Tag Archives: Conan

Blogging Brackett: “Black Amazon of Mars”

“Black Amazon of Mars” appeared in its original form in Planet Stories, March 1951. It was later expanded into the short novel The People of the Talisman (1964). This post will review just the original version. I’ll save comparison of the two for another day.

The story starts with Eric John Stark accompanying a Martian companion, Camar, home to the city of Kushat just south of the northern polar ice cap. Camar is dying and wants to return a sacred talisman he stole. The talisman was left by the legendary Ban Cruach to protect the city from a danger in a canyon to the north known as the Gates of Death.

Camar dies in the opening scene of the story, but not before Stark promises to fulfill his quest. The talisman is a jewel. Stark puts it against his temple, sees strange visions that come straight from Ban Cruach’s mind, and takes it off. He hides the talisman in his belt and sets off for Kushat. It isn’t long before he runs into trouble. Continue reading →

It’s Frank Frazetta’s Birthday

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Frank Frazetta, one of the greatest fantasy artists to ever stride this land, was born on this date (February 9) in 1928. I’m not even going to try to put the impact his art has had on my life into words, much less that of the fantasy field. Here are a couple of my favorite works of Frazetta’s.

The image on the left is the promotional poster for a Frazetta exhibit I saw in Austin last spring. That trip has really been on my mind today, maybe because the weather has been so unseasonably warm. The image was used on the cover of one of Karl Edward Wagner’s Kane books. You can read about my trip in this post.

Probably my favorite of the Frazetta Conan covers is the one shown on the right. It’s for Conan the Usurper. I saw this one at the Frazetta exhibit, and let me tell you, none of the reproductions do the images justice. It was awesome to stand in front of some of those paintings and see close up the detail and the brushwork. The painting were larger than what you see on a book cover, of course, and the detail really stood out.

I think the thing that has always captured my imagination about this picture is the snake. I hate snakes. There’s just something evil about them. I’m not sure why, but they’ve always given me the willies.

Frazetta is gone now, but his work lives on. While it might be easy to think that with his popularity, there will always be copies available to enjoy, that’s a dangerous way to think. Today hot property is too often tomorrow’s has-been, or worse completely forgotten. So take a moment over the next few days to admire a Frazetta painting, especially if it’s one you’ve not seen before or not seen in a while.

Update: Here are tributes by David J. West and Woelf Dietrich. They’re both worth checking out.

Blogging Brackett: “Enchantress of Venus”

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“The Enchantress of Venus”
Originally published in Planet Stories, Fall 1949

I first read this story in high school in the SFBC edition of The Best of Leigh Brackett. It was my first introduction to Eric John Stark, arguably Brackett’s greatest creation. In my opinion it is arguably her best work at shorter lengths.

Stark is an Earthman, raised by a tribe of aboriginals in Mercury’s twilight belt. (The astronomy geek in me is compelled to point out this story was written before Mercury’s 3:2 rotational/orbital resonance was discovered. Mercury doesn’t have a twilight belt because it doesn’t keep the same face towards the Sun.)

Stark is black, although whether he’s of African descent or permanently burned by the Sun, Brackett never explicitly says anywhere (that I can recall). His tribal name is N’Chaka, which implies the former rather than the latter. Continue reading →

Daughter of Naked Slave Girls, Illustrated Edition

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A few years ago I wrote a post entitled “Why Modern Fantasy Needs More Naked Slave Girls“, in which I said that too many people were taking modern fantasy too seriously and killing all the fun by trying to impose their views on everyone else. This was before I moved everything over from Blogger. At the time I transferred everything over, it was the second most viewed post I had written. (A review about a book on the Bayeux Tapestry was the most viewed. No, I don’t know why.)

Well, apparently we need to revisit that topic (naked slave girls, not the Bayeux Tapestry) because some people haven’t gotten the message. The latest dustup involves the Conan board game that set records on Kickstarter, like over $3 million. There have been a couple of posts recently that have taken the makers of the game to task because of the art used. The picture in question, which will be shown below the “Read More” tag, shows a damsel in distress. And we can’t have that now, can we?

I’m going to include some pictures here that some hothouse flowers might find offensive. I did put “Illustrated Edition” in the title, you know. If you’re one of those, be advised that I don’t provide fainting couches or smelling salts, and this is my space, so it won’t be a safe space. If you can’t handle that, go somewhere else. Continue reading →

Brackett and Bradbury: “Lorelei of the Red Mist”

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This is a unique item. The only collaboration between two great science fiction authors, Leigh Brackett and Ray Bradbury. Here’s how it came about:

Both authors were living in the Los Angeles area in the 1940s, and both had been working hard to develop their craft as writers. Both were regulars in Planet Stories at the time. They were friends who had both been mentored by Henry Kuttner. They used to meet once a week to read and critique each other’s work.

