Linwood Vrooman Carter (1930-1988) was one of my favorite authors growing up. In fact, he may well have been my very favorite during my preteen years. In eighth grade, when I was attending Kesling Junior High (not yet Middle School in those days), I was deep into Burroughs books and Burroughs-type novels, and issues of Ka-Zar and Warlord. Most of these novels were by Lin Carter. Carter bypassed nearly every other author in his rich descriptions of alien worlds, fantastic beasts, and alien landscapes. And to be honest, it was the Jandar of Callisto books that I was immersed in and got me hook on the sword and planet type adventures, not John Carter of Mars. I knew Burroughs' Mars from Micheal Whelan's stunning covers (I figured I was too young to read them), and from the comics of course, and I dreamed of writing my own sword and planet series one day.
I saw Lin Carter's works on the shelves since I was quite small, but really didn't get to know them. There was a big article by him in Savage Tales featuring Ka-Zar, which my dad bought when I was in lthe first grade, because i wanted any comics with dinosaurs. In it, Carter explained how he crafted the series, and all the ideas that paralelled Burroughs' Martian books. He also hinted at the end, that in the next book, he would write himself into the story!
It was only years later that I got my folks to buy my first LC book, the third in the Zanthodon series, when I was coming of age. Around the same time I found a copy of Black Legion of Callisto at a used book store. I read it and was hooked. This was around the time that the current Ka-Zar series had gone "all-direct", meaning that it was only available by subscription and by dealers and stores who specialized in comics. So of course I subscribed, but still had to go to a comic specialty shop in Indianapolis, and I wouldn't have gotten to go if my dad didn't take me on regular appointments to see the doctor every three months for a serious disorder.
There, I not only found more comics and back issues than I'd ever imagined, I found the first and third books in the Jandar series. There may have been more, but I couldn't buy everything back then.
Carter's Jandar of Callisto series is about a Vietnam pilot named Jonathon Andrew Dark who encounters an jade-lined well in the ruins of an ancient Cambodian city. Through some ancient technology, Dark gets transported millions of miles over space to the surface of Callisto, one of the nearly earth-sized moons of Jupiter. He finds immediately that is not the frozen, ice-bound planet one would expect, but a lush tropical world of thick scarlet jungles, populated by tremendous monsters. He runs afoul of one scaled cat-like thing the natives call a yathrib, before being saved by a party of giant insectasoid beings called Yathoon, astride giant four-legged birds of prey known as thaptors. Dark befriends one member of the Yathoon horde named Koja (the equivalent of Tars Tarkas of the ERB's tharks), and manages to escape. He manages to clumsily slay a monstrous "elephant-boar" or vastadon (rather similar to the Basto, native to ERB's Venus), and saves a beautiful alien princess with flaming red hair named Darloona. A planetary romance naturally ensues, before they are both captured by Callisto's sky pirates. These are modeled on the black-skinned pirates of Barsoom, only they have paper-white skin, and the vessels they command are giant airships that look for all the world like winged sixteenth century Spanish galleons. They are given powered flight something Leonardo De Vinchi's ornithopters, and are often called that, and are constructed of paper, soaked in glue to give them their buoancy. The lower chambers of each ship are filled with a helium-like gas.
Anyway, Jandar (as the natives all him), and Darloona are taken to the pirates' city of the clouds (I forget the exact name of it---Zanadar?), and while Darloona is captive by their leader, Jandar gets tossed into the arena where he battles a gigantic horned and ruffed scarlet saber-tooth tiger-like thing called a deltagar, and and a horde of alien theropod-like reptiles, later in the series to be revealed as karkadans.
Anyway, I don't quite recall how Jandar and his girl manage to escape. But they do, and I remember that somehow, at the end, the pirates recapture her, but she calls out to Jandar that she truly loves him!
The next book has Jandar joining the Black Legion of Darloona's native city of Shondakar. He becomes enbroiled in political intrigue, and uncovers a dark plot, instigated by a mysterious man named Ool, who has buttery-yellow skin, unlike the olive shade of most other Thanatorians (Thanator being the native name for Callisto--and you might recall that in the movie Avatar, they named a savage panther-like jungle beast a thanator--coincidence, or had someone read the Callisto books?). Ool turns out be a Mind-Wizard, a race of humans from a different world with physic powers who intend to conquer the planet.
In the third volume, Sky Pirates of Callisto, Jandar and his friends and allies, including Koja the Yathoon set off to rescue Princess Darloona from their city. Dark makes the very foolish mistake here of trusting Ulthar, a captured sky pirate, who throws him off the ship into Callisto's inland sea. Jandar winds up captured by the Parushtarians, a sea-faring race with tomato-red skin. Meanwhile, back on the ornithopter, the demise of Ulthar in this book was particularly memorable. The rogue has also managed to mess up the ship's controls so that they are now on a collision course with giant ice-mountains at Thanator's north pole.
