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Hither Came Conan: The New Weekly Robert E. Howard Series at Black Gate!

Hither Came Conan: The New Weekly Robert E. Howard Series at Black Gate!

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Hither Came Conan. Indeed. The iron-thewed Cimmerian trod the thrones of the earth under his sandaled feet. Usually, while wearing nothing more than a loincloth…

Robert E. Howard completed twenty-one tales of Conan, as well as a few more fragments. Of course, some stories were better than others, but even those generally considered among ‘the worst’ offer evidence of Howard’s expertise as a story teller. “The God in the Bowl” rarely makes anybody’s Favorites List, but I wrote an essay, positing that it was a very early example of a police procedural; before the term even existed.

Which might leave the average reader wondering, “What are the best stories in the Conan Canon?” Black Gate is here to tell you… ALL OF THEM! in a brand new weekly series.

Black Gate was proud to round up some of the best Howard scholars, and biggest fans (hey, there’s no shame in that sobriquet – I’m one!), for our award-nominated Discovering Robert E Howard series.

Reaching far beyond the stories of the sword (and axe, and dirk, and torch, and furniture, and…) swinging northern barbarian, almost two-dozen essays delved into the works and life of the pride of Cross Plains. It was a fantastic series that truly paid tribute to the man I consider to be the best fantasy writer I’ve yet read.

Well, Black Gate sure as heck didn’t win a World Fantasy Award for my posts on Sherlock Holmes and hard boiled pulp! Swords and sorcery, epic fantasy, and imagined worlds are what the visitor comes here for. And until they change the password and I can’t log in anymore, I’m going to do my best to keep the Robert E. Howard content flowing. And this time, it’s all about Conan!

Beginning on Monday morning, January 7th, an absolutely All Star roster of guest contributors and Black Gaters (and me. Hey, it’s my series!) is going to be presenting you a cogent argument on why that week’s story is the best Conan tale written by Robert E. Howard.

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Black Gate on the list for the 2018 REH Foundation Awards

Black Gate on the list for the 2018 REH Foundation Awards

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REHaward_ShanksIf you were to take a poll at Black Gate World Headquarters, asking for the staff’s favorite author, I’d put my money on Robert E. Howard coming in at the top spot. ‘Conan’ appeared in a Black Gate headline over a decade ago (thank you, Charles Rutledge!). Ryan Harvey, John Fultz, Bill Ward, William Patrick Maynard, Brian Murphy, Howard Andrew Jones, Barbra Barrett and more have written about Howard and his works under the Black Gate banner.

And the respect and love of Howard’s work has only increased over the past few years. All with the standard Black Gate quality. For the third year in a row, there is a solid Black Gate presence on the Robert E. Howard Foundation Preliminary Awards List. Our nominees for 2018:

The Cimmerian—Outstanding Achievement, Essay (Online)

(Essays must have made their first public published appearance in the previous calendar year and be substantive scholarly essays on the life and/or work of REH. Short blog posts, speeches, reviews, trip reports, and other minor works do not count.)

BOB BYRNE – “Robert E. Howard Wrote a Police Procedural? With Conan?? Crom!!!”

JAMES McGLOTHLIN – “A Tale of Two Robert E. Howard Biographies”

M. HAROLD PAGE – “Why Isn’t Conan a Mary Sue?”

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By Crom: Some Conans are More Equal Than Others…

By Crom: Some Conans are More Equal Than Others…

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Conan and the Emerald LotusI’ve been in a bit of a Robert. E. Howard mood lately, so I re-read some of his Solomon Kane stories (fine stuff). But, as always, I gravitated back to Conan. And that inevitably led me to the pastiches. A quick count of the shelves produced 42 non-Howard Conan tales, excluding the de Camp/Carter books, of which I’m missing two or three, I think.

I’ve read at least a third of those pastiches, I’d say, maybe close to half. Except for a few, they are part of the Tor line I wrote about here. And as I mentioned, they’re a mixed bag. I also wrote a post regarding how official those pastiches are considered, which generated a lot of good commentary.

The Tor line came to a halt in 1997, with one additional book in 2003 (I wouldn’t have minded if they’d skipped that last one). There have been no official Conan pastiches in fifteen years, though that’s going to change shortly.

