Part 1 (1/2)
Conan of Ciue DeCamp
Introduction
Robert Ervin Howard (1906-36) was born in Peaster, Texas, and lived most of his life in Cross Plains, in the center of Texas between Abilene and Broood During his last decade, this prolific and versatile writer turned out a large volume of as then called ”pulp fiction”- sport, detective, western, historical, adventure, weird, and ghost stories, as well as his hs, Robert W Chambers, Harold Lamb, Talbot Mundy, Jack London, and H P Lovecraft (of whoe of thirty, he ended a pro literary career by suicide
Howard's adventure fantasies belong to a kind of fiction called heroic fantasy, or sometimes swordplay-and-sorcery stories Such stories are laid in a world not as it is or was but as it ought to have been The setting o, or as it will be in the distant future, or on another planet, or in another diic works and spirits are real, but y are essentially unknown Either they have not yet been discovered, or they have been forgotten Men are hty, women are beautiful, problems are simple, and life is adventurous
When well done, such tales furnish the purest fun to be found in ned primarily to entertain, not to educate, uplift, or convert to soy They derive ultiends, and epics of ancient tilect, Willialand in the 1880s Early in this century, Lord Dunsany and Eric R Eddison made further contributions to the field A notable recent addition to it has been the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J R
R Tolkien
The appearance of the Aazines Weird Tales in 1923 and Unknown Worlds in 1939 created new enre were published A Horote several series of heroic fantasies, est and hteen Conan stories were published in Howard's lifeti Howard's papers since 1950
Late in 1951, I stumbled upon a cache of Howard's ent for Howard's estate These included a few unpublished Conan stories, which I edited for publication Other manuscripts have been found in ent for the Howard estate, in collections of Howard's papers
The incoa has teht have done had he lived In the early 1950s, I rewrote the manuscripts of four of Howard's unpublished adventure stories, with s, to turn theues Bjorn Nyberg and Lin Carter have collaborated with me in the completion of the stories that Howard left unfinished and in the composition of pastiches, based upon hints in Howard's notes and letters, to fill the gaps in the saga The reader e how successful our posthu the past three years, Lancer Books has been engaged in the publication of the coun by him and finished by other hands, and the pastiches-all in chronological order to give a coherent biography of our hero
Because of legal complications, it was not possible to issue the voluical order Thus this, the tenth voluical order, following Conan and preceding Conan the Freebooter The ten volumes now in print include all the Conan stories by Howard-those completed by him and those finished by Carter or by me At present, two aps One, inshallah, will deal with Conan's career as a captain of the Zingaran buccaneers; the other, with his later years as king of Aquilonia
Before he undertook the writing of the Conan stories, Howard constructed a pseudo-history of Conan's world, with the geography, ethnography, and political units clearly worked out It is partly the concreteness of Howard's iives his stories their vividness and fascination-his sharp, gorgeous, consistent vision of ”a purple and golden and cri can happen-except the tedious” He incorporated this plan in a long essay, ”The Hyborian Age,” which is printed in two parts in the voluer of this series
According to Howard's scheed into his desperate adventures about twelve thousand years ago, eight thousand years after the sinking of Atlantis and seven thousand before the beginnings of recorded history
In this ti to Howard) the western parts of the main continent of the Eastern Hedoalaxy of states set up by northern invaders, the Hyborians, three thousand years earlier on the ruins of the evil edo city-states of Sheia, the rival and partner of Acheron in the days of the latter's bloodstained glory Further south yet, beyond deserts and veldts, were barbarous black kingdoms North of the Hyborians lay the barbarian lands of Ci the ocean, were the fierce, savage Picts To the east glittered the Hyrkanian kingdohtiest was Turan
About 500 years after the time of Conan the Great, most of these realrations After so which the earth supported a drastically shrunken population of wandering, quarreling barbarians, civilization- as left of it-was further overwhellaciers from the poles and by a convulsion of nature like that which had previously destroyed Atlantis At this tireat inland Vilayet Sea shrank to the dimensions of the present Caspian, and vast areas of West Africa arose from beneath the waves of the Atlantic Mankind sank to the ery After the retreat of the ice of this glaciation, civilization again revived and recorded history began
Conan was a gigantic barbarian adventurer who roistered, brawled, and battled his way across half the prehistoric world, to rise at last to the throne of a hty realm The son of a blacksmith in the bleak, backward northern country of Cied hills and somber skies As a youth, he took part in the sack of the Aquilonian frontier settle a band of AEsir in a raid into Hyperborea, Conan was captured by the Hyperboreans Escaping frodo there and in the adjacent lands of Corinthia and Nees 6 and 7) Green to civilization and quite lawless by nature, he made up for his lack of subtlety and sophistication by natural shrewdness and by the herculean physique he had inherited fro existence, Conan enlisted as a mercenary soldier in the armies of Turan For the next two years he traveled widely, as far east as the fabled lands of Mem and Khitai He also refined his archery and horsemanshi+p, both of which had been at best indifferent up to the ti the later part of his Turanian service that the present voluins
Readers ould like to know eneral are referred to the other volue before the title page of this volume) and to two periodicals and one book One periodical is Ao, Ill, 60690
This is the organ of the Hyborian Legion, a loose group of admirers of heroic fantasy and of the Conan stories in particular The other periodical is The Howard Collector, published by Glenn Lord, literary agent for the Howard estate, Box 775, Pasadena, Tex, 77501 This is devoted to articles, stories, and poems by and about Howard
The book is The Conan Reader, by the present writer, published by Jack L Chalker, 5111 Liberty Heights Ave, Baltimore, Md, 21207 This consists of articles on Howard, Conan, and heroic fantasy previously published in Amra I have also listed many works by Howard, currently available, in my introduction to the volume Conan of the present series For those ish to try heroic fantasy by other authors, besides the Tolkien trilogy and the various works by Lin Carter and myself, a number of excellent stories of this type are available in paperback form These include the books by Jane Gaskell (three novels of Atlantis), John Jakes (Brak the Barbarian), Fritz Leiber (three books about Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser), Michael Moorcock (the four-volume History of the Runestaff, Lancer Books), Andre Norton (six ”Witch World” novels), Fletcher Pratt (The Well of the Unicorn, Lancer Books), and Jack Vance (two collections of ”Dying Earth” stories) I hope you have half the fun out of theue de Ca the events of ”The City of Skulls” (in the volume Conan), Conan rises to the rank of captain in the Turanian service His growing repute as an irresistible fighter and a goodto soft jobs with large pay for little work, causes King Yildiz's generals to choose him for particularly hazardous missions One of these takes him thousands of miles to eastward, to fabled Khitai
Chapter One
The sheer cliffs of dark stone closed about Conan the Cimmerian like the sides of a trap He did not like the way their jagged peaks loolittered like the eyes of spiders down upon the small camp on the flat floor of the valley Neither did he like the chill, uneasy wind that whistled across the stony heights and prowled about the ca h stone walls of the nearer valley side