And herein lies a problem. Thanator's light and heat source supposedly comes from an element in the atmosphere, and acts as both day and night for a planet so far from the sun. How does it work? This is never really explained. Since it does not depend on such proximity, then why should there by ice at the poles?
Anway, Ulthar manages to hide himself in a secret compartment within the ship. He is sought out and discovered by Tomar, a young lad he'd taken advantage of. The ensuing conflict when Ulthar is about to murder Tomar, when the boy drenches the rogue from burning oil from a lamp, and the villain is hurtled through the compartment window toward the icy landscape below!
Anyway, they manage to reach the city and rescue Jandar and Darloona, and the story ends with the sky-pirate's city being utterly destroyed (something I wouldn't have done).
The follow-up novel I remember purchasing the first time I went to the Griffon bookstore in South Bend. This is still in business, by the way, though I rarely do there now. They used to have hordes of metal minitures, one of the first stores to specialize in roleplaying games, as well as used sci-fi paperbacks. Anyway, the novel itself has Jandar, Darloona, and their Parushtarian friend whose name I can't remember out on a hunting party seeking herds of vanth; stag-like creatures with seal-like skin. They a pursue a white or albino specimen, which leads them into a trap set by Zamora and her minions, a "mad" ruler of Tharkal, who schemes to conquer all of Thanator. The white vanth, by the way disappears, replaced by a yellow-skinned dwarf, which readers, including myself, recognized at once as another mind-wizard.
Jandar and his friends are captured and imprisoned in Tharkal's dungeon, where they encounter a small, large-nosed rogue who introduces himself as Glypto, and calls himself a "Chanthan", Thanatorian for something like "gentlemen adventurer." They all assume this is merely self-flattery, but Glypto enables them to escape from Tharkal and capture Zamora in the bargain, aboard a hot air-balloon While attempting to reach Shondakar, they are attacked by a bat-winged Callistan pteranodon (shown on the cover) called a ghastozar. There are two more pterosaur species known to be native to Callisto, the smaller zel (of the forest) and kajazel (of the inland sea). Jandar falls astride the monster and is nearly killed, but all manage to survive, and they set out on foot for Darloona's homeland. At this point, Carter introduces a bizarre vegetable lifeform native to the arid country of Callisto that the natives call the jinko. It is an ambulatory plant that survives dessert regions by crawling on its roots waterhole to waterhole, where it puts down its system and its "leaves" swell up like water-balloons. It also seems to have a rudimentary intelligence (according to Carter) that allows it to sense the presence of pursuers and flee. More realistically, this would probably be caused by turger, or some other manner of perception unique to plants.
Anyway, they harvest the jinko's bladder-like leaves, and drink their fill, before Jandar's ornithoter appears, and they assume that they are about to be rescued. It turns out that Zamora's minions have managed to capture the vessel, and she is freed and in command once again, while Jandar and company are again her prisoners. By now though, they rightly assume that it is the dwarfish mind-wizard who is manipulating the Empress behind her throne. Upon hearing them discussing this, she bursts in the cabin, furious. Somehow though, Jandar manages to convince her to listen in while they set a trap for the dwarf. The wizard falls for it, and Zamora realizes her predicement: it was Mind Wizards all along who'd setting the Thantorian nations against one another so that they could conquer all! Also, it is revealed that the sniveling but clever little Glypto is no common thief, but that he really is the Chanthan he claimed all along, in disguise.
The next volume, Mind-Wizards of Callisto, has Jandar and company leading a fleet of ornithopters to the mostly unexplored far side of Thanator, where the city of the Mind-Wizards resides. Once they cross into the uncharted regions then they are attacked by a horde of man-like bird-creatures called the Zarkoon. One of their ornithopters is also called the Zarkoon, named after beings the Thanatorians had assumed as mythical as harpies! Jandar and Tomar are captured by the bird-men and imprisoned in a place that looks similar to a bird-cage, where they find another captive, a jungle girl from one of the native tribes named Ylanna. She and Tomar don't get along at first, but after their escape these two eventually become lovers. There follows a battle with a plesiosaur-like aquatic reptile called a groak, and native only to the far side of Callisto (which serves, it turns out, as kind of "lost world" on Thanator), Jandar's party get captured by the Mind Wizards and taken to their city of Kuur. It is one of Jandar's friends (I forget his name) who finishes Jandar's manuscript upon returning to Shondakar, and places in the well, where it will be transported back to earth to be edited and published by LC.