Howard Andrew Jones, fantasy author and Black Gate‘s Managing Editor, had some thoughts similar to mine over at his blog a few years ago. Ryan Harvey’s Pastiches R Us looked at about a dozen of the Tor books: you can search Black Gate for them, but here’s one and here’s another. He also had Charles Saunders do a guest post for him.

A multitude of writers have penned a plethora of words about the Conan pastiches, but I’m keeping this post ‘in-house’ and will focus on musings from Howard, Ryan and myself.

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By Crom! New Robert E. Howard Pastiches Coming in 2018!

By Crom! New Robert E. Howard Pastiches Coming in 2018!

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Conan_FrazettaFrostgiantsOf course, you saw yesterday’s Black Gate post on Heroic Signatures, the new digital/gaming partnership, which includes the rights to about two dozen Robert E. Howard characters and stories. With the recent releases of Modiphius’ Robert E Howard’s Conan: Adventures in an Age Undreamed Of RPG, Monolith’s Conan board game and Funcom’s in-beta Conan: Exiles video game, Conan is a very viable gaming brand these days. And Funcom’s Age of Conan MMO (which I play) is still going strong as it approaches the decade mark.

But fans of Conan’s creator, such as the contributors and readers of our recent Discovering Robert E. Howard series, are yearning for new pastiches featuring Howard’s characters. And not just Conan, but Solomon Kane, El Borak, Breckenridge Elkins and Steve Harrison, to name a few. Aside from some Age of Conan tie-in novels, the Conan pastiche market dried up when Tor finished its series in 2003 with Harry Turtledove’s Conan of Venarium.

The Tor novels were a mix of varying quality, as I wrote about here. I quite enjoyed some, such as John Maddox Roberts’ Conan the Rogue (an homage to Dashiell Hammett’s Red Harvest), Chris Hocking’s The Emerald Lotus and Leonard Carpenter’s Conan the Raider. But unfortunately, some were just simply bad fantasy books.

So, while we have been treated to quality reprints of Howards’ works from Del Rey and the Robert E. Howard Foundation Press, new tales have not been forthcoming. Behold: that is about to change!

In 2018, new pastiches featuring Robert E. Howard characters will be forthcoming!!!!  

Cabinet Group LLC, the REH rights holders and 50% of Heroic Signatures (with Funcom) “have decided to curate a line of carefully picked novels and start a publishing program next year.” This will not just be Conan but other Howard works as well.

Black Gate will have a Q&A post with Cabinet Group head Fredrik Malmberg shortly. Updates coming from Cabinet Group with more information.

But to the many fans of Robert E. Howard, this is exciting news. Could we even see a new Steve Harrison tale? Asks the in-house mystery guy who writes Sherlock Holmes stories? (Hint, hint, hint, Cabinet…)

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Heroic Signatures: REH Digital Rights Part of $10 Million Deal

Heroic Signatures: REH Digital Rights Part of $10 Million Deal

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Funcom is the developer of the Age of Conan (AoC) MMORPG. They’ve currently got a resource/action RPG, Conan: Exiles, in beta, scheduled for a May, 2018 release. I’ve played quite a few hours of AoC and think it’s a very good MMO, mixing elements from Robert E. Howard’s original stories and some of the pastiches. I haven’t tried Exiles yet.

Cabinet Group LLC owns the rights to Robert E. Howard’s non-public domain works. Cabinet Group and Funcom each will own 50% of a new venture entitled Heroic Signatures. Heroic Signatures will control the interactive (gaming) rights to 29 properties — most of them based on the works of Robert E. Howard. REH characters and stories included are:

Conan, Solomon Kane, El Borak,  Dark Agnes, “Children of the Night,” Bran Mark (yes, they spelled it incorrectly!) Morn, James Allison, Cormac Mac Art, Black Turlogh, Kirby O’Donnell, Cormac Fitzgeoffrey, Steve Harrison, “Black Canaan,” Almuric, Steve Costigan, “The Black Stone,” “The Fire of Asshurbanipal,” “The Cairn of the Headland,” “The Horror from the Mound,” “The Dead Remember” and “Pigeons from Hell.”

