Archives: Conan Re-Read

Howard’s Birthday

Robert E. Howard

Not THIS Howard, but the mighty Robert E. Howard. I’m planning to sit down and read one of my favorites by him this evening.

I have found myself defending my take on of his stories in some private message exchanges earlier today. Sometimes it seems like the work never ends…

It’s super busy here, as is usual lately. The launch date of my new book is less than a month away, and while I ready for various promotions I’m head down over book 2, punching problem areas into shape. I did steal some time this weekend to play some Ambush! and to put finishing touches on the outline for a new short story. Meanwhile I continue to poke a little bit at book 3, and the series work I’ll begin when THIS series wraps up — although I have a back up plan to do more with this particular world if things really take off.

My wife is still after to me to finish the third Dabir and Asim novel. Maybe I’ll try to make time for that. It seems like Arabian fantasy is suddenly selling again, and maybe there will be a big boost for the genre when the live action Aladdin comes out. But the first two books didn’t exactly fly off the shelves, so who knows.

Anyway, this Howard plans to celebrate the last name Howard with the re-read of one of his best tonight. Are any of you going to be doing the same? And if you are, what story will you choose?

Revisiting Some Sword-And-Sorcery

As I work away on various projects, I thought I’d link back to some earlier posts.

First, having just re-read “Queen of the Black Coast,” I recently revisited observations Bill Ward and I had about an earlier re-read. Bill knocked this one out of the park.

Second, Bill and I looked at a great Brackett story, “The Moon That Vanished.” We’d meant to analyze more, but we’ve both gotten pretty busy.

Lastly, here’s a post I penned back in 2013 discussing and contrasting the way Jack Vance and Robert E. Howard depicted women in their fiction. I don’t want to spoil the post, but I have to say that after binge reading a huge amount of Vancian fiction I hold even more strongly to my conclusions, and came away with some rather icky observations about some plot preferences Vance liked to return to again and again. And I don’t think they were employed, like some Robert E. Howard features, because he knew it would get him a cover. (If you’re not in the know, REH figured out that if he wanted a cover illustration for Weird Tales, the editor would be highly inclined to give him one if he put a whipping scene in the story. I can’t say for sure whether that actually meant more sales, or if it’s something that editor really enjoyed.) For all that I love Vance’s amazing world and culture building, he repeatedly has young women, just barely mature, being raped. Sometimes it’s depicted as “lighthearted” and one time it preceded the woman’s death.

Conan in the News

Conan and Belit by Brom.

So here’s a thing. Conan the Cimmerian is going to have a new TV series from Amazon. Good? Bad? I like that those involved say that they’re long-time fans of the character and want to keep him true to how Robert E. Howard wrote him, but I will withhold judgment until I see what they have wrought. Fingers are crossed. Here’s a link if you want the details.

I’ve gotten tired of being in a holding pattern as my in-house editor (i.e. the wife) works her way through the final draft of the most recent novel. It’s not her fault that she has a real job and can only read it on weekends and at night, and she’s made huge progress, with less than a quarter of the book left to re-read. But I’m still tired of being on hold, and as I’ve finished the basement organization I’ve pulled out a Dabir and Asim story and started work on it. Maybe I can finish it this week. Maybe I can actually write enough of ’em this year to do what I planned last, which was to put out another collection of their short stories!

Celebration

Robert E. Howard

I’ve written of the power of Robert E. Howard’s prose any number of times, and I’m sure that there’s more that could be said, and that will be said. Today on his birthday, though, I’ll merely reflect again on what I’ve written in the past, and this evening hoist a drink to one of my favorite writers while reading one of my favorite stories by him.

Over the weekend I finished the last of the Marvel collections that assembled all of the Roy Thomas Conan run. I’m not sure I’d recommend running out and buying that particular collection, unless you’re a completist. On the whole, the earlier phase of Thomas on Conan was better. Let me provide another shout out for the Thomas 12 issue arc for Dark Horse, collected in two graphic novels. (Those are volumes 11 and 12, The Road of Kings and Throne of Aquilonia, and they are two of only three volumes from the Dark Horse run that I’ve bothered to keep hold of.)

I’ve been told that story arc really isn’t very popular and I can’t for the life of me figure out why that is. The storytelling was top notch and Conan sounded and behaved like Conan… and the world felt right, too, which is something that doesn’t seem to be appreciated enough by some readers, who only care about whether or not Conan’s muscles are the size they think appropriate. In issues written by other hands there’s too much of the supernatural, so that it almost feels common place, or the plotting is off, or, worst of all, Conan isn’t right.

Roy Thomas gets Conan and what his world is like more than nearly any other pastiche writer, and consistently got him better than any other comic pastiche writer, period. That’s not to say that there weren’t some great issues and arcs written by others, but Thomas usually got it right. Even in a lesser story, Conan still acted like himself. And that’s a lot more complicated that it seems, or there’d be a lot more good pastiche out there.

Revisiting Universe R

cosmos alexandriaMany moons ago, back when I blogged as BG_Editor (that’s Black Gate editor), I took a little trip to Universe R. I talked about that trip in an article I wrote for Steven Silver, but I’ve never mentioned it on this blog, and I thought it time.

When it comes to the parallel universes we visit in speculative fiction, some of my personal favorites are the ones where Rome never fell, the one where Spock has a goatee, and Universe R.

