The Black Star by Lin Carter

For a time, under the First, or Lemurian, Dynasty of glittering Caiphul, a technological renaissance had brought science to new golden heights; but the collapse of that Dynasty and the dark ages that followed before the rise of the City of the Golden Gates, had robbed the Atlanteans of much that they had so slowly and painfully re-won from the wreckage of the past.

I keep telling myself I'm a reader and not a collector, but I have recently bought a lot of Lin Carter books because of their Jeff Jones and Frank Frazetta covers.  We read one pretty recently, Time War, Carter's A. E. van Vogt pastiche, and today we're reading another, Carter's 1973 novel The Black Star which has a Frazetta cover full of naked musclemen facing a dreadful fate on a collapsing stone bridge.  There's also a wizard in there--is he rescuing the pale face by destroying the bridge with his sorcery, or is he the one who had blondie chained up?  Maybe we'll find out when we read this thing, which is like 220 pages of text.  Or maybe this cover illustration has no relationship to the contents, which sometimes happens with these SF novels.

The Black Star is set in Atlantis, and the book begins with a prologue made up of quotes about the mythical lost continent from Plato and Madame Blavatsky and others; the text proper consists of six books, and each of these is headed by an epigraph of similar theme and source, e.g., Pliny or W. Scott-Elliot, author of Atlantis and Lost Lemuria.  First up is The Book of Diodoric.  Diodoric is an ethnic Celt, pale, blonde and blue-eyed, whose ancestors were enslaved by the Atlanteans but earned their freedom.  A fighting man pledged to defend Atlantis and its White Emperor, as the story begins Diodoric is about to commit suicide because the war against the evil wizard Thelatha is lost and the Emperor has fled the half-ruined capital city--The City of the Golden Gates--and the enemy is moments away from taking the palace.  But his comrades convince him to live on, and Diodoric rescues from assassins a sixteen-year-old brunette noblewoman with "shallow sweet breasts and long supple legs" who was left behind by her fellow courtiers as they made their getaway.  Together our hero and this tasty dish, Lady Niane, escape the city in one of those flying boats so common to Barsoom and to fiction influenced by Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Carter seems as interested in the architecture and history of Atlantis and its predecessor Lemuria as he is in the adventure plot of his novel, and as the heroes escape we learn a lot about the city and the provenance of these air boats, and we get such digressions throughout the novel.  As with so many sword-fighting adventure stories, from Burroughs to Tolkien to Vance to Wolfe, the setting of The Black Star is a civilization in decline and its characters are members of a nation inferior to those that preceded theirs; there is a lot of talk about how the Lemurians and the early colonists of Atlantis were masters of innumerable technological wonders, but the secret of building and maintaining such devices is now lost--these air boats are one example, common thousands of years ago but now rare.

The Book of Diodric ends back in the palace, where we watch a mysterious wizard, cloaked and masked, enter a treasure room and find the thing he was seeking is gone.

Book 2 is The Book of Niane, and as it begins we learn how Niane acquired the as yet unspecified thing that masked wizard sought and was enraged to find gone from its accustomed perch.  When they stop the airboat in some mountains to rest, Diodoric and Niane are captured by Troglodytes, barbaric dark-skinned dwarves whom it is suspected are the natives of Atlantis, forced into caves when the Lemurians colonized Atlantis many centuries ago.  (I guess in a book written nowadays these people would be the good guys.)  These illiterate little bastards carry our heroes for miles through their slimy tunnels and dark caves to the cell where Diodoric and Niane are to await their scheduled torture and cooking.

Book 3 is called The Book of Nephog Thoon.  Nephog Thoon is a 200-year old wizard of pure Lemurian blood who lives the life of a hermit in his tower in the same mountain range where reside the Troglodytes, whom he easily keeps at bay via various sorceries.  Carter describes this dude's tower over several pages.  Then we hear how the worldwide network of good wizards, apparently worried about the conquest of the capital of Atlantis by evil wizard Thelatha, now calling himself the Black Emperor, contacts Nephog Thoon and gets him to go rescue Diodoric and Niane before they are eaten.  The foremost episode of this caper is the destruction of a bridge over a monster-haunted abyss, the inspiration for Frazetta's cover. 

Book 4, The Book of Gryphax, offers more insight into green-clad Thelatha, and we observe as he sends one of his top soldiers, Gryphax, after Diodoric and Niane.  The horse has yet to be domesticated, and Gryphax's company rides big flightless birds.  Thelatha's sorcery cripples the airboat, bringing our three main characters down in a jungle.  Niane reveals to Diodoric and Nephog Thoon that she is carrying the Black Star, the jewel from Heaven that no Emperor can safely rule without, and Carter waxes superlative about it for a few pages.  For one thing, it glows with "eleven colors otherwise not known to human vision."  Trippy!  I wish Carter had done a better job explaining what the Black Star's powers were, however; he says that our heroes have to keep the Black Star out of Thelatha's hands because "Even the Gods could not dethrone Him Who Held The Star," but Thelatha dethroned the White Emperor, who had the Star in his palace with him.  Hey, why did the White Emperor leave the Black Star behind when he fled the palace, anyway?  Seems a little irresponsible!

