BREAKING: New Conan the Barbarian Novel by . . .

. . . noted Alternate History author S. M. Stirling?

Yes, it's true, at least according to a press release published last Thursday (March 24) by Conan.com. The rest of the press release is short on details, but does reveal that the novel - Conan: Blood of the Serpent - will serve as a prequel to the classic Conan adventure Red Nails - a personal favorite of mine due to its opening featuring Conan battling a stegosaurus.

It's not the worst place to slot a pastiche story - I'm not up on the ins and outs of the post-Howard novels, though I have read a few, so I couldn't say if this is going to conflict with anything written previously. I feel confident in predicting that Valeria of the Red Brotherhood will appear if not have a prominent role, since she appears in Red Nails and is well, a woman rather like Conan himself.

A few pertinent details about the novel can be gleaned from the Amazon page, including the October 18 release date, price and page-count. This last number, 496 pages, is slightly worrying - Conan as conceived by Robert E. Howard was the hero of short, tightly written novellas and short stories. Even advertised as a standalone, the page-count of a modern doorstopper stands in sharp contrast. That's not to say it can't still be the pulpy adventure Conan deserves, but much depends on the writer.

So, S. M. Stirling. Not the first name that comes to mind for Conan, but given the requirement for a certain level of name recognition I can think of several worse ones. I can also see the potential - as mentioned, he's primarily an alternate history author, but his most famous series takes place in the sort of sword-swinging milieus that resemble the Hyborian Age in reasonable facsimile. And at his best, his novels do echo the pulpy action that Robert E. Howard excelled at - I've even heard that Howard himself appears in a short story set in the world of Stirling's The Peshawar Lancers. At his worst - well, there's no need to dwell on potential disasters until we have more news. Sucess or failure, we'll know in the fall.

A big thank you to the DMR Books blog and their weekly DMRtian Chronicles posts for bringing this piece of news to my attention.

A Tale of Two Conans

When Conan of Cimmeria, Robert E. Howard's iconic sword-and-sorcery hero, was first being adapted to American comic books in the 1970s, the publisher - Marvel Comics, home of Spider-man, the Avengers, and a bright destiny in the movie industry - gave him a starring role in two separate magazines. The first, Conan the Barbarian, was the mainstream, all-ages title while Savage Sword of Conan was meant to be a more adult, sophisticated title. Nearly fifty years later, the Wheel of Copyright has once again brought Conan to Marvel, and while they seem to have a fairly aggressive schedule planned, the central focus is again those two titles.

Conan the Barbarian: The Life and Death of Conan Book One is the first trade collection of the former, although its family-friendliness seems suspect when practically the first time we see Conan he's in a fighting pit in the Maul decapitating his two opponents. Readers familiar with Conan may remember the Maul as being a district in the city The Tower of the Elephant took place in, and indeed the stories that make up this collection have something of a "Conan's Greatest Hits" feel to them. The stories that follow, although there's a continuing story-line with an undead witch and her creepy child minions, jump around to some of the most well-known episodes of Conan's life - one takes place immediately following Beyond the Black River, one while Conan is a pirate, another while he's king, and so on. While the stories are mostly well done, a couple of places (such as the appearance of a sharktopus) get a bit campy - the idea of King Conan and his pet lion becoming a masked vigilante in the Aquilonian capital was so ridiculous it had to have come from corporate meddling. There were some nice shout-outs to the greater Conan continuity, although this was matched by at least one timeline flub (the chapter that takes place after Beyond the Black River ends with Conan going back across the river to civilization, while in the original stories he fights his way through the wilderness to the coast and gets caught up in the plot of The Black Stranger). I also noticed a general trend, common in Conan pastiche, of giving Conan's life an air of Destiny, with everything bending towards his becoming a king. This was something that Howard managed to avoid, even though Conan was already king in his first appearance, and all the earlier stories were technically prequels.