I imagine a lot of you have thought about it. It’s that place where great artistic works were never lost. It’s the land where overlooked, forgotten, or under appreciated poets, playwrights, authors, and artists were encouraged and celebrated and lived on to craft more work. I don’t mean the egoverse where you’re the top of the charts or have written a chain of bestsellers – this universe is for the artists you wish had gotten a better deal. Universe R can’t be completely logical, of course. For instance, I’ve been lamenting the destruction of the Library of Alexandria since I first learned of it – and especially after I saw Carl Sagan walking through it in Cosmos – but if the Library of Alexandria had survived, we’d probably be further along with a lot of developments and some of the later artists who prospered in Universe R might not ever have been born. You can’t worry about Universe R making that kind of logical sense or the whole thing falls apart.

REH Palooza

dream towerThe other week I had a chat with Robert Zoltan and Edgar the Raven, and we discussed Robert E. Howard, sword-and-sorcery, my own writing, and all sorts of other stuff as well. You can journey to the Dream Tower yourself and listen in through this link.

If you haven’t dropped by the Dream Tower yet, I encourage you to do so. The interviews so far have covered Edgar Rice Burroughs and J.R.R. Tolkien and have been with a couple of my favorite people.

I’ve been in the midst of a whole lot of spring cleaning over the last weeks and it’s time to get back to writing, although part of each day will still be devoted to some not-quite-finished projects.

At the end of each busy day I’ve been reading the Breckinridge Elkins stories of Robert E. Howard, something long overdue for me. The Robert E. Howard Foundation recently printed the second and final volume that collected all of the Breckinridge Elkins tales, along with adventures starring other similar characters.

Quick Update, Now with Conan

elephanttower5I’ll keep this brief. In my limited spare time I’ve been working on a couple of projects that I can hardly wait to reveal… but must. One of them is going to be of great interest to sword-and-sorcery fans, and the other is research for a genre I’ve never written in.

Most time, though, has gone to the creeping progress towards the conclusion of the revision of book 1 of my big new series. And darned if I can’t really talk too much about that, either. I just hope all of this hard work is going to pay off.

It’s probably no fun to read such a mysterious entry, so let me point you towards something fairly cool. Hocking noticed this a couple of weeks ago and I’ve been meaning to share it. Here’s an essay about Conan and Robert E. Howard that manages to see things from a new and insightful perspective. I especially like the part where the writer calls out the perception of “failings” in the execution of “The Tower of the Elephant.”

Right — back to the salt mines.

Belated Birthday

solomon-kane3Here’s to Robert E. Howard, creator of my favorite genre, sword-and-sorcery, on the anniversary of his birth. Raise high your goblets and drink deep.

What is best about Robert E. Howard’s writing? The driving headlong pace, the seemingly inexhaustible imagination, the splendid cinematic prose poetry, the never-say-die protagonists? It is hard to pick one thing, so it may be simpler to state that Robert E. Howard possessed profound and often astonishing storytelling gifts. Without drowning his readers in adjectives (he had the knack of using just enough adjectives or adverbs, and knew to let the verbs do the heavy lifting) or slowing pace, he brought his scenes to life. Vividly.

Writer Eric Knight may have most succinctly described this particular aspect of Howard’s power in an article on Solomon Kane:

“’Wings of the Night’ features a marathon running fight through ruin, countryside, and even air that only a team of computer animators with a sixty-million dollar budget and the latest rendering technology (or a single Texan from Cross Plains hammering the story out with worn typewriter ribbon) could bring properly to life.”

Revisiting Late Marvel Conan

chronicles conan 6I don’t often revise my web articles aside from addressing typographical errors, but I wanted to take another crack at this particular entry, because I don’t think it was fair or well considered. Heck, I hadn’t even finished reading one of the volumes when I wrote this.

Dark Horse has been reprinting the entire Marvel run on Conan now for multiple years. I’m a latecomer to the comic, even in reprint form, so the stories are new to me.

I read and enjoyed many of the Roy Thomas written run (volumes 1-14, although 15-17 have additional Thomas penned stories). Experimentation with reading the tales by other writers in 15-17 led me to conclude that, as promised, the non-Thomas Conan is pretty wretched, so I’ve held off reading any more until he rejoined the mag in volume 31. (I should add that I do hear good things about Priest’s run on the Marvel Conan and will probably check one of those collections out before much longer.)

But the point of this brief post is a look at these final Thomas collections, and they’re substantially better than the ones that appeared immediately following the departure of Thomas. 

Carter & de Camp Pastiche

savage-sword-4A few months ago I pulled down my old Conan paperbacks to re-read what I’d remembered as a pretty decent pastiche, de Camp’s “Halls of the Dead.” The bones of the story were pretty good, most likely because they were from a very detailed outline Robert E. Howard himself had set down (now popularly known as “the Nestor fragment”). But man, was the execution terrible.

And in the past few months I’ve been exposed to more de Camp pastiche than ever as I worked through various Savage Sword of Conan volumes. On the whole, they’re just not very good, even in outline form.

The only exception I suppose I have is when de Camp changed names and settings in one El Borak story and turned it into a Conan tale. Even that isn’t entirely successful — until it makes its way into comic form in a Savage Sword story, at which point, in the hands of Buscema and Thomas “Sons of the White Wolf” kicks an awful lot of sword-and-sorcery butt.

Do any of you enjoy the de Camp and Carter pastiches? If so, which ones?