Conan The Nostalgic

This was the late 1970s and into the 80s: At the age of about fifteen a friend introduced me to the works of Robert E. Howard and I began to work my way through his Conan short stories and one novel. These were published in the UK by Orbit.  I consumed them with great vigour.

The works were edited by Sprague de Camp and Lin Carter who collaborated on many volumes in this series and others. As the original works were published a number of authors started to write pastiches. To be honest these varied in quality and tended to follow the Conan verses wizard format. However, the last book published by Orbit was Conan: Road of Kings by Karl Edward Wagner. This was a serious piece of writing and like his Kane stories was well written with a great plot.

Orbit stopped publishing them when the fantasy market fell away in the late 1980s. I transferred my allegiance to the Tor Originals. These too varied in quality, with a variety of authors commissioned to write novels of our barbarian hero. Robert Jordan cut his teeth here with four novels before he embarked upon his Wheel of Time epic. After a couple of years I had moved on to other things and Conan was pretty much forgotten until recently.

Sat on my bookshelf were two unread novels of the Cimmerian that had been there for 31 years. Having noticed that Conan had been resurrected in the Marvel comic universe, fond memories came to the fore and I dug out one of those books. Conan The Marauder by John Maddox Roberts (pictured). I bought it in Bristol's Science Fiction bookshop, Forever People, that used to reside on Park Street. Like most of Bristol's bookshops it has long gone, but seeing the price sticker on the cover brought back a wave of nostalgia.

A friend said 'what do you want to read that for, they are all the same?'  Yes they are. Then again people watch football or antique programmes every week, and from my perspective they are all the same too. I was not dissuaded.

I have just started the book and it is like relaxing into a different place, when I was a different person. No literary greatness here, but a fun story. A little of what you like is a good thing, even if it is self-indulgent nostalgia.