Lin Carter’s Simrana Cycle

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.” 

Lin Carter

• Introduction


• The Gods of Nion Parma


• The Whelming of Oom


• Zingazar


• How Sargoth Lay Siege to Zaremm


• The Laughter of Han


• The Benevolence of Yib


• How Ghuth Would Have Hunted the Silth


• The Thievery of Yish


• How Her Doom Came Down at Last on Adrazoon


• How Jal Set Forth on his Journeying


• The Gods of Neol Shendis


 

Lin Carter & Robert M. Price

• How Shand Became King of Thieves


 

Lin Carter & Glynn Owen Barrass

• Caolin the Conjurer (Or, Dzimdazoul)


 

Darrell Schweitzer

• The Philosopher Thief


 

Gary Myers

• The Sorcerer’s Satchel


 

Adrian Cole

• An Unfamiliar Familiar


• The Summoning of a Genie in Error


 

Charles Garofalo

• The Sad but Instructive Fable of Mangorth’s Tomes


 

Robert M. Price

• The Devil’s Mine


• The Good Simranatan


• How Thongor Conquered Zaremm


 

Lord Dunsany

• The River


• The Fortress Unvanquishable, Save for Sacnoth


• The Sword of Welleran


• Carcassone


• How Nuth Would Have Practiced His Art Upon the Gnoles


• The Distressing Tale of Thangobrind the Jeweller, and of the Doom That Befel Him


• In Zaccarath


• How the Enemy Came to Thlunrana


 

Henry Kuttner

• The Jest of Droom Avista