The announcement said that Funcom will be focusing on partnerships and third party developers, indicating they want to license the properties to get games made. Funcom isn’t a mass-producer, so this may well be a way to leverage the REH property. As part of this move, Funcom got a $10.6 million investment from a Swedish company.

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Robert E. Howard Wrote a Police Procedural? With Conan?? Crom!!!

Robert E. Howard Wrote a Police Procedural? With Conan?? Crom!!!

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BG_GodBowlComicCoverReportedly, Ernest Hemingway bet Howard Hawks that the director couldn’t make a good movie out of his worst book. Hawks took the bet and we ended up with Humphrey Bogart in To Have and Have Not (it’s not Bogie’s best, but I vote Hawks the winner of the bet). Suppose I told you I could show you that one of what’s commonly considered among the worst Conan stories isn’t really that bad – and that it’s a pre-genre police procedural? Ready to take on the challenge?

In 2015, Black Gate‘s Discovering Robert E. Howard series showcased the breadth and diversity of REH’s writings. Boxing stories, westerns, science fiction, Solomon Kane, El Borak: Howard was an immensely talented author who wrote in a variety of genres. My first entry in the series was about Steve Harrison, Howard’s take on the hardboiled private eye with a weird menace twist. As you can read in that essay, Howard didn’t care for the genre and he abandoned it almost as quickly as he entered it. Today, I’m going to look at his lone police procedural. Yep – Robert E. Howard wrote a police procedural before the term was even in use. And it features Conan!

The general consensus is that Howard hit the mark with his fourth Conan story, “The Tower of the Elephant,” published in March of 1933. His first was “The Phoenix on the Sword,” which appeared in Weird Tales in December of 1932 and was a rewrite of an unpublished Kull story, “By This Axe I Rule.” Farnsworth Wright, editor of Weird Tales, rejected the second, “The Frost Giant’s Daughter,” which to me, reads more like a chapter in a longer work than a self-contained story.

“The God in the Bowl” was probably written in early 1932 and was Howard’s third Conan story. Wright rejected this one as well and it did not see print in any form until an edited version by L. Sprague de Camp was published in 1952’s Space Science Fiction, Volume 1, Number 2 (the story has nothing to do with either space or science fiction…). De Camp did less chopping on this one than most of his Conan edits, but fans could finally read Howard’s original text in Donald Grant’s The Tower of the Elephant in 1975.

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Black Gate on the List for the 2017 REH Foundation Awards

Black Gate on the List for the 2017 REH Foundation Awards

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Howard_FoundationPlaqueWell, the Preliminary List. There may well not be a more respected organization in Robert E. Howard circles than that of the REH Foundation. Black Gate and a few of its bloggers were on the final 2016 Awards ballot. Last week, the Foundation released the preliminary list for the 2017 Awards. It will be winnowed down to a final ballot soon.

Typing ‘Robert E. Howard’ or ‘Conan’ in the BG search engine (or just clicking on the Conan Category at left) will definitely establish that we love Howard and his works here at Black Gate. And several Black Gaters, including the site itself, are in the running for the 2017 final ballot. I’ll also point out that many of the nominees contributed to our ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series: some of the best Howard scholars came to Black Gate to share their thoughts. The Black Gate contingent:

The Cimmerian—Outstanding Achievement, Essay (Online)

(Essays must have made their first public published appearance in the previous calendar year and be substantive scholarly essays on the life and/or work of REH. Short blog posts, speeches, reviews, trip reports, and other minor works do not count.)

ADAMS, FRED – “Esau Cairn – A Man Outside His Epoch” – Black Gate
BYRNE, BOB – “Steve Harrison: REH’s Private Detective” – REH: Two Gun Raconteur Blog
JONES, HOWARD ANDREW – “The Ne’re-do-well Hero of “Gates of Empire” – REH: Two Gun Raconteur Blog
MAYNARD, WILLIAM PATRICK – “Steve Harrison Reconsidered” – REH: Two Gun Raconteur Blog

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Modular: Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerors of Hyperborea — 2nd Edition!

