Lin Carter’s Simrana Cycle

Lin Carter (June 9, 1930-February 7, 1988), though a skinny youngster, proved his mettle as an infantryman in the Korean War. Subsequently he continued the fight against the evil hordes on the printed page. After the war he worked as a copywriter, using his spare time writing the sort of fantastic literature that stimulated his imagination as a youth. His novel The Wizard of Lemuria (Ace Books, 1965) launched his writing career, which he pursued full-time as of 1969. He loved his favorite authors so much, he was content to devote his own writing to continuing their legacies, contributing numerous series of novels pastiching Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith, H.P. Lovecraft, Lord Dunsany, and others. His tales of Simrana form his pseudo-Dunsanian canon. He also brought several volumes of Dunsany's fiction to a new generation of readers in his acclaimed Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series.

Lin Carter, enthralled by the "Dreamland" tales of Lord Dunsany and others, contributed to the growing genre with a series of his own stories, dubbed "The Simrana Tales." Some of them were published in a variety of small-press magazines and other publications, but they were never collected into a book, and many tales have never been published at all.Until now.As Carter himself commented in his afterword to Lord Dunsany's Beyond the Fields We Know, "The most Dunsanian of my fiction is the Simrana series … the name was coined many years ago and lay in my notebooks awaiting the right kind of story to occur to me." A complete collection of his Simrana tales could hardly be called complete without including the stories that inspired him to write them in the first place: Lord Dunsany's masterpieces of fantasy. Here at last is the complete Simrana Cycle, accompanied by outstanding stories in the genre including Dunsany's own "The Sword of Welleran" and others; Henry Kuttner's 1937 Weird Tales gem "The Jest of Droom-avista," and new stories by leading authors in the field: Gary Myers, Darrell Schweitzer, Adrian Cole, Charles Garofalo, and Glynn Barrass, as well as six ink drawings by Roy G. Krenkel, originally done for the publication of Carter's "The Gods of Neol Shendis."