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Chapter Four

The length of their fall was nearly five spans; fortunately, the bottom of the descent was watery.

What’s the point of giving a numeric distance if it’s in a unit that no one knows? And I mean literally no one, because the “span” used here cannot possibly be the historical span, which was the span of your hand from thumb to pinkie. That’s like half a foot, so even with generous rounding we’re talking about a fall of like three feet, here. Clearly this “span” refers to something else. I’m guessing approximately one yard? Just because the author is American, will probably use American units, and five yards is about the distance that seems to have been fallen here. But American units of distance are already pretty old timey and archaic, you can seriously just use them and it makes perfect sense. A foot is roughly the length of a guy’s actual foot, a yard is roughly the length of a man’s stride, a mile was originally 2,000 yards (while marching, your left foot would hit the ground 1,000 times exactly in a mile) but due to conversion issues between Roman and British units wound up being 1,760 yards instead, and the league is about how far you can get walking in an hour. Almost no one uses leagues outside of fantasy context anymore, but they’re at least a sensible unit of distance for iron age peasants walking places. Inches are the only weird one, a length whose definition is three lengths of barleycorn because fuck you, that’s why, but once you’re using all the other units, you may as well use inches, too.

The water isn’t super deep, but Conan and Elashi soon encounter a White. A Blind White, which I think is just their full name, not a specific sub-type. In addition to being a white ape, these things also have oversized ears and no eyes at all, just smooth flesh and bone where the eyes would go on a normal primate. Likewise, we learn that the full name of the bats are “Bloodbats.” I guess that makes sense alongside “fruit bats.” We also learn the full name of the Webspinners is “the Webspinner Plants,” so not actually spiders. This isn’t a masterclass in worldbuilding or anything, but this underground world does get a little bit more interesting every time we learn more about it.

Conan and Elashi fight their way past the Blind Whites, and a three-way chase soon ensues. Katamay Rey’s cyclops minion has the Blind Whites on his side, while Chuntha’s giant worm has the Bloodbats and Webspinner Plants on his. Both of them want to catch Conan, although why isn’t clear. Steve Perry is really consistently good at these build-up scenes, where problems stack up behind our heroes, but he also consistently has them arrive one at a time and fail to do any lasting damage. They neither compound on one another by showing up all at once nor risk wearing our heroes down by noticeably fatiguing them, injuring them, or depleting any kind of limited resource from them. Instead of danger escalating to a moment of cathartic climax during which lots of tension is released and then begins building up again, the story follows roughly a bell curve, with dangers being introduced one by one and then resolved one by one. Of course, that all happened back in 1987. It’s not impossible that he’s shaken that habit here in 1989. We’ll see.

Oh, also, the two wizards are both making plans for what to do with Conan once they catch him, and it’s not clear why they care so much about him yet, but Katamay Rey plans on chopping up his parts for use as ritual components, while Chuntha plans of using him for sex magic. Because of course the female wizard draws her power from sex magic.

Continue reading “Conan the Indomitable: Steve Perry May Actually Be Getting Good At This” →

Chapter Two

After seeing off the bandits, the fleeing villain swears that they will have Conan’s sword. The narrative stops to comment on how weird it is that they specifically want his sword, so safe to say this isn’t just a pack of bandits asking for the one valuable thing Conan carried and then their leader getting unreasonably attached to it when they were denied. Also, Conan is so dumb that Elashi has to point out the possibility of looting the corpses for cash to him, even though he plans to be a thief. It is again difficult to tell whether Steve Perry is buying into the “Conan is dumb” flanderization or if he’s just copy/pasting the “dumb husband” sitcom tropes endemic to the 80s (and which live on through ever worse seasons of the Simpsons and assorted Seth MacFarlane shows to this day).

Conan and Elashi come to stay at an inn in some wintery part of Corinthia, because apparently the road winds through Corinthia a bit before getting into Zamora. Feels a bit like Steve Perry wanted Conan’s journey from Hyperborea to Zamora to not only be exhaustively documented, but to be a grand tour of Hyboria’s northeast-ish. This is not a terrible idea, except that the only places visited in Brythunia were the Suddah Oblates, spider town, and the village that lived in the shadow of Neg the necromancer. Aquilonia is an aristocratic monarchy with knights and legions and such, Zamora is a land of thieves and assassins, Stygia is a place full of ancient magic and occult power, and Brythunia is…home to lots of small time cults, I guess? But I never got the impression that Neg’s village and spider town were meant to be typical exemplars of what Brythunia was like.