Modular: Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerors of Hyperborea — 2nd Edition!

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astonishing-swordsmen-and-sorcerers-of-hyperborea-smallBack in December of 2012, Black Gate head honcho John O’Neill wrote a glowing post about Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerors of Hyperborea (for ease of typing, we’ll go with AS&SH from here on in). AS&SH was created by Jeffrey Talanian, who co-authored Castle Zagyg with Gary Gygax (The Zagyg saga is worthy of a post in itself).

AS&SH came out of Original Dungeons & Dragons (0E), created by Gygax and Dave Arneson. That is the version that my retroclone of choice, Swords & Wizardry, is based on. Talanian cited Robert E. Howard, Clark Ashton Smith and H.P. Lovecraft as his influences. So, we’re talking Pulp: weird pulp!

Fast forward to 2016 and Talanian has launched an already successful Kickstarter for a 2nd Edition of Astonishing Swordsmen & Sorcerors of Hyperboria. As I type this, with 22 days remaining, it is at 318% funding and is tearing through stretch goals like the Cimmerians at Venarium.

The book will be somewhere around five hundred pages and will include a 32” x “40 color map, as well as an introductory adventure. Ian Baggley’s popular art from the 1st Edition will be supplemented with illustrations from about a dozen new artists. If you like this style of art, AS&SH is absolutely worth backing. Check out the new cover!

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Discovering Robert E Howard: Fred Adams Jr. on Esau Cairn – A Man Outside His Epoch

Discovering Robert E Howard: Fred Adams Jr. on Esau Cairn – A Man Outside His Epoch

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Almuric_Cover1As you can see from the list of prior essays in this series down below, we’ve wandered all over the Robert E. Howard landscape. But we hadn’t touched on Howard’s science fiction. Dr. Fred Adams goes off-planet for us and examines one of Howard’s cult classics, Almuric. Blasting off…

In his novel Almuric, published in Weird Tales in 1939, Robert E. Howard presents a one-shot protagonist named Esau Cairn, a man in many ways typical of Howard’s barbarian warrior-heroes, but who departs from them in that he is more philosophical than most of Howard’s creations, and perhaps in many ways best speaks to Howard’s personality and philosophy.

Much of the discussion of Esau Cairn and of Almuric hinges on what I call the WWCD? Issue: ‘What Would Conan Do?’ in the modern world. That topic has been exhaustively covered by the discussion threads of the Robert E. Howard Society, and several interpretations have been postulated. To me, the importance of Esau Cairn as a character is that he gives voice to Howard’s own frustration at being a man of action trapped in a relatively genteel world.

Howard wrote, in “The Tower of the Elephant,” “Civilized men are more discourteous than savages because they know they can be impolite without having their skulls split, as a general thing.” Cairn bears out that rule when his barbarism rises to the surface and he kills a corrupt politician (perhaps rightfully so) with a single blow to the head.

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Discovering Robert E. Howard: Barbara Barrett – Painting With Words: The Poetry of REH

Discovering Robert E. Howard: Barbara Barrett – Painting With Words: The Poetry of REH

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REH_PoetryIndexBlack Gate‘s ‘Discovering Robert E. Howard’ series had ranged far and wide across the writings of REH. But we had not yet tackled his poetry. Consider it tackled! Barbara Barrett, who put together the extensively detailed The Wordbook: An Index Guide to the Poetry of Robert E. Howard, is the planet’s resident expert on the poetry of REH. And the author of Conan was quite a poet. Read on!

By the time I discovered Howard’s poetry, Solomon Kane, King Kull, Conan and El Borak were familiar characters. I didn’t think Howard’s writing could get any better than the poetic prose in those stories. At least, until I picked up a copy of Shadow Kingdoms: The Weird Works of Robert E. Howard and read these lines from his poem “The Ride of Falume.”

A league behind the western wind, a mile beyond the moon,

Where the dim seas roar on an unknown shore and the drifting stars lie strewn

I was transported to a place straight out of a Hubble star-strewn space photo where I sat on some unknown seashore, gazing at a moon larger than I had ever seen, and listening to the roaring waves crash against sand and rock. I could see it all clearly.

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