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gradenko_2000 posted:Where is the best place to get started on Conan the Barbarian? There's only 21 original and complete Conan stories, and only one of those is a novel, so it's not a huge canon you have to wade through. Generally, these are considered to be the best stories. If you don't like any of them, I'd say you wouldn't care for Conan as a whole: The Tower of the Elephant Beyond the Black River The People of the Black Circle Red Nails I'm quite fond of all of them, plus The Black Stranger, also considered a good one. There are a couple of meh stories in there, but none are outright bad: the worst ones are just sort of by-the-numbers, and most indulge in the sort of excesses that Conan and Sword & Sorcery writing as a whole would come to be known for. It's funny that only the few worst Conan stories would be the real trendsetters (although, to be fair, Red Nails certainly has its share of cheesecake; it's just so creepy that no one cares).
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May 25, 2017 17:22
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Ornamented Death posted:75% chance that was de Camp. Carter was a competent writer to some extent, even if he didn't really get what made Howard's stories so good; de Camp was just a hack. During his lifetime, Carter was almost a poster child for fannish enthusiastic writing that completely missed the point. Many reviews of his books were horribly cruel; people really brought out their knives whenever another Thongor title came out. He did enjoy a decent reputation as an editor/anthologist, however. Anyways, a lot of Conan anthologies mix Carter/de Camp/Nyberg material in with the originals (and even the originals were edited posthumously by de Camp). The only readily available collections of the untouched originals are the Gollancz centenary edition omnibus and the 2003-2005 Del Rey trilogy.
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May 26, 2017 21:57
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There was a Hero System setting book that tackled this idea. The idea was magic is slow to use, and costly to the user. There also often involves summoning something powerful to do what you want, rather than actually channelling pure energy to create the result directly. So, while in D&D you just have the wizard wave his hands, say a few words, and a few seconds to a minute later something amazing happens, in a more swords & sorcery setting it a guy sacrificing animals / people to a dark power over the course of some day-long ritual that might only work at the right time of the day or month and then some demon appears who will do the thing you want (and may or may not be angry at you afterwards for bothering it).
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May 28, 2017 00:20
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david_a posted:How far off were his beliefs from the norm at the time? I can't emphasize enough that racism was pretty much the norm in the 1920s and 30s, an attitude viewed as wholesome and healthy and pretty much universal. So the increasingly common "these guys were crazy even for the times" displays a remarkable ignorance of racial attitudes of the period. Where writers like Howard and Lovecraft differ is in their expressions of these ideas, not the ideas themselves: that is, as exceptionally literate, intelligent and imaginative people, they dressed up typical attitudes in atypical ways; they could express them with a clarity and imagery not available to the typical Joe that just plain hated darkies and wasn't going to write fifty-page letters with poetic interludes telling you why. I would strongly recommend getting a hold of a bunch of pulps from the period if you want a genuine idea as to how your average writer of that time and type saw the world. That having been said, I'd say Howard was more moderate than Lovecraft. Howard felt civilization was an enfeebling force, which gave him more sympathy for more "primitive" peoples. But he felt them to be primitive all the same, and in some cases wasn't shy about stating it.
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Jul 17, 2017 19:40
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MrMojok posted:I love Beyond the Black River best of all his Conan stories. There are a couple of others I rank close, but it's #1. Yeah, Savage Sword of Conan 26 and 27. I remember them very fondly.
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Apr 17, 2018 04:35
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