Anyway, there’s a guy who works for the inn who makes fun of some dim-witted bandits, and his zingers are one step up from “your face is stupid!” but still somehow manage to sail over one of the bandits’ heads. I guess it’s not completely unreasonable that this bandit is just real dumb, but from Conan’s reaction, we’re meant to believe this guy is actually laugh out loud funny with lines like “I can see that you are a wit. No, on second pass, I think that is probably only half true.” When this inevitably results in violence, it turns out this “witty” fellow knows kung fu. Like, almost literally. He learned it from the men of Khitai somehow, despite the fact that they’re on the other side of a desert, a sea, and a steppe (or a desert, some tundra, and a bit more of a steppe, or a whole lot more of desert, some mountains, and about the same amount of steppe as the first time – there’s a lot of routes there, none of them friendly). Also, Conan gets involved, nominally because Elashi threatened to get involved if he wouldn’t, so he caved to her demands again, but really because God forbid we have a fight in a tavern and Conan not get involved. I wouldn’t even be down on it if Conan was just straight up like “a fight in a tavern? Sign me up, this is my jam!” But instead the narrative contrives to involve him rather than just letting this Lalo fellow fight alone, since apparently he’s Bruce Lee.

Continue reading “Conan the Indomitable: The Obligatory Tavern Fight” →

Conan the Indomitable arrived early, which means instead of figuring out what I’m going to do for the Monday review, we’re going to go ahead and dive into that. Just like Conan the Defiant, I don’t have the book in a copy/pastable format, although this does mean that I get a quaint ad in the back of the book for Hyborian War, a play-by-mail strategy game set in Hyboria from back in those primitive days when if you wanted to have a Conan-themed grand strategy game with dozens of different players each taking on a separate kingdom in the world of Hyboria, it was something you had to organize via snail mail with each turn taking 2+ weeks, not something you’d set up a Discord for and drop links on some relevant forums and subreddits and have turns every 24-48 hours.

Chapter One

This story is a direct sequel to Conan the Defiant, which means we open at the juncture between Brythunia, Corinthia, and Zamora, with Conan and Elashi bickering in a typical 80s sitcom kind of way. The narrative tells, rather than shows, who our characters are:

The speark of these words was named Elashi, a beautiful young woman born of the Khauranian desert. While lush of breast, she had the supple muscles and carriage developed by one familiar with hard work, and her legs were firm and slim from much walking.

I’m just kinda gonna leave the whole “lush of breast” thing there, because I’ve taken Steve Perry to task for this kind of thing often enough in Conan the Defiant that I don’t think there’s much left to add. I quote this passage mainly because it identifies Elashi – I think for the first time – as Khauranian, which gives us an idea of where she’s headed and how long her and Conan’s paths will follow alongside one another. And the answer is not far, because she is going straight across Zamora and Conan is in quest log mode, planning to get off at one of the cities along the way so he can start up his Robert E. Howard-penned thief stories.

Continue reading “Conan the Indomitable: Inauspicious Beginnings” →

Part 1: Pacifists Are Pretty Straightforward To Assassinate It Turns Out
Part 2: Also, Bonus Sexism
Part 3: A Gap In The Story
Part 4: An Overabundance of Dumb Tropes
Part 5: Into the Warp
Part 6: Finale

Books like Conan the Defiant are what make me pine most for a world with more lax copyright laws. It’s like the Star Wars prequels, an experience where I come out of it thinking “there were a lot of good ideas in there, crying shame about the lack of basic competence in execution,” and then I want to write my own version and make it better, but I’m also trying to transition to being a fulltime creative professional and can’t be writing entire 50k-100k word novels that can’t legally be used to make a dime when I could be using that time writing original IP that I own and can sell.

It’s too bad, because I think I could draw rather a good market writing things like a Final Fantasy 7 novelization with the middle section fixed up to be less aimless, or giving the MCU treatment to Conan by taking over half a century of stories, picking out the good ones or the ones which, like Conan the Defiant, have underutilized potential, and then stringing them together into a new continuity where each story is made with the others in mind. These sorts of things are often extremely popular across time, as we can see from both Le Morte d’Arthur clear back in the middle ages, a compilation of King Arthur stories into a unified chronology, all the way up to the MCU, and that despite the MCU being maimed by its lack of the Fantastic Four, X-Men, and Spider-Man at its inception. Kind of hard to make a unified Marvel timeline when the original Marvel super hero team and their two most popular franchises are both unavailable, but they made it work, and now the Disney Collective has assimilated the complete set, for better or for worse.

Conan the Defiant’s specific underutilized ideas are mainly the creepy spider cult we encounter halfway through and the magical second dimension he and his companions pass through to breach Neg’s fortress. The Suddah Oblates are also pretty cool, but those actually get used pretty much to their fullest extent. Conan meets them, enjoys their hospitality, and swears revenge when one of them is slain. Dude swears revenge on a hair trigger, but that’s fine, it’s a reasonably Conan-y thing to do, particularly when he’s got nothing better to do that weekend and there’s no fat merchants on hand to rob. Neg and his scheme for ultimate necromantic power are perfectly acceptable, but also get explored plenty in the narrative and plus aren’t really all that different from the evil necromancer queen we met in the Legion of the Dead, so it’s really spider town and the Warp that I wish was part of a more competent story, one good enough to provide precedent for those ideas and others like them to be incorporated into the Conan setting as a whole.

