A lot of the "sword and sorcery" lists I see give me a lot of novels about stuff I wouldn't consider S&S. Novels where the hero's sword kind of takes precedence over the hero, novels where the focus is really more on espionage and subterfuge than violence, novels where the hero is a dragon breeder instead of a warrior.
I just want some stuff that's more similar to something REH would write, but it's super hard to find anything that really captures it for me. I was unimpressed by any of Carter or de Camp's attempts to pastiche him, although I found that John Maddox Roberts wrote very entertaining novels (shame there are only 8)
Finding stuff outside of Howard's writing and directly licensed pastiches can be hard. I really enjoyed Charles Saunders' Imaro series even though by the end that was pretty unquestionably high fantasy. I liked Dariel Quiougue's Sword of the Four Winds a decent bit. I really liked Scott Oden's Men of Bronze which is one of very few novels that legitimately feels like something in the same genre of Conan while being completely unrelated. I've started two or three other books by Oden but they didn't impress me as much.
A couple tales from fifties Light Sci-fi magazines have entertained me. The Tharn dualogy by Howard Browne entertained me, but after looking through some of the old magazines it came from I discoveredthat those two stories contained pretty much every story element and trope you would ever find in fifties caveman stories.
ES Kraay's the Olympian: A Tale of Ancient Hellas is historical fiction but feels way more like a Howard story than a lot of the stories people say are in the same "sword and sorcery" genre.
So what am I looking for?
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Strong protagonist. Literally strong (probably) but somebody whose personality can drive the story.
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Mundane protagonist. Or at least borderline mundane. You could argue the appeal from a humanist angle, from just being interested in martial arts and their portrayal in text, from a verisimilitude angle...but I just am not looking for a book about a wizard or (worse) a half-demon with fire powers that allow him to instantly kill everybody in his setting
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Focus on fighting. I've been recommended Master Li and Number Ten Ox when looking for Sword and Sorcery. Those are good books but they are about solving mysteries and exploring bizarre mystical problems. When I ask for Sword and Sorcery, I am looking for something about some kind of savage killer.
Anyway,
... keep reading on reddit ➡
Not necessarily "horror," but looking for fantasy short story compliation/omnibus books along similar themes/styles to either H.P. Lovecraft or Robert E. Howard.
I would appreciate any suggestions. Thank you.
marvel got the license back a few years ago and they are releasing EVERYTHING. they are re releasing everything they did with robert e howard's characters conan , solomn cane and kull. also all the dark horse comics. so you have your choice between omnibuses or marvel epic collections which are soft covers around 400 to 500 pages and less expensive.
my favorite stuff so far are the conan chronicles epic collection and the savage sword of conan omnibuses. the savage sword of conan was a black white magazine marvel did in the 70s . the art is amazing.
this youtuber does overviews or first looks at a lot of the books. but so do other youtubers if you want to take look before you buy
here are someplaces to get them cheap
All fled, all done, so lift me on the pyre;
The feast is over and the lamps expire.
While many folks swear by "Pigeons from Hell" or "The Black Stone," I have to admit my favorite is "Old Garfield's Heart."
So, I started reading the First Law series and I'm like 50 or 60% of the way through The Blade Itself right now. So far, I've been really enjoying it. It's been an engaging read and it's helped me recapture at least some of the magic that I'd felt while reading Berserk and even given me a laugh or two with some of the POVs. It's an incredible book and I've found some of my new favorite fantasy characters in there (Glokta's the fucking best).
But something I did notice, in particular once I got to Logen's arrival in Adua with Bayaz and Malacus was the story's clear juxtaposition of the Northern lifestyle with the "civilized" society within the Union. It really reminded a lot of the Conan comics I've read (a lot of which are direct adaptations of Howard's stories as opposed to original stories within the Conan IP) and how they often clearly show the inherent issues of civilization compared to the barbarian culture of Cimmeria. This became most apparent when Bayaz explained the greater value of noble lineage within the Union compared to that of the merit-based power structure of the North in which anyone who could make a name for themselves in battle could potentially earn themselves a position of authority.
So, with this being the case, I was wondering if anyone knew if Joe Abercrombie was in any way influenced by Robert E. Howard's work?
