Honestly, I never know how to feel about announcements like this. On the one hand, I'm always glad to see Conan and other foundational pulp fantasy characters celebrated, especially nowadays, when so much of popular fantasy is so thoroughly deracinated. On the other hand, precisely because of that deracination, I wonder just how well this new fiction will reflect the work and worldview of Howard. Given how well such an effort went down in the 1960s under the stewardship of L. Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter (i.e. not very), I am not sanguine. I suppose a great deal depends on who these "finest authors" Titan plans to employ are.
Only time will tell.
The Swarzenegger and Momoa Conan movies are diametrically opposed on the nature-vs-nurture scale, so at this point, nothing can surprise me. Maybe he'll learn magic in this book?
ReplyDeleteSOYNAN THE BARBARIAN!
ReplyDeleteSeriously, I have about as much faith in this as I do Disney's Lucasfilm and Marvel or any D&D movie.
The good news: The press release states, "Expanding from the core of Howard’s original work, the new fiction will stand firmly within the Conan canon..."
ReplyDeleteThe bad news: The press release states, "The original short fiction will be available exclusively in e-format..."
I'm not afraid anymore.
ReplyDeleteI'm just tired.
That's very well said.
DeleteOne of the definitions of "original" is "not imitative or derivative" but the ad copy here seems to suggest exactly the opposite. Trying to profit from Howard's work by using his characters and setting is the very epitome of imitation to my mind.
ReplyDeleteI've read more pastiches of Conan than I ever should have and have zero interest in seeing more.
I know I should be scared, but I hold out hope.
ReplyDeleteToday's political (and commercial) climate isn't very lenient towards an anarchistic, unabashed and definitely male force of nature. I'm not holding my breath.
ReplyDeletethe first Conan story literally positions him as a king, I don't think you understand what "anarchy" means.
Deletealso if they make Conan genderqueer I am 100% buying anything they sell lmao
Conan may be referred to occasionally as a king, but what he does on stage time in REH's (or anyone else's) stories has little to do with a king's day job, i.e. ruling over a country or worrying about taxation. What he actually does is the exact opposite: he roams around unbound, unfettered by society, state or family, pillaging, looting and slaying, giving no heed to authority or power, except maybe his own.
Deletewell, I realize everyone has strong opinions on this, but I don't. I know that no one would remember Conan at all, if it wasn't for the re-writes, unauthorized editions, etc. And these things get lost otherwise. the example I use is Bing Crosby. In the early fifties, he was the biggest thing ever. movies, shows, radio, songs, books. All #1, ALL AT ONCE. and no one under 70 has heard of him, basically. Pop culture is fleeting, and the average consumer has an attention span of about a week.
ReplyDeletethis is why the big entertainment corporations are always doing reboots. reboot it or lose it.
When was the last time you thought about (let alone purchased) something related to The Dark Crystal, or The Last Starfighter, or ET? These were VERY big deals when I was young, and now, gone. no one under 40 even remembers.
there was a new Dark Crystal Netflix series that came out just a couple years ago. ET is still a cultural touchstone. nobody gives a frick about the Last Starfighter, but I feel like 2/3 ain'tn't bad ;)
Delete"When was the last time you thought about... The Last Starfighter..." You make me sad.
DeleteDark Crystal's already been mentioned, I bought miniatures of the Last Fighter ships from Studio Bergstrom less than two years ago, and while I never cared for ET much even as a kid I did watch the Freakazoid parody episode of it last week, which remains as amusing as ever. I'm also 15 years shy of seventy and I sure as hell know who Bing Crosby was even if I don't care for his musical style at all.
DeleteYour argument seems shaky as hell to me. Conan as literature is not Conan as pop culture in other media, and even in literary terms the pastiches of him have been universally wretched IME. Robert Jordan's efforts were so bad I skipped on Wheel of Time for years, and never did get past the first book when I did try it.
well, pastiches generally are, be it Lawrence Sanders, Robert Ludlum or REH. But without them, the IP dies. No one reads them. I have tons of older materials that I love, love, love, but no one even remembers the authors, let alone the books. Sometimes you can just re-print the material for the next generation (say Agatha Christie), even if from a specialty publisher (say, Black Gat Books or Hard Case Crime) but most of the time, it just falls off. People forget, throw the old stuff out, and no one cares. I spend a lot of time in thrift stores, and seeing the amount of Hard SF thrown out is depressing. I grew up on this stuff.
DeleteIt's demonstrably untrue that no one cares, or we wouldn't be having this discussion. Yes, the majority of people won't ever bother to experience writers from before their time (and far too many don't even manage contemporary authors) and older books fall out of the public eye - but is that inherently a bad thing? Tastes change over the generations, and if we don't make room for new authors doing new things literature will become more and more like Hollywood, endlessly remaking past successes because they're seen as safer bets than innovation is.
DeleteI'd honestly rather see any author capable of doing a good Howard pastiche create their own work instead of playing in his sandbox.
