In 1978, I was just getting interested in fantasy fiction in general and Sword & Sorcery in particular. I’d read and loved The Chronicles of Narnia back in 5th Grade, and of course, seen the then-recent TV and movie adaptions of The Hobbit and Ralph Bakshi’s Lord of the Rings. I read the occasional Marvel Conan comic, and in the fall of 1978 I was just starting to play Dungeons & Dragons with my 8th grade buddies. The previous year I had seen and loved Bakshi’s previous fantasy film, Wizards. I was and still am a huge fan of Wizards. 1977 may be remembered for Star Wars by most people, but for me it was Wizards.

I went shopping with my mom one Saturday and instead of just going down to check out the toy soldiers in the basement of W.H. Smith’s bookstore, I decided to look through the Science Fiction and Fantasy section upstairs. The very first cover that caught my eye was this:

Obviously, it was about a wizard, which was a big plus in light of my appreciation of Wizards. He wasn’t a regular Gandalf-style wizard, either; no, it was a big fat green Genie-looking dude with a sexy brunette in tow, running from a dragon in front of some weird looking cacti. Wizards also had an offbeat wizard in the person of Avatar, and he had a sexy brunette girlfriend as well, and they ran around in psychedelic landscapes too. Sold!

I spent the rest of the weekend completely engrossed in Lin Carter’s tale of a mysterious wandering green-skinned wizard named Oolb Votz and his slave girl, Ooo, as they traveled through a world that at the time was totally alien to me. It was a psychedelic bedtime story told in a genteel narrative voice, blending a somewhat Arabian Nights mood with the kind of far-out 1970s fantasy settings I had only seen in posters glimpsed through headshop windows. I went on a whirlwind tour of bizarre places like the City of Ning, which has nothing to fear from invaders for the reason that they are abject paupers. I met fabulous beasts, like the Loquacious Simurgh. (Every creature in the book, Carter states, was taken from an existing mythology or classic fantasy book.)

The Wizard of Zao is part of an incomplete series; The Chronicles of Kylix, which also includes The Quest of Kadji (much of which was lifted directly from a Cossack novel by Harold Lamb), Kellory the Warlock (a grim revenge quest), and several uncollected short stories of Amalric the Man-God. Several other works were planned, but never written. The books are connected only by virtue of being set in the same solar system. I have my suspicions that Carter used this conceit to sell these unrelated stand-alone books in a series-hungry fantasy publishing market.

As an adult with a much broader background in fantasy fiction than my middle-school self, I can recognize some of Carter’s influences in this story. Take a bit of Dunsany’s exotic settings, a pinch of Andrew Lang’s witty authorial interjections, toss in a healthy measure of Bakshi’s world-weary wizard and his sexy protégé, Elinore, mix well and there it is. Contrary to the title, I did not find too much similarity to Baum’s Oz series, although I understand Carter was an avid fan. I have not read many Oz books myself, so maybe there is an influence here beyond the title.

I think Carter may have hoped to use this book as a basis for a humorous fantasy series. The first volume of Piers Anthony’s Xanth series was getting a lot of recognition at this time, and Lin probably saw this as a subgenre he could easily tap into. A chapter in Wizard of Zao that includes a tribe of goblins singing the old “Plop-plop-fizz-fizz” Alka-Seltzer jingle wouldn’t have been that out of place in a Xanth novel. In fact, Wizard of Zao served as a commercial for Xanth in my case, anyway, because after reading it, I wanted something similar and was directed to A Spell for Chameleon. The Wizard of Zao was far more enjoyable.

Carter eventually did write a humorous fantasy series: Terra Magica, four books written in the 1980s that were very reminiscent of The Wizard of Zao in style. They have the same dry narrative voice and they share the use of pre-existing mythical beings culled from classical sources but were far more polished than The Wizard of Zao. Sadly, these were among the last books Lin Carter would write before succumbing to cancer in 1988.

In closing, The Wizard of Zao is no classic of the genre by any means, and probably not even considered to be one of Lin Carter’s best. Not too many swords, but a healthy measure of sorcery. However, it was my own personal gateway into fantasy and Sword & Sorcery, and it will always have a place of honor on my personal bookshelf.

Thanks to this little book, I soon visited Hyboria, Nehwon, Melinboné and so many other worlds of wonder, and eventually even produced a couple of tales of my own. Pick up a copy somewhere. You’ll have a lot of fun!

Mark Taverna was born in the barbaric frozen wastelands of Canada. Many years ago he journeyed south to the ancient desert city of El Paso, where he now lives with his wife, sons, and cat. Having recently escaped from slave-labor in the vile dungeons of a public school library, he is now a stay-at-home dad. Mark hopes this happy circumstance will result in the writing of many tales of high adventure. His stories appear in the anthologies Death Dealers & Diabolists and Warlords, Warlocks & Witches.