Far less epic in scope, Savage Sword of Conan: The Cult of Koga Thun manages to seem much more complete as a story, although this is probably an unfair comparison to make with something explicitly labeled Book One. Following the well-trodden formula of Conan escaping from dire circumstances that would kill a lessor man, getting mixed up in a struggle over a fabulous treasure, and escaping into the night as everything collapses into chaos; it still manages to insert a few interesting wrinkles, such as the nature of the treasure and the involvement of the mysterious serpent-men, who are usually a Kull thing but always fun to see show up (indeed, of the various scheduled appearance of Conan tying him to the greater Marvel universe, the one I'm most interested in has the intriguing title of Conan: Serpent War). The use of magic in the story seemed heavy compared to the original Howard, what with the undead hordes and the poison that turns humans into serpent-men and the map that imprints itself onto Conan's mind, but the Cimmerian was at least properly suspicious of all of it.

In the end, although they were trying to do quite different things with the pulp-era character, both of these comics presented reasonably enjoyable takes on Conan the Barbarian. It goes without saying that the prose originals by Robert E. Howard were the best, but  once you've read all those, these make as good a continuation as you're likely to find. I did hear that the original single issues that these editions collect had a prose Conan serial in them too, and was a bit disappointed that they weren't also collected. Hopefully they'll turn up in a collection of their own at some point.

Signal Boosts and Tab Clearing

All the news that's fit to print, but maybe doesn't justify an entire post to itself.

First off, as we were just speaking of Atomic Robo, a month or two back the spinoff comic Real Science Adventures went live as a similarly presented webcomic - as of this posting it updates Tuesday-Thursday while Atomic Robo is Monday-Wednesday-Friday. Thus far the entirety of Volume 2 ("The Billion-Dollar Plot", one of Tesla's pre-Robo adventures) has been posted, along with the beginning of "Raid on Marauder Island", an all-new Kickstarter-funded prequel to The Flying She-Devils of the Pacific. No word yet on whether any stories from Volume 1 will be making an appearance, but I imagine it's only a matter of time until they're up, complete with covers imitating hilarious old men's magazines.

Also funding on Kickstarter is a new fantasy fiction magazine that I'm quite interested in. The chief draw of Skelos: The Journal of Weird Fiction and Dark Fantasy is the promise of a never-before-published Robert E. Howard fantasy piece. which would be quite a find after eight decades. As it turns out, however, "unpublished" doesn't mean quite the same thing as "unknown":

"The REH piece in this first issue is a fictional essay in the form of three drafts written in early 1926. It's much like a prototype for Howard's later essay "The Hyborian Age" written as backstory for his Conan tales. This early essay tells the story of the rise of the Lemurians, Atlanteans, and the prehistoric Picts. It represents one of Howard's earliest attempts at true world-building and is the very beginning of the fictional prehistoric setting of the later Kull and Conan stories. The final version of this essay would eventually be inserted into the Bran Mak Morn story "Men of the Shadows" where it was narrated by the Pictish shaman Gonar."

Even so, it still sounds like an interesting read, and at $3 for the first digital issue there's very little buy-in if it's all one's interested in.

Also in the pop-literary-criticism vein, the Sherlock Holmes Pastiche Characters website I mentioned last fall has added an index for Win Scott Eckert's Crossovers 2 to its list of Indexes to Classic Sherlockian Works (it's currently listed as a second Volume One, but it's definitely for Volume 2). This is a much-needed and sorely appreciated project, and I for one am very grateful that it exists.

Finally, the long-awaited followups to the Crossovers books are now available for preorder from the Meteor House Press website. Now called Crossovers Expanded, they look very comparable to the original volumes, and will be shipping sometime in the late summer. The new covers look particularly slick, and so of course Sean Levin has added them to the headers of his Crossover Universe blog:

But will they have indexes?

I know I'm greatly looking forward to these, they'll be great references for a couple projects I'm working on . . .