Howard was a genre-hopper and died just before WW2, which I suspect deprived the world of seeing what he (assuming he survived the war) would have done with the military genre, or the vet-in-exotic-locales-postwar genre that was so big for a brief span - or looking forward, REH writing espionage stories set in the Cold War.
If some unknown modern writer could actually manage to emulate his style and mindset convincingly, I'd far rather see that talent used for the things REH might have written but didn't than a retread of Conan.
Writing new stories about Conan isn't just opening a can of worms, it's opening a whole shelf of cans of worms.
ReplyDeleteFirst, no one can write about Conan like Howard did. Just not going to happen. No one has the same writing style, no one has the same intimate knowledge of the character, no one knows the Hyborian Age like Howard. So any pastiche, no matter how well-intended or attempted, is going to fall short. That can be seen in the fact that several well-known and well regarded authors have attempted to do so in the past, and have failed spectacularly.
Second, today's audiences outside a few aficionados such as ourselves are not going to enjoy any Conan story that even comes close to the mark for any of the above, anyway. They are going to loathe Conan, the Hyborian Age, the other "heroes," and even the "villains," as they just won't get it. Classic Sword & Sorcery is related to modern "Fantasy" in the same way a wolf is related to a chihuahua -- only very, very distantly, and if you look at it through rose-tinted glasses. And the problem there is, if you do not write a book for the modern fantasy mass market -- you have already failed.
Third, the classic Conan character is "problematic" to much of the modern fantasy base, mostly because of bad pastiches and horrible misunderstanding of the original character. He is viewed by many as a relic of an earlier, unpleasant age, and tainted by Howard's racial views. Yet if you "redeem" the red-handed wolf that is Conan, you piss off the fans of the original (and make him into something milquetoast), but if you don't, you piss off everyone else... and again, no sales (or not enough to make it worth while).
Finally, how busy IS Conan? Howard already wrote enough adventures to seriously fill a lifetime, then DeCamp, Carter, & Co. doubled that, then the other pastiches trebled that... if you read the prospective timeline in GURPS Conan, somehow, sometimes, it seems like he was in different parts of the continent at the same time! What part of the Hyborian world has Conan not already visited? What potential enemies has he not already fought?
The answer to all those problems, of course, is to simply use the Hyborian Age as a backdrop for some other worthy adventurer. Even in Howard's works there was mention of plenty of these -- Conan was merely among the most storied. But therein lies the Conan RPG quandary -- if you are not playing Conan, you are not the star. And the same can be said with writing about other characters in the Hyborian Age. The appeal is... much more limited. As was proven in the last round of "Conan" novels, when there were three trilogies about secondary (very, very secondary) characters in the Hyborian Age. I'm not even sure some of the third novels in each trilogy were ever published...
So the odds are very, very much against any of these books pleasing... anybody.
Sad to say, but frankly, Conan needs to be left alone in his barrow. The Hyborian Age needs to be lit upon a bier. Let us enjoy the original myths and legends, and let the dead rest. This foul necromancy that attempts to raise Conan as some withered husk is unbecoming to the king and hero he was.
The same problem affects both the fandom and the property holders. The problem is this: Few understand REH's worldview, few understand Conan's worldview, and less understand the worldview of the author. As James M. points out REH Conan is not pastiche Conan is not film Conan. When the reader takes in all the REH Conan says about himself, actions he takes, and his views of the world he is NOT a problematic character. An accurate portrayal of the REH Conan would anger many fans of the original simply because those fans don't understand the nuances of the Conan character, nor do they understand what REH is trying to say. It certainly is not something that can be conveyed in a comment page on a blog!
ReplyDeleteGiven that the nuances inherent to the worldview of the author, the character and the hyborean world are often lost on even the most hard core literary fans, it can be expected that all that will really survive in further literature and screenplays is the name and general idea of the character and his world as they in the modern consciousness.
Still, I prefer that attempts are made in hopes that someday someone who has the necessary understanding and production skill - I would prefer the visual more than the literary - can create a work worthy of sitting alongside the original stories the way the Roy Thomas Comics do. It was these Comics above anything else that catapulted Conan into the mainstream.
Give the original Conan stories the attention to detail, respect and nuance that you see in the first three seasons of Game of Thrones and I guarantee you will have a hit on your hands.
Well said. REH was pretty open minded for his time and place. He certainly didn’t share some of the traits of some of his contemporary pulp writers that have landed them in the dog house of late — he has none of HPL’s terror of the foreign and the feminine, and none of what I reluctantly and advisedly have to call ERB’s white supremacist fantasies. But all that being said, REH didn’t have much of a filter, god bless him, and he never met a nubile slave-girl or a black-skinned cannibal savage he didn’t love. You hit the nail on the head when you talked about the nuances being lost in the din of the culture war, as the shouting and misunderstanding will come from both the left and the right. Fantasy and science fiction publishing is in no state right now to do this character justice, nor are the readers.
