The Fantasies of My Youth

[bibliogramma]

The Grey Mane of Morning, by Joy Chant.

A long time ago, when I was still in my teens, most publishers thought that, despite the overwhelming success of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, fantasy was primarily for kids and readers of pulp magazines. Sword and sorcery and supernatural fantasy had been around for a while – from writers such as Lovecraft, Howard, Bloch, Smith, Moore and Leiber – but the flowering of adult fantasy in the 1800s (MacDonald, Mirlees, Morris, Dunsany et. al.) was mostly forgotten, and the genre was, with its other speculative fiction cousins, science fiction and horror, in disrepute. There was always fantasy being written and published, of course, but not a lot of it.

Then along came a brilliant editor named Lin Carter (himself a fantasy author), who launched one of the more influential publishing imprints in the history of speculative fiction: the Ballantine Adult fantasy series, which during its five-year existence reprinted a great many of the classics of adult fantasy, and introduced a few new authors who would help lead the great rebirth of adult fantasy.

One of those authors was Joy Chant. While The Grey Mane of Morning was not part of the Ballantine series (it was published in 1977), it is set in the same world as her first published novel, Red Moon and Black Mountain, which was printed by Ballantine in 1971.

OK, so that’s the history. I became a devoted reader of fantasy during this rapid proliferation of old and new material of the late 1960s and early 1970s, and Joy Chant was one of the writers who took me there.

The Grey Mane of Morning is a story of a nomadic and technologically unsophisticated people living under the influence of a city-dwelling people who see them as a useful source of readily available luxury goods and crafts (furs, animal horns, and so on) and slave labour, and the young man whose actions provoke their emergence from a state of servitude and the beginning of their transformation into a powerful civilisation.

It’s the first of Chant’s books that I’ve been able to locate and re-read, and I am very glad that I was able to do so. I’m looking forward to finding and re-reading her two other books set in the same world, Red Moon and Black Mountain and When Voiha Wakes, and also her book The High Kings, a retelling of Celtic myths and Arthurian legends.

Comments

[wolfinthewood.livejournal.com]

There is an interesting interview (http://www.lib.rochester.edu/camelot/intrvws/chant.htm) with Joy Chant online, but you have probably found it already.

[bibliogramma.livejournal.com]

Yes, I've been reading (and re-reading) Ray's interviews ever since I stumbled across them a few years back. ;-)

I still haven't quite gotten over finding my favourite professor on-line doing such interesting things. It's the whole "The Internet makes the world a very small place indeed" thing that comes and hits you in the face every once in a while when you least expect it.