Brackett had sold some detective short stories as well as one novel, No Good From a Corpse. The novel caught the attention of movie producer Howard Hawks, who decided he wanted Brackett to work on the screenplay for his next project. She was approximately halfway through a novellette she was writing for Planet Stories that was set on Venus (More about Brackett’s Venus in a bit.) when she got a call from Hawks, or more probably his secretary. Which is how Brackett launched her screenwriting career by coauthoring with William Faulkner the script for Raymond Chandler’s The Big Sleep starring Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall. How freakin’ cool is that? Continue reading →

Howard Andrew Jones and Bill Ward Start Conan Read Through

Blogging Northwest Smith: Scarlet Dream

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“Scarlet Dream”
C. L. Moore

This post contains content of an adult nature and is not suitable for younger readers. You have been warned.

“Scarlet Dream” is the third Northwest Smith story. In terms of sexually charged imagery, it’s the most explicit of the ones so far, hence the warning above. (My discussions of “Shambleau” and “Black Thirst” can be found here andhere.) There will be spoilers, as well. You’ve been doubly warned.

When the story opens, Smith is wandering through the Lakkmanda Market on Mars. The name has a decidedly Leigh Brackett feel to it. “Scarlet Dream” was published in 1934, predating Brackett’s Mars by a few years, but still I can’t help wondering if Brackett was influenced a bit by the name.

Smith spies a shawl with an intricate pattern consisting of a scarlet thread woven in a blue and green background. The Martian vendor displaying tells Smith the thing gives him a headache, and he sells it to Smith for a good price.

After he returns to his quarters, Smith tries to trace the pattern on the shawl, gives up, covers himself with it, and goes to sleep. Sometime in the night he begins dreaming that he’s walking up a mist enshrouded stair. He soon loses sight of the bottom.

Eventually he is nearly run over by a young girl with long orange hair, wearing a short shift, and covered in blood. She babbles something about some type of monster killing her sister. Smith manages to calm her enough to carry her to the top of the stairs. Once there he takes her into a side room, sets her on a stone bench, and gets a little more explanation from her.

The girl, who is never named, tells Smith that he’s dreaming but that he’s entered a dream world that can only be exited by death or by a fate worse than dying. Most of Smith’s questions are answered along the lines of “We find it best not to think/ask/do that.” This includes trying to leave or learn new things. Indeed, it’s only when Smith eventually decides to leave that the monster shows up and attacks him. But that comes later.

One of the things she tells him is that no one has ever gone down the stairs he came up. She only went down the stairs in a panic. Why Smith doesn’t at some point try to retrace his steps is never explained. But if he did, then there would be no story.

Smith and the girl are in giant temple, and she leads him outside to a lake and a small shrine containing two cots, two blankets, and a few clothes. It’s completely open to the air, but since the temperature never changes, that’s not a problem.

The trees seem to bend towards them, and the grass certainly does. Smith eventually learns that if a person stands barefoot in the grass for long, it will begin sucking blood through the feet. The trees are implied to be flesh eating.

Smith sits with the girl beside the lake, drifts off, and comes to as night is falling. Moore implies that at this point Smith engages the girl in sex. Regular sex between them is implied, with the word “kiss” and its variations being a euphemism for more than a kiss. In spite of the raciness of the covers Farnsworth Wright selected for Weird Tales, the contents tended to be squeaky clean. One of Robert E. Howard’s early Conan stories was rejected because Wright felt Conan took too many liberties with a young lady. (My opinion of that can be found here.)

Where Moore engages in some serious sexual imagery is when the girl shows Smith the only source of food. She takes him to a hall in the temple in which there are people “eating”. That there are other people present is mentioned more than once, but this is the only time we see them. Smith has no interaction with them. In fact, they’re only mentioned in a few sentences, basically as backdrop.

The way people eat is they kneel before spigots in the wall, spigots that curve upwards. What they drink from the spigots is blood, with the hint that it contains some addictive substance. Once Smith realizes what he’s drinking, he’s repulsed but finds himself returning the next day. Moore goes into details describing how pleasant and yet repulsive feeding is, dwelling on the taste.

Now I don’t know what mental picture you get, but what comes to my mind now is the same thing that came to mind when I was 15. Fellatio, although I had not encountered that word at the time. It’s hard to escape that image. The posture of kneeling, along with Moore deliberately stating that the spigots curve upward from the wall, leave little room for any other conclusion. What I have to wonder is what Wright thought about this imagery, or if he even noticed it. I doubt we’ll ever know. Smith comes to enjoy the feeding more than the girl, although he never completely overcomes his revulsion of it.

Smith eventually spies mountains through the surrounding mist, attempts to leave, is attacked by the monster, and drives it off with his blaster. It’s at this point that the girl tells Smith she would rather lose him to the fate worse than death than through death at the hand of the monster. She helps him get home, although he doesn’t realize what’s happening until it’s too late.

Smith awakens to find his partner Yarol and a doctor leaning over him. Smith has been in a coma for a week. Seems Smith can’t be left alone to wander about on Mars without getting into trouble. Yarol gave the shawl away while Smith was out. The pattern was giving him a headache.

This is the third Northwest Smith story, and other than “Shambleau”, it’s the one that has stuck out the most in my mind since I first read the series nearly 30 years ago. Again, I’m struck by how graphic the sexual imagery is in these stories. If my parents had known what I was reading….

