Editing Lin Carter (section)

==Unfinished projects==

Carter left a number of projects unfinished. He regularly announced plans for future works that never came to fruition, even including some among lists of other works printed in the fronts of his books. His 1976 anthologies ''[[Kingdoms of Sorcery]]'' and ''[[Realms of Wizardry]]'' both included such phantom books among his other listed works, titled ''Robert E. Howard and the Rise of Sword & Sorcery'', ''The Stones of Mnar'' and ''Jungle Maid of Callisto''. The first of these, presumably a non-fiction study along the lines of his ''[[Tolkien: A Look Behind "The Lord of the Rings"]]'' (1969), never saw print; the second seems to be related to ''The Terror Out of Time'', a collection of Cthulhu Mythos tales he had pitched unsuccessfully to Arkham House (the existing material for which was eventually gathered into his ''[[The Xothic Legend Cycle: The Complete Mythos Fiction of Lin Carter|The Xothic Legend Cycle]]'' (1997)); the third was apparently a working title for ''[[Ylana of Callisto]]'' (1977), published the year after the anthologies.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://singular--points.blogspot.com/2008/04/lost-kingdoms.html|archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20150610232725/http://singular--points.blogspot.com/2008/04/lost-kingdoms.html|url-status=dead|title=Rutledge, Charles R. "Lost Kingdoms," April 11, 2008|archive-date=June 10, 2015}}</ref>

Several of his series were abandoned due to lack of publisher or reader interest or to his deteriorating health. Among these are his "[[Thongor]]" series, to which he intended to add two books dealing with the hero's youth; only a scattering of short stories intended for the volumes appeared. His "Gondwane" epic, which he began with the final book and afterwards added several more covering the beginning of the saga, lacks its middle volumes, his publisher having canceled the series before he managed to fill the gap between. Similarly, his projected [[Atlantis]] trilogy was canceled after the first book (''The Black Star''), and his five-volume "Chronicles of Kylix" ended with three volumes published and parts of another (''Amalric'').

Another unfinished project was Carter's self-proclaimed ''magnum opus'', an epic literary fantasy entitled ''Khymyrium'', or, to give it its full title, ''Khymyrium: The City of the Hundred Kings, from the Coming of Aviathar the Lion to the Passing of Spheridion the Doomed''. It was intended to take the genre in a new direction by resurrecting the fantastic medieval chronicle history of the sort exemplified by [[Geoffrey of Monmouth]]'s ''[[Historia Regum Britanniae]]'' and [[Saxo Grammaticus]]'s ''[[Gesta Danorum]]''. It was also to present a new invented system of magic called "Enstarrment", which from Carter's description somewhat resembles the system of magical [[Liavek#Magic system|luck investment]] later devised by [[Emma Bull]] and [[Will Shetterly]] for their "[[Liavek]]" series of shared world anthologies. Carter claimed to have begun the work about 1959, and published three excerpts from it as separate short stories during his lifetime – "Azlon" in ''[[The Young Magicians]]'' (1969), "The Mantichore" in ''[[Beyond the Gates of Dream]]'' (also 1969) and "The Sword of Power" in ''[[New Worlds for Old]]'' (1971). A fourth episode was published posthumously in ''Fungi'' #17, a 1998 fanzine. His most comprehensive account of the project appeared in ''[[Imaginary Worlds – the Art of Fantasy|Imaginary Worlds: the Art of Fantasy]]'' in 1973. While he continued to make claims for its excellence throughout his lifetime, the complete novel never appeared. Part of the problem was that Carter was forcing himself to write the novel in a formal style more like that of William Morris and quite unlike his own.

Carter also spoke about publishing a magazine titled ''Yoh-Vombis,'' which he intended to consist of stories he would have published in his paperback ''Weird Tales'' series had he been permitted to continue editing it. As well as new fantastic stories, he intended to publish stories and verse by [[Robert E. Howard]] and [[Clark Ashton Smith]]; unpublished letters from Smith, [[H. P. Lovecraft]]; and art by Smith, [[Roy Krenkel]], [[Mahlon Blaine]], etc.<ref>"An Interview with Lin Carter." ''Crypt of Cthulhu,'', Vol 5, No 2 (Yuletide 1985)p. 37.</ref> However, this mooted magazine never eventuated.