The two wrote together with Lovecraft, but do their stories have anything weird about them? Can you tell me what aspects of the weird feature in their stories?
> Dear Mr. Howard: > > My blessing! I can’t tell you how much I enjoyed “Sword-Woman.” It seemed such a pity to leave her just at the threshold of higher adventures. Your favorite trick of slamming the door on a burst of bugles! And leaving one to wonder what happened next and wanting so badly to know. Aren’t there any more stories about Agnes?
—C. L. Moore to Robert E. Howard, 29 Jan 1935, The Collected Letters of Dr. Isaac M. Howard 24
Catherine Lucille Moore burst into the pages of Weird Tales with “Shambleau” (Nov 1933). She was a secretary at the Fletcher Trust Company in her native Indianapolis, Indiana, and engaged to a bank teller named Herbert Ernest Lewis. During the Great Depression, jobs were scarce and her $25 a week was needed to support her family; married women were often expected to be homemakers, and this may be why Moore and her fiance had a long engagement—and it is why, when she began to sell her stories to the pulps for extra cash, she used her initials “C. L.” so that her employers would not discover she had an extra source of income.
By the time C. L. Moore hit the pages of Weird Tales, to immediate acclaim, Robert E. Howard had already become a fixture; his stories of Conan the Cimmerian were still going strong, interspersed with other weird tales and poems, as well as sales to Weird Tales‘ companion magazine The Magic Carpet, and he had just employed an agent, Otis Adelbert Kline, who would help Howard break into many other pulp markets.
Both Moore and Howard had correspondents in common, notably H. P. Lovecraft, but also R. H. Barlow and E. Hoffmann Price; Howard and Moore also shared a friend in Frank Thurston Torbett, a Texan fan of weird fiction. Yet there is nothing in the letters of either of the principles to their friends to suggest of a correspondence between two of the great fantasists of Weird Tales in the ’30s. All that is known to survive of their correspondence is a single letter, dated 29 January 1935…and from that, and a few inferences in the rest of their correspondence to others, is all that we can judge of their exchange.
To begin with, we know that Moore was a fan:
> I’d like to read everything Robert E. Howard has ever written. The first story of his I read was WORMS OF THE EARTH, and I’ve been a fanatic ever since. And of course Lovecraft and Price.
—C. L. Moore to R. H. Barlow, n. d. [early Apr
... keep reading on reddit ➡As a huge fan of the original Conan stories, I was recently thinking about early fantasy authors and how the torch has been passed down the line to those writing the genre today. This following connection in particular came to mind;
Robert E. Howard wrote his most iconic character, Conan, in the 1930s, but his character and world have been kept alive by a range of authors long after his time - a notable example being Robert Jordan, who wrote six original Conan novels (seven including the Conan the Destroyer novelisation) as the start of Tor's extensive mass market paperback run in the 1980s, prior to his own The Wheel of Time epic. Then, with Jordan's untimely death, Brandon Sanderson took on the monumental task of finishing his own great story in the early 21st century, with Sanderson now being one of the most well-known and respected names writing fantasy today (though of course I know he was already a published and talented writer prior to his contributions to The Wheel of Time).
I just found this connection - this fantasy family tree of Howard to Jordan to Sanderson, if you will - really fascinating, and also truly heart-warming. The fact that, despite the untimely and tragic deaths of Howard and Jordan, their legacies have been continued and carried after their passing by forerunners in the next generations of authors in the genre.
It also peaked my interested. Does anyone know of any other connections like this? I'd love to discover some new examples of the fantasy torch being passed from generation to generation in one way or another.
Reading the stories I kept running into points where I would think, "Oh Tolkien did something similar in XYZ a decade later". This could be a coincidence but there are a lot of similarities between the two, we know Tolkien did read and comment on some of Howard's work. I know Robert Howard is a controversial figure, and I see why after reading the stories, but his impact on the fantasy genre is undeniable. To me, there seems to be a clear influence from Howard in Tolkien's work, but Tolkien certainly could have written LOTR before reading any of Howard's writings. Does anyone have further insight or opinion?
At the young age of 30, REH had already created much, with Conan The Cimmerian being most memorable
What would his legacy been like had he lived longer?
