Larvatus Prodeo

A while back, I wrote a series of posts on speculative fiction – Distant Suns. Commenter patrickg liked the posts and wanted to try his own hand at one. So I’m happy to host the first of his continuation of the series! – MB

Distant Suns: a clean sword and a clean foe to flesh it in.

Image of a Conan comic courtesy of j_phillipp at Flickr, reproduced under a Creative Commons licence.

Conan is arguably the most iconic figure of the fantasy era, but he’s a somewhat enigmatic one, too. So widely sampled and replayed, you could talk about the character that Schwarzenegger immortalised, or Marvel’s Conan, or the L. Sprague De Camp Conan of the fifties. It’s easy to forgot the original, which is why I took the time to wade through 1000-odd pages of un-bowdlerised Conan recently.

And the original is a much more complicated, interesting figure than the subsequent versions. Robert E. Howard’s Conan represents a weird combination of ubermensch and bestial throwback. A petty thief, a pirate, a king and a soldier, the only thing he’s not good at is magic.

His physicality is almost parody: Whilst the popular conception of Conan is a bit reductionist, do prepare for mighty thews, steely thews and rippling thews; a veritable bestiary of thews. Continue reading ‘Guest post by patrickg: Distant Suns IV’