The poor storytelling that mars Conan the Defiant lies in two main areas. First, the dumb 1987 gender tropes that haunt the narrative constantly. No one line is particularly egregious, but minor annoyances are everywhere. Sometimes they’re just lazy – it makes sense that Conan is socially oblivious even if it’s a cliche tired enough to induce eye-rolling when it comes up. Sometimes they actually damage the setting – Elashi and, to a lesser extent, Tuanne behaving like stereotypical 80s sitcom women means they act like they live in modern controlled environments where things like spiders are rare enough that you might never get used to them and where life-threatening danger is rare enough that breaking down crying in response to it is something you might reasonably expect from full grown women.

Second, and this one would’ve been a deathblow even without the injury dealt by the first, some two-thirds of all scenes in the book are totally unnecessary. While the beginning arc at the Suddah Oblates is necessary to establish character motivation, the confrontation at spider town is necessary because it actually plays into the climax at all, and the final confrontation is necessary because it resolve the plot, everything else has no impact on the story whatsoever. The encounter with the dire wolf, every enemy who crops up at spider town who isn’t the spider cult in charge, the entire Disguise Master sub-plot where he’s hunting Conan for revenge, the undead Men With No Eyes, the various obstacles in the Warp when Conan and company use magic to penetrate Neg’s outer defenses, all of these have ultimately no consequences at all. They don’t even end up significantly slowing our heroes down, because although Neg does achieve supreme necromantic power, our heroes are able to take it from him again without incurring any losses, whether in material, injury, or even any significant exhaustion. The final confrontation would’ve gone the same if they’d arrived just after Skeer and fought Neg before he’d activated the Source of Light at all.

The next Conan story is Conan the Indomitable, which is in the mail. Couldn’t find any library copy of it, digital or otherwise, so I bought a copy, which I’m considering donating to a library when I finish so the next person doesn’t have to deal with this. The book is showing up on Monday, probably too late for me to get a Monday post out of it, but 1) I just realized I never did a Mythos Part One wrap-up post, so that’s probably going to be on Saturday, and also I’ve got plenty Leaves of the World Tree stories left to get through, so we’ll look at another one of those on Monday.

Chapter Twenty-One

I’ve felt kind of bad while summarizing this story, because there’s just so much “this happens, then this happens, then this happens.” Partly, this is a hazard of reviewing chapter-by-chapter a story which cannot be easily quoted. Because reacting directly to the story’s prose is hard, I don’t do it very often. But also there’s the thing that all sloppy books get into eventually, which is that after a while they just keep repeating the same mistakes over and over again, and rather than calling them out anew every single time, it gets easier to just skip over them and see if they’re going to do anything new. And Conan the Defiant isn’t.

So, Conan and company meet with Skeer, who defects for revenge on Neg. And then they hide from some zombie soldiers from Neg’s gathering army. And then they disguise Conan and Elashi as Skeer’s prisoners to get past the patrols to where the Source of Light is kept. And then Neg uses his new ability to look through a zombie’s eyes to confirm that Tuanne is paralyzed on the floor somewhere, but doesn’t bother raiding her memories to figure out why (the narrative says he can know what the zombies know just a few lines earlier, but here it seems like it can’t – was that line just in reference to his ability to see what they see?). He briefly considers having Skeer look into it, and while Skeer can provide guidance to Neg’s enemies, he cannot refuse direct commands, so if Neg asks Skeer if there are intruders in the castle, he must answer honestly. But then he decides not to. It’s not like being kind of careless is a consistent character flaw of Neg’s that is now coming to bite him, and it’s especially not like this is in contrast to a more meticulous Conan, Elashi, or Tuanne. He just briefly considers a course of action that would allow him to instantly thwart our heroes’ plan, and then decides not to, for no stated reason at all.

The “pretend to be prisoners” gambit turns out to be so much wasted pagespace. Conan and Elashi don’t even bother disarming themselves, let alone having their hands tied or anything else that might even slightly suggest they’re actual prisoners. Most of Neg’s slaves just don’t care, and let Skeer pass by them without so much as a raised eyebrow, up until the undead Disguise Master shows up. Since he wants personal revenge on Conan, he shouts that they’re enemies of Neg, and apparently Neg’s zombie thralls are under standing orders to attack anyone identified as an enemy. This is a really easily exploitable standing order, but I’m not gonna ding the book points for it, because Elashi exploits it immediately by telling the next pack of zombies they find that their pursuers are enemies of Neg, whereupon they immediately attack the zombies chasing them, and our heroes escape during the melee. I’m willing to believe that Neg never ran into this problem before he had a giant zombie army. Coming up with zombie commands that cause them to actually do what you want on autopilot is hard.

Continue reading “Conan the Defiant: Finale” →