Book 5 is The Book of Kashonga, named for a jungle dweller who is like nine feet tall and has blue-black skin.  An attack by a saber-toothed tiger splits up the three adventurers; Nephog Thoon uses his sorcery to overcome the soldiers of Gryphax he meets, but Niane and then Diodoric are not equal to the task of surviving in the jungle, and are rescued by Kashonga.  They build a raft to travel down a river to Caiphul, a city loyal to the White Emperor, but on the way are attacked by Gryphax's forces; Carter leaves us with a cliffhanger--will our heroes drown?

In the final Book, Book 6, the Book of Athothmose, we learn how our heroes fared in the attack on their raft--and the answer is, not too good!  Diodoric is on the brink of death, having been hit by a poisoned arrow.  Nephog Thoon lost his staff and so most of his magical powers are inoperative.  And the Black Star is missing, presumably dropped on a jungle trail or sunken to the bottom of that river!

When our exhausted cast gets to Caiphul, where Diodoric is patched up, they learn the headlines from across Atlantis--more bad news!  The White Emperor is dead, having been hit by one of those venomed arrows himself.  His infant son is rightful heir to the Imperial throne, but civil war has broken out across Atlantis as the monarchs of the individual kingdoms that constitute the Atlantean Empire each claim the White Throne for themselves.  Athothmose, the Seer of Atlantis is in Caiphul, and using his farseeing ability reports breaking news from the City of the Golden Gates--the capital of Atlantis is sinking beneath the ocean and Thelatha and his legions are being wiped out!  Those who are in the know, like Nephog Thoon, recognize that a long period of chaos, known to scholars as The Long Night, has begun.

(The Black Star is dedicated to three men, among them Poul Anderson.  As you classic SF fans know, the idea of a Long Night of chaos after the fall of an Empire is a major theme of Anderson's Flandry stories.)

The novel ends with Nephog Thoon back home in his tower.  We learn he stole the Black Star at the behest of the council of good wizards, and he hands it over to their representative.  This representative tells NT that Diodoric will go on to have further adventures, and one of Diodoric's descendants a thousand years hence will be permitted to find the Black Star.  Carter expected to publish an entire Atlantis trilogy, and announces at the end of The Black Star the sequel, titled The White Throne, but it seems this and a third book were never produced.

Following the story proper and an epilogue drawn from W. Scott-Elliot, Carter provides several pages of notes, detailing his classical and theosophist sources for the novel, and indicating that his many Thongor stories are set in the same universe as The Black Star.

The Black Star is not great, but it is not bad, and I enjoyed it mildly.  It feels short, because there are relatively few actual incidents, so much of the page count being taken up by history and architecture.  I also prefer a sword and sorcery story in which the main character, through his desires and decisions, drives the narrative over one of these tales in which unseen elites the hero doesn't even know about are manipulating him and other characters are forever rescuing him.  The Black Star is also sort of lacking in the climax department, seeing as the hero fails to deliver the MacGuffin and the villain gets killed offscreen not by one of our heroes but by climate change--this I guess is a reflection of the fact that The Black Star was meant to be the first of a series of three books following Diodoric, Niane, and their buddy Kashonga.  

On the good side, Carter tries to have a distinctive style and to depict a strange alien world, and also endeavors to portray how Diodoric and Niane grow as people over the course of their adventure, not just falling in love with each other but also, under the pressure of new responsibilities, maturing.  Carter is ambitious, he isn't just shoveling hack work at us here in The Black Star; Carter's work here may be derivative, but he actually loves his sources, he doesn't have contempt for them or for his audience and he isn't lazy.  I was never bored or irritated by The Black Star. 

I guess we'll say this is a mild recommendation.

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My copy of Dell 0932 has five pages of ads in the back, and somewhat to my surprise one of them is for a dictionary, two are for mainstream fiction---including a full page devoted to Catch-22--and one is for Desmond Morris's The Naked Ape.  Only one page is really SF-related, and that page is dedicated to Kurt Vonnegut, who is essentially regarded as a mainstream literary writer.  Of all the books advertised, I think the only one I have read is James Dickey's Deliverance, which I can recommend.  If you have read Philip L. Greene's The Jane Castle Manuscript or Cheryl Nash's The Ms. Girls or any of these other books, feel free to tell us about it in the comments.