The name John Maddox Roberts (1947 – ) first came to my attention as a writer of Conan sword & sorcery pastiches from Tor. He wrote eight, and when I talk to other REH fans Roberts’ name is almost always listed near the top of the Conan pastiche writers.
Of the pastiches that were published by Tor between 1982 and 2004, I’d have to agree, although I like the earlier pastiches by Andy Offutt and Karl Edward Wagner better.
Happy 2026! Let’s kick butt for another year. Or at least, limp to the finish in 52 weeks. I really enjoy ‘meeting’ with my friends – and some strangers – here at Black Gate every Monday morning. Keep checking in, and let’s keep the discourse going on things we love. Or at least that catches our eye. Black Gate really is a family. My time writing here has almost been longer than my marriage was!
I continued to evade the Firewall at Black Gate (no, I do not earn a cent a word every time I mention ‘Black Gate.’ like some kind of blogging Pulpster), so I showed up every Monday morning. I had a much harder time conning other folks into writing my column for me – they’re catching on. Drat! So, I had to do my own work this past year.
Here are what I thought were ten of my better efforts in 2025. Hopefully you saw them back when I first posted them. But if not, maybe you’ll check out a few now. Ranking them seemed a bit egotistical, so they’re in chronological order. Let’s go!
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Messenger of Zhuvastou (Berkley Medallion, March 1973). Cover by Jeff Jones
Part I of The Sword and Planet of Andrew J. Offutt is here.
I’ve read two unabashed Sword & Planet novels from Andrew J. Offutt, Messenger of Zhuvastou, and Chieftain of Andor. I thought I had a sequel to the Andor book in my TBR piles but on closer examination it’s the same book with a different title: Clansman of Andor.
Messenger of Zhuvastou features an Earthman named Moris Keniston, the son of a Senator, although this is on a future Earth where humans have begun to spread to the stars. He heads for a primitive, barbaric world called Hellene in search of Elaine Dixon, a woman he is in love with who has been taken there — either voluntarily or involuntarily. Since the planet is supposed to be left undisturbed by galactic civilization, Moris undergoes plastic surgery to make him fit in with the humanoid natives. We already know he has been an Olympic level athlete and is a trained fencer.
And we are wrapping up Cimmerian September. Which I think will be an annul thing here at Black Gate. Maybe I’ll do a broader Robert E. Howard month around his birth (January) or death (June). But it’s more Conan this week.
If you’re a regular here, you know that I post almost exclusively positive stuff. You can go anywhere on social media for negative stuff. I like to share things I like – with people who wanna comment on it sometimes. It’s cool.
A notable exception is that festering pile of garbage that was Max Landi’s Dirk Gently TV series. Sometimes you gotta call a spade a spade.
I’m gonna give some thoughts on twenty different Conan pastiches from over the years. And some aren’t good. So, not all happy stuff here. But I think a legitimate opinion is worthwhile. Even mine…
Not ranking them, but listing them in alphabetical order by author. I’ll give some info on the story in the first paragraph, and a very short review in the second. I’ve done in-depth reviews here at Black Gate. These are just light looks at a bunch of Conan stories, to put them on your radar. Hopefully, you’ll find this post useful.
There are others I haven’t read at all,
Above are my Edgar Rice Burroughs Pellucidar books. Tarzan at the Earth’s Core goes with this series as well, although I included it in Part II of this series, with my Tarzan collection. In these stories, Pellucidar is a hollow area at the center of the Earth. There are openings into it at the North and South poles, but in the initial book, At the Earth’s Core, an American named David Innes reaches the interior by riding inside a giant drill. This is kind of a reverse of the Sword & Planet plot in which the Earthman is taken outward to another world.
Pellucidar is an interesting construction and ERB clearly gave it some thought. There’s a miniature sun at the center that leads to perpetual day, and the only shadowy area on the surface of Pellucidar is an area of constant twilight beneath the bulk of the unmoving moon. The interior has no horizon because everything curves up and away from the viewer, and the land and water masses are the reverse of the surface, leaving a lot of land. The world is populated by all kinds of extinct outer lifeforms that wandered in through the polar entrances, including some dinosaurs and the remnants of the mammal megafauna.
The package I received on July 6, 2020 brought me great joy! Roy Thomas is my favorite comic book writer. I correspond with him occasionally, and he is quite generous with his time, sharing his thoughts and memories. Very similar to how Gary Gygax did this, treating every fan with dignity and respect. A true gentleman.
I thanked Roy in my latest Hyperborea adventure book, The Sea-Wolf’s Daughter, because it included a character inspired by one of his creations. I sent him a copy of the book, and along with it my personal copy of Conan the Barbarian #1, to be signed by the author. Well, here it is! (He has an agency that normally handles this sort of thing, but he made an exception for me.) Excelsior!
Just about everyone is familiar with A Christmas Carol. The first short movie was made in 1901, based on a play adapted from Charles Dickens’ novel. And there were new adaptations this year. THAT is enduring.
I’ve seen different word counts, but Dickens’ work is about 29,000 words long. That’s a very short novel. But, as with any adaptation, some things are left out.
