian “Tale of Two Brothers,” Volsunga Saga, and the contents of Andrew Lang’s colored fairy- tale books. 21. With chapters on William Morris, Dunsany, Lovecraft, Eddison, Howard, Pratt, Smith, and Tolkien, framed by more general opening and concluding chapters. 22. Kingsley’s The Water Babies is a formal amalgam, though it does include sig- nificant elements associated with the BAFS template; Lewis’s Space trilogy, particularly Out of the Silent Planet and Perelandra, would formally belong to the science fiction subgenre of the planetary romance, though the vocabu- lary of that subgenre has much in common with BAFS fantasy; MacDonald’s 204 NOTES Lilith and Phantastes and Peake’s Gormenghast trilogy are distinct in crucial ways (I will return to this) from most of the BAFS canon but were published in the series. 23. The most recent edition appeared in 2004. 24. I don’t remember seeing The Game of the Impossible until many years after its publication; I do, however, remember seeing Jackson’s book around the time it came out— at a point when fantasy meant Morris, MacDonald, Dunsany, Eddison, and Tolkien to me— and finding myself bemused. 25. Jackson would certainly fall into Shippey’s academic category. While he does not name Jackson or her book, he alludes to “a recent book on fantasy” with a list of authors on its back cover that is exactly the same as that listed on the back cover of Jackson’s book (Shippey xxi).

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