Moore seems to have a theme of vampirism going as well. In the first story, the vampire fed on life essence, in the second beauty, and now the grass actually drinks blood.

I’m going to continue this series. The post on “Black Thirst” is in the top 10 most viewed posts I’ve done. Stay tuned. There’s more to come. Or should that be Moore to come?

Blogging Conan: The God in the Bowl

The Frost King, The Frost-Giant, and Their Daughters

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It’s been bitterly cold here on the South Plains of Texas for much of the last week. Temperatures were near record lows for several days. Just when it looked like things were going to warm up again, we got more snow Sunday. And that made me think of “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter”, which made me think of “The Frost King’s Daughter”. And I knew what the next post on this blog would be.

The tale (or tales, if you prefer) concerns the lone survivor of a battle in the frozen north. Having just killed the only member of the opposing army left standing, he sees a beautiful young woman wearing only a gossamer veil walking among the dead. She taunts him with her body, and he pursues hers. Of course, this is a trap. After a time, she calls her brothers forth, two ice giants, to kill the man. Instead, he defeats them, captures the girl, and is about to ravish her when she calls on her father, Ymir. The girls is transported into the sky in a blaze of blinding light that leaves the hero unconscious. He is awakened by a band of his allies who were delayed by an ambush. After he tells his story, one of the older men in the group tells the warrior he saw Ymir’s daughter Atali, who haunts battlefields and lures survivors to their deaths so that she might present their hearts to her father. The old man claims to have seen her as a youth when he was too wounded to follow her. Everyone thinks the old man had his brains addled by a sword stroke until the hero unclenches his fist to find a veil.

This pair of stories are essentially the same, only the names have changed. “The Frost King’s Daughter” concerns Amra of Akbitana, while the “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” is an early Conan story that was rejected by Farnsworth Wright (more on that later) and wasn’t published until the August 1953 issue of Fantasy Fiction. Unfortunately, that version was rewritten by L. Sprague de Camp. It wasn’t until 1976 that Howard’s version saw print in Donald M. Grant’s Rogues in the House. This was a hardback collectible volume, not a mass market edition. “The Frost King’s Daughter”, on the other hand, was published in the March 1934 issue of The Fantasy Fan. You probably couldn’t afford an original copy of that little fan publication, provided you could find one. Fortunately, the entire run has been reprinted in facsimile (details on how to order are here.)

The first mass market publication of Howard’s original version of “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” wasn’t available until 1989, when both stories were printed side-by-side in Karl Edward Wagner’s Echoes of Valor II. If you aren’t familiar with the series, it ran to three volumes (as far as I know; if there was a fourth I missed it). Wagner, a fan and writer of sword and sorcery who deserves to be better remembered, compiled collections of rare heroic fiction. While many of the stories Wagner selected have been reprinted in recent years, especially the Robert E. Howard and C. L. Moore pieces, there are still some tales that haven’t seen the light of day since and make the volumes worth seeking out.

In his introduction, Wagner states that Howard wrote “The Frost King’s Daughter” first and that the Conan version, “The Frost-Giant’s Daughter” was the rewrite. How he knows this to be true, Wagner doesn’t exactly say. He supports his case by saying that “The Phoenix on the Sword” was a rewrite of the Kull story “By This Axe I Rule” (documentably true), and that “Frost-Giant” was a rewrite of “Frost King”. We know Howard would recycle stories if they didn’t sell, at times changing the names of major characters, and we also know that sometimes the details of his stories would change from one draft to the next. Furthermore, there is evidence that Howard was still developing the character of Conan as well as the Hyborian Age for the first several Conan stories. Patrice Louinet, in his essay “Hyborian Genesis” (The Coming of Conan), does a thorough job of showing this development.

And here we encounter a small problem. Louinet suggests that Howard changed the title of the story and Conan’s name to Amra when he sent the story to The Fantasy Fan. His evidence seems to be the publication date of “Frost King” as well as an unreferenced letter from Howard to Charles D. Hornig, editor of The Fantasy Fan. Patrice Louinet is one of the leaders in the field of contemporary Howard scholarship. Wagner was one of the foremost authorities of his day. So who is correct? Was “Frost King” the rewrite, or was “Frost-Giant”?

As far as their respective texts are concerned the stories are almost identical. I compared them, and there was only one significant deviation I found. This one:

“Far have I wandered, from Zingara to the Sea of Vilayet, in Stygia and Kush and the country of the Hyrkanians; but a woman like you I have never seen.”

So who do you think said this, Conan or Amra? Based on the place names, which are the settings of other Conan stories, you would probably think Conan, right?

Well, you would be wrong. Amra said this. In the Conan version of the story (Frost-Giant), the wording is “Far have I wandered, but a woman like you I have never seen.” Conan’s wanderings and the Hyborian geography are never mentioned. The only reason that I can think of for Howard to add place names from the Conan stories to a rewrite of a Conan story in which he changes the name and nationