Hey, just a quick note to let you know my latest post on the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series is up at Black Gate. I’m looking at the first volume in the series proper, The Blue Star by Fletcher Pratt.
Dayjobbery got in the way of finishing this one, or it would have gone up a couple of weeks ago.
I mentioned this here recently, but now it’s official. My first post for Black Gate went up this afternoon. I’m looking at the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. The first post was an overview, giving a little historical context and laying out what I’m going to be doing. The following posts will be reviews of the individual titles in the series. You can read my post here.
I’d like to thank John O’Neill for giving me the opportunity to blog for Black Gate, which is one of the top websites for fantasy.
I started to refer to this project as Sooper Seekrit Project Number 3, but it will go public too quickly to really have that title. Number 1 was the Amazing Stories gig. Number 2 has been put on hold indefinitely, and will thus remain secret for a while longer.
John ONeill asked me about a month or six weeks ago if I would consider doing some posts for Black Gate. After a brief back and forth, this is what we settled on. I said I would be glad to do it, but it would have to wait until October was over. He agreed.
Lin Carter
So here’s the deal. I’m going to be reviewing the Ballantine Adult Fantasy Series edited by Lin Carter. The first post will be a brief overview of the series, placing it in its historical context. Then I’ll start reviewing the books. I’m going to take them in order of publication at first, but at some point I’ll start jumping around. Some of the titles I find the most interesting were published later in the run.
For those of you who might not be familiar with it, the Adult Fantasy Series was a series of books published by Ballantine Books in the late 1960s through the mid 1970s. Edited by Lin Carter, the series included a number of works written in the 1800s or early 1900s, many of which had fallen into obscurity or were unfamiliar to American readers. The books had gorgeous wraparound cover art and are highly collectible today.
I’m not going to be on a regular schedule, at least not for a while. My intention is to get about one post a month done. I’m still doing a weekly post for Amazing Stories, and that will continue through the end of the year. Then I’m going to cut back. Trying to review an independent work every week is starting to put more of a strain on my schedule than I want.
