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Chapter 9

That seer guy is hanging around Duthil doing odd jobs to earn his keep whenever he can’t get by selling visions. Conan asks him to look into the future of Cimmeria and see whether they’re going to win against the Aquilonians.

The seer suddenly went stiff. His eyes opened very wide, so that white showed all around their irises. “Crom!” he muttered, whether calling on the grim northern god or simply in astonishment Conan could not have said. In a voice that might have come from the other side of the grave, Rhiderch went on, “Gore and guts and grief and glory! War and woe and fire and flame! Death and doom and dire deeds! War, aye, war to the knife, war without mercy, war without pity, battle till the last falls still fighting!”

Conan shuddered. He had got more in the way of a vision than he had bargained for. Rhiderch twitched like a man in the throes of an epileptic fit. Hoarsely, Conan asked, “But who will win?” Nothing else mattered to him. “Who will win?”

Now Rhiderch’s gaze thrust through him like a sword. “War and woe!” repeated the seer. “Duthil dies a dismal death. The golden lion—” He twitched again. “Aye, the golden lion flaps above your head.”

At first, I was worried this was going to turn into another “oh, isn’t Conan so great” moment, where a fanboy oohs and ahs over his favorite fantasy hero right in the middle of a narrative. But no, this is actually just a misleading vision, in the way of prophetic visions everywhere, about Conan becoming king of Aquilonia. And also about Duthil getting razed, apparently. I don’t know how this book, specifically, will end, but my guess is that Duthil is the price Cimmeria pays for victory.

Continue reading “Conan of Venarium: Fourteen Year Olds In Frank Frazetta” →

Chapter 7

The “disconnected vignettes” problem affects the reviewing more than the reading. It’s almost impossible to know which, if any, of the details of these stories is going to come up later. Is Conan being tested by the Three Trials of Crom which will culminate in his transforming into a Super Cimmerian with golden hair and green eyes, or are monsters just showing up because there’s a protagonist around to fight them now and it’s a good way to mark time while we wait for Conan to turn fifteen?

On the other hand, the episodic nature of the story isn’t actually bad. Individual vignettes are sometimes bad, like when Count Villainous shows up to creep on a piece of cardboard with “jail bait” painted across the front, but the episodic nature means that no matter how shoddy one vignette is, it has practically no bearing on the quality of the next. Sure, the “character arc” of the protagonist is not really an arc so much as frequent callbacks to previous stories, but if I wasn’t happy to read about Conan killing a giant snake just for the Hell of it, I wouldn’t be reading Conan at all. That’s like forty percent of Conan stories.

Continue reading “Conan of Venarium: Reruns” →

Chapter 5

The timeline continues crawling forward towards Conan’s fateful fifteenth year. On the one hand, time skips suck. They play out pretty much one of two ways: Either the character is exactly the same as when we last left off, or else they’ve had a character arc we didn’t get to see and now they’re basically a different (though hopefully at least similar) character. The other hand, though, is that Conan of Venarium didn’t need to cover three years of Conan’s life. We didn’t need any details on what Conan was like before he reached barbarianing age, and having a narrative cover three years of events without coming across as disconnected vignettes marking time until the climax is hard to pull off. There’s a theme of Conan wanting to be all growed up, but so far it’s not super clear what fighting a snake in the Feywild or meeting a settler has to do with Conan’s overall arc other than being events that happened in the summer. Of course, we’re still only 32% of the way into the story, so there’s some wiggle room left for things to start coming together later.

Now in chapter 5 it is winter so we’re talking about Vanaheim and Asgard coming down to raid, because apparently they are ice people and only move south when the weather is bad, instead of doing the sensible thing and bunkering down for the winter before heading out to raid in the summer when they don’t have to trudge through three feet of snow to reach their target.

Continue reading “Conan of Venarium: Disconnected Vignettes” →

Chapter 3

The chapter opens with the victorious Aquilonians marching into Duthil and telling the Cimmerians that they’re in charge now, ha ha ha. Conan reluctantly admits that attacking them now is suicide and decides to stick to his father’s plan of biding their time until they can retaliate. Then there’s a bit with the Aquilonian garrison in which they stare at trees until they see Conan passing through having shot some particularly elusive birds ordinarily caught using traps, and everyone shivers at how protagonisty he is, and then we’re following Conan again on his hunt. It’s all pretty unremarkable? Like, it’s not bad. Maybe they’re absolutely botching iron age hunting the same way they botched iron age warfare in the last one, but I’m not really knowledgeable on that subject at all, so I can’t tell.

There is this one line that I’ll quote, just because it keeps coming up:

“I hope so,” said Granth. “Sometimes barbarians will kill without counting the cost. That’s what makes them barbarians.”

Daverio shrugged cynically. “That will probably happen once or twice. Then we’ll kill ten or twenty Cimmerians, or however many it takes. Before long, the ones we leave alive will say, ‘Don’t do anything to King Numedides’ men. It hurts us worse than it hurts them.’”