I took Dickens’ original novel – not one of the movie versions – and rewrote it as a Sherlock Holmes tale. I include some text from Dickens, and some stuff I’m not familiar with from just watching the movies.
I have about a half-dozen published Holmes short stories, and I think that I voice Watson, and emulate Doyle, fairly well. Well enough to give my stuff a try, I feel. And in this one, I feel like I presented some depth to Holmes, but I also remained faithful to Doyle’s actual character.
So, give it a read.
I
It is with a certain sense of misgiving that I relate the following tale, which took place during the Christmas season in 1902. I had moved out of our Baker Street lodgings earlier that year, having married only a few months before. I had rooms in Queen Anne Street and was quite busy with my flourishing medical practice. A newly married man, I once again found myself as head of a household, with all of the duties thereof. I saw Holmes infrequently, but had found the time to stop by the day before Christmas. Knowing he would have no plans of any kind, I extended to him an invitation to join my wife and I for Christmas day.
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Three installments in The Heroic Legends Series from Titan Books: Conan:
The Shadow of Vengeance by Scott Oden (January 30, 2024), Solomon Kane:
The Hound of God by Jonathan Maberry (November 28, 2023), and Bran Mak
Morn: Red Waves of Slaughter by Steven L. Shrewsbury (March 26, 2024)
Pastiche — basically, licensed fan-fic — has been around as long as there has been fiction, but certain properties “lock in” on it; becoming sometimes so richly filled with authorized sequels, continuations or standalones, that the pastiche comes to outweigh the original work. BG’s Bob Byrne might tell me I’m wrong, and has the chops to do so, but I think Sherlock Homes probably outweighs every other character for stories written by hands other than the original author. But in the fantasy realm, that nod must go to Robert E. Howard, and of all his creations, to Conan of Cimmeria.
Starting with L. Sprauge de Camp and Lin Carter’s “posthumous collaborations,” of the mid-20th Century, wherein they finished unfinished manuscripts, rewrote non-Conan stories and added tales of their own to create a coherent timeline of his adventures, REH pastiche truckled along quite steadily through the 70s, with stories by diverse hands from Poul Anderson to Karl Edward Wagner, Dave Smith and Richard Tierney to Andrew Offut, and for not only Conan but for Solomon Kane, Bran Mak Morn, Black Vulmea and others.
Many of these works were forgettable, some pretty good and a few excellent (IMO, the Offut Cormac Mac Art stories co-written with Keith Taylor are decidedly better than Howard’s use of the character and stand on their own as great S&S). After a glut of Conan novels into the early 80s by TOR, again by many diverse hands such as Robert Jordan and John Maddox Robert, the wind went out of Sword & Sorcery’s sails and there was little-to-nothing in REH pastiche for decades. Conan lived on for a time in Marvel comics, then a Dark Horse’s excellent reboot, in a MMORG, and that was it.
Then, out of nowhere, Heroic Signatures proudly announced it had acquired the rights to Robert E. Howard’s properties in 2018 – and did nothing. Nothing until the last two years, when they suddenly launched a three-pronged approach – novel length works, a new Conan comic series partnered with Titan, and a series of monthly digital short stories penned by established fantasy and horror writers. It’s the latter we’ll talk about here.
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Tarzan Alive and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (Playboy
Paperbacks, August 1981 and July 1981). Covers: uncredited, Ken Barr
Read the first half of this article, The World of Tiers and Beyond: Philip Jose Farmer, Part I.
Continuing our examination of Farmer’s pastiches, Farmer soon gave up the Grandrith and Caliban names and went full on with the characters in two fictional biographies called Tarzan Alive (1972) and Doc Savage: His Apocalyptic Life (1973), both from Playboy’s Science Fiction line.
The cover for Tarzan Alive is very cool but is uncredited. Ken Barr seems to have done the Doc Savage cover and it’s also very cool. I liked both of these books pretty well. The Tarzan book rambles a bit. The Doc Savage is better than many of the original Doc Savage novels. It references quite a few. These books are true to the characters and have none of the bizarre sexual exploits described in A Feast Unknown.
These books also suggest that Tarzan, Doc Savage, and such other fictional characters as Sherlock Holmes are all related to each other and are the product of inherited mutations caused by a meteor that struck England in 1795 called either the Wold Cottage or the Wold Newton Meteor.
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Conan: City of the Dead (Titan Books, June 18, 2024). Cover by Jeffrey Alan Love
John C. Hocking’s (1960 -) Conan and the Emerald Lotus came along in 1995, near the end of the Tor Conan pastiche series of books. I’d read a lot of pastiches early but by ’95 was burned out on them and stopped picking up the new ones. So I never read Hocking’s entry. Until now.
In 2024, Titan Books published Conan City of the Dead, by Hocking. It contained Conan and the Emerald Lotus, and a second pastiche called Conan and the Living Plague. Hocking had written Living Plague under contract with Conan Properties, but when the ownership changed hands, the book fell into a limbo that lasted some 25 years.
The wait must have been agonizing for Hocking, but the result was a very nice hardcover printing of both his books together, with some neat interior illustrations by Richard Pace. The cover art is uncredited.