AndreasB.Net

While Robert E. Howard has been dead for over half a century, his works still live on, in particular the barbarian known as Conan. In The complete chronicles of Conan: Centenary edition all of R.E.H.’s short stories and semi-novels about Conan are collected into one massive book.

There is talks about a new movie about Conan, as well as the upcoming Age of Conan: Hyborian Adventures from Norwegian MMO developer FunCom.

But back to the Conan short stories. While written while the genre known as Fantasy was in its infancy, in the pre-Tolkien era, there was still a large market for so-called “Weird Stories”. Most of these have fallen into the abyss of forgottenment, but the works of authors such as Howard and Lovecraft live on. And the Conan stories have aged well.

Set in our fictional past, in what Howard called the Hyborean age, Conan is a barbarian, a Cimmerian which are the unknowing descendants of the people of Atlantis. Conan travels throughout most of the known world, being both pirate, corsair, kozzak, guardsman, leader of the Royal guard and finally king of Aquilonia.

The stories are set in a more mature environment than most of fantasy post-Tolkien, but they are well written, the environment living and breathing, and well worth a read.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 21st, 2007 at 09:40 and is filed under Books. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.