At this point I'll have to make it clear (if I hadn't already) that LC has been pulling an ERB stunt throughout this series, claiming in his intros that he never actually wrote any of these books, that they were sent to him from Cambodia, having materialized across space in the well. Jon Dark is a real man, these adventures are really happening. He even makes the statement at one point that when asked to "write" another book in the series, that it was assumed he was concocting the same manner of good-natured hoax ERB claimed himself when he wrote the Mars and Pellucidar series. But no, he insists, he's only the editor. Most likely Carter never imagined anyone would actually fall for this. Leaving aside all the scientific impossibilities, the books not only parallell ERB's the names and places are all distinctly Carter-esque! In his aforementioned Savage Tales article, LC elaborates on how he created the series, coming up with the place and character names so that readers would be continually reminded of ERB, without straying too close to the original.
But still, as Carter explained in later years, that he received very many letters asking the location of well in Cambodia. At last he grew tired of explaining that there was no such well, and just made up some bogus location!
As he had hinted at in that article in Ka-Zar however, in the following book, he took the hoaxing device to an extreme that even ERB himself never dared venture. Yes, the title of Lankar of Callisto, is the Thanatorian version of the author's own name. In it, Carter journeys to Cambodia, and takes the same plunge that his character does. He ends up on Thanator, and where he battles himsefl through the jungles of the Grand Kumala. He befriends an injured othode, a Callistan dog-like creature, huge as a tiger with purple fur and six legs! With goggling eyes, tusk-like teeth, and a frog-like gash for a mouth, the othodes of Callisto (which are more common on the far side), look very like a green callots of Burroughs' Mars. The resemblance is intentional, and Carter even calls Bozo the othode (which he names after his own pet) his own equivalent of Woola, the faithful Barsoomian "hound." LC and Bozo slay a vastodon; then they find and rescue a young Thantorian boy named Taran ensnared in ximchak (giant spider) web, and togather the three make it Shondakar, from which they find Jandar's allies set off for the Mind Wizards' city to rescue him.
Once Lankar is captured by the Kuurians, he finds himself taken to same cell as Lt. Andrew Dark. Recognizing him at once, he greets him, shockingly, with, "Lt. Jonathon Andrew Dark, I presume!"
This is the point in the story where I actually remember getting a chill while reading it. I don't want anyone reading this to get the idea I thought any of this was real! And yet...
Somehow apprehension caused the hairs on the back of my neck to go up. Or something very like it.
Andrew Dark begins explaining all he has learned during his captivity of the Mind Wizards' planned invasion of earth. They've about given up on Callisto, he tells Carter. Earth shows much greater promise. By tapping into Dark's brain, they've found that the part the world in which he reached Callisto from is inhabited by yellow men, like themselves, and they could blend into the population faultlessly. All they'd need to do was get control of one man--Mao Tse Tung--and it would all be over for earth. Their plan is to destroy all life on the planet save that need to sustain themselves, as they dominate the planet on as living brains immersed in chemical soup, living an existence of pure intellect. There is already one wizard, Jandar tells him, Quarral No. 5, who is nothing but a living brain aspiring to subjugate whole civilizations.
And here was LC insisting that all of this was real, not fantastic fiction, and might happening even as I read! But then, I assurred myself that too much time had elapsed from when Carter wrote this, for any alien invasion to have taken place, so the heroes must have succeeded in defeating these would-be conquerors.
And so they did. Lankar and Jandar escape, kill the Mind-Wizards and their flesh robots (giant soliders created by fusing body parts). The pulsating giant brain, Quarrel No. 5, ends up slain by little Taran, who thinks it some experimental animal the wizards are torturing!
Everyone escapes and all ends well, Jandar returns to Shondakar, Ylanna and Tomar find each other, Lankar returns to earth. Where he soon discovers from another manuscript that Bozo the othode has found a mate, and they now have puppies!
After Lankar, Carter wrote only two more Callisto books, Ylana of Callisto, about the jungle maid of Callisto's far side, and Renegades of Callisto, which introduced the game of Darza, the equivlelent of Barsoomian chess. This was where Carter hemmed a little too close to the source material, as the rules of Darza were virtually the same.
I don't remember a whole lot from these final volumes, only that cover art was from a different artist, and that the whole cover format was different. In Renegades, Carter also introduced a member of heretofore unknown aquatic race, presumably native to Thanbator's inland sea, the Koram-Laj. One beast also native thereof, called a dragon-fish or dragon-snake, also never featured in any volume.
Carter seemed to have planned a few more novels, but sales were apparently flagging by this point, and he went on to other things.
When I started this post I wanted to discuss Carter's other Burroughsian series, especially Zanthodon, and the Venus-like Green Star series. But I didn't figure on getting into this long summary, so that will have to wait until later.
Great post, I love your passion for the genre.
ReplyDelete