DeleteI don't know who you are comparing him to, but after re-reading some of his Solomon Kane stories recently I don't think you could call him 'pretty open minded for his time and place'. Those books are an obsessive, repetitive meditation on the horrors of blackness. Perhaps 10 % of the Conan canon taps into that same energy in the same way, but the fetishization of white skinned purity and beastial nature of brown and blackness are everywhere in his Hyborian Age stories.
DeleteI would agree with Picador's assessment that HPL and ERB were worse but I have to also agree with the above poster that as far as race goes REH was typical for the time. But for the place where he was - Cross Plains TX - there were other issues where is was quite open minded - and this was part of the reason he was fairly ostracized in his community. I think it is this ostracism that opened the door to his beginning to shift his racist views.
DeleteThe thing to keep in mind with respect to REH and one of the ways he is misunderstood is that he grew. That is to say he was more racist in his teens than at his death. This is evidenced from looking at his works in the order they were written, what he says in his letters, and in context of his biography. Much of which is often presented out of order and context obscuring this gradual change or even the meaning of a quote.
Solomon Kane was written several years earlier than the Conan stories - so that would be something to take into consideration. However we need to be careful not to confuse Howard's racism which was very real, and typical of his time, with Solomon Kane's racism as he (Solomon) meditates on the horrors of a fantasy 16th century Africa, which does not match up to Howard's personal views. REH's racism was beginning to lift when he was authoring Solomon Kane. One piece of evidence for this is the presence of Solomon's ally N'Longa. There is a huge amount to unpack there - the portrayal is still racist - but sum total this is a favorable character that serves as evidence of the beginning of a slow change that never completes due to his suicide.
I guess I'm in the minority. I don't think "today's audiences" will ever find out about this. It's a Conan ebook after all.
ReplyDeleteIf they actually pick writers we love, who love Conan, it could be really interesting, like McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales*, which included new pulp stories by Michael Moorcock, Stephen King, Neil Gaiman, Michael Chabon, Harlan Ellison, Elmore Leonard and more.
Sure, you've loved and lost. But find the courage to love again.
*https://www.amazon.com/McSweeneys-Mammoth-Treasury-Thrilling-Tales/dp/140003339X
Negative as I am about this, I will point out that once in a very long while we get a good pastiche of someone else's work. It's vanishingly rare, but things like the Michael Kurland Lord Darcy stories do exist and are worthy continuations of Randall Garrett's work. August Derleth's "Solar Pons" shorts aren't any worse than most of Doyle's Holmes tales were, and better than some. It does happen.
ReplyDeleteNot holding out any great hope of it happening here, but stating that there's no hope of finding a competent Howard imitator is overstating a bit. That said, I'd still rather see someone that talented do their own thing with their own characters than revive a pulp style that's going to be unwelcome to many readers in this day and age.
Honestly, when choosing what to read, I give no consideration whatsoever to what is welcome or unwelcome to other readers. :)
DeleteNeither do I, but there's the obvious problem that if a book isn't welcomed (or at least perceived as welcome by the publishers) by a certain critical mass of readers it may never get published at all, and certainly won't improve the odds of seeing more from the same author.
DeleteAdmittedly, self-publishing via POD, the failure of traditional publishing, and the internet make it easier than ever for aspiring authors to reach an audience, but making a living as writer doesn't seem to have followed suit.
Honestly, when choosing what to read, I give no consideration whatsoever to the economic model of the publisher or the author. :)
DeleteIf Michael Moorcock wrote a story about Conan, I'd read it.
ReplyDeleteThe Elric/Conan team-up in Marvel Comics way back when remains a fond memory, and was plotted by Moorcock and James Cawthorn, albeit written by Roy Thomas. If you've somehow missed them all these years I'd vouch for them as solid reads, albeit obviously not up to Moorcock's standards. The Comics Code Authority was still a concern back then and Marvel wasn't going to ever give his imagination free reign.
DeleteGood point. I thought, perhaps wrongly, that Moorcock was writing Elric in those and Thomas was writing Conan. (btw, Moorcock also wrote an issue of Alan Moore's Tom Strong who is an homage to Doc Savage.)
DeleteBut as someone said, Roy Thomas is a great example of a "new" writer working on an old character.
Likewise O'Neill and Kaluta on The Shadow comics.
And Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns from 1986; a new story about a character created in the same decade as Conan.
Or Humphrey Bogart's definitive interpretation of Sam Spade 11 years, and two films, after The Maltese Falcon was published.
Or Frank Frazetta's ideal visual representation of Conan decades after the original stories.
The truth is that great artists and writers are just as fannish toward their inspirations as we are. Let them play in that sandbox if they want, as long as they're not violating anyone's IP.
I don't have many hopes for something good in this day and age. With modern sensibilities they will probably make Conan a genderspecial snowflake who talks to his enemies about his self doubt.
ReplyDelete