There’s something to be said for dumping more resources than seems immediately prudent into revenge, particularly in iron age societies, because that can deter people from trying to harm you in the future. Sticking strictly to only retaliating when such retaliation is the good move for you right now encourages bad actors to harm you whenever you’re unable to immediately profit from retaliation, and you’re usually unable to immediately profit from retaliation. Fighting powerful enemies is costly, and if you only ever look one move ahead, the “smart” thing to do is always to roll over for them. Plus, you might value a reputation for indomitability more than whatever material wealth you sacrifice acquiring it.

Continue reading “Conan of Venarium: Double Villain” →

Chapter 2

We open on the Aquilonians again, this time standing guard at Venarium.

A harsh chattering came from the woods. Granth’s hand leaped to the hilt of the shortsword on his belt. “What was that?” he said.

“A bird,” said Vulth.

“What kind of bird?” asked Granth. “I’ve never heard a bird that sounded like that before.”

“Who knows?” said his cousin. “They have funny birds here, birds that won’t live where it’s warmer and sunnier. One of those.”

We flip to Mordec’s perspective as the battle begins.

Before the Bossonians and Gundermen outside the encampment were fully formed to face the Cimmerian tidal wave, it swept onto them.

Wait, why were they outside the encampment in the middle of the night? Is Venarium not big enough to hold the army that built it? Why not? There’s plenty of materials, and more soldiers means more labor to assemble it. If the fort is unfinished, I can’t find any mention of it.

The foemen in front of them gave ground. A few archers and pikemen ran for their lives, forgetting in their fear they would find no safety in flight. Most, though, put up the best fight they could. And, to take the place of the fled and fallen, more and more soldiers came forth from the camp.

Why did you even build this thing?

Continue reading “Conan of Venarium: The Battle Adjacent to Venarium” →

Robert E. Howard never wrote about Conan’s origins. His earliest story chronologically was the Frost Giant’s Daughter (if, like a sane person, you place that immediately after Conan departed Cimmeria). Conan of Venarium most faithfully follows what the narrative claims in brief reference later on: That Conan came to the civilized world of Hyboria following a clash with Aquilonian forces at Venarium.

This book is brought to us in 2003 by Harry Turtledove. I haven’t cross-referenced all the books I’ve read with Harry Turtledove’s complete bibliography, but I’m pretty sure Conan of Venarium is the first of his novels I’ve read. I’ve heard of him a lot, but he writes a lot of alternative history, a genre which I tend to avoid because of how often it’s littered with historical fix fics in which a defeated army is instead victorious, thus ushering in utopia. And it’s never “Trotsky took over after Lenin and everything was great forever,” which, while not really any improvement of craft over the other style, would at least be a nice change of pace from all the “the South won the Civil War and then abolished slavery all by themselves and lived in a Libertarian paradise forever” stories.

Turtledove has written a “the South won the Civil War” alt history series, Wikipedia informs me, but I’m on too tight a deadline to even bother reading the summaries of all twelve-ish books in that series, so I have no idea how it portrays the South. I’m gonna guess that it’s not “evil empire in which sadistic aristocrats reign over an economy sustained by one of the most brutal systems of chattel slavery in all human history while using racist tensions to keep the unlanded majority of whites loyal to their cause despite their having been ghettoized in impoverished bayous.” In fairness, though, I haven’t actually read any of them, so I won’t hold that series against Turtledove here.

Also, Macmillan, the seller of this story, has offered it DRM free at the request of Tor Books, which is neat.

Continue reading “Conan of Venarium: Parenting the Conan Way” →

As promised, today we are reading Robert E. Howard’s posthumously published essay on the history of his fictional world Hyboria, something originally written for use internally to help Howard keep his setting straight (officially – I wouldn’t be surprised if this was one of those things written mainly for the love of worldbuilding, but that’s speculation).

The following can be found in Marvel’s Conan Saga series number 50, 51, 52, 53, 54 and 56. It is an adaptation by Roy Thomas and Walt Simonson of Robert E. Howard’s immortal essay commencing with the age of Kull.

I don’t plan on quoting word-for-word the entire essay just because I no longer have to worry about copy/paste limits from Kindle. Rather, I’m quoting this section because I want to point out that this “adaptation” appears to be word-for-word identical to the original. I’m pretty sure it’s been “adapted” in that some neat illustrations have been added.

The essay proper begins in 20,000 BC, grounding us in real world history. This, I think, is an artifact of the time. By the 1930s, everyone was okay with the idea that a fictitious story could be blatantly so. Like a stage play or radio drama, it could recount exact dialogues and depict events with descriptive detail implausible for any supposedly historical narratives, and didn’t have to claim to be the compiled diaries of four guys who actually hunted a real vampire or one guy who got stranded on an island full of two-inch tall people or whatever. It had not seemed to have quite shaken, however, the need to claim connection to the real world. JRR Tolkien didn’t invent the concept of the “secondary world” which is wholly separate to our own, not just far away or long ago but a completely different reality, but the concept doesn’t seem to have caught on until his writings became popular.

Continue reading “Conan the Cimmerian: Let’s Get The Conversation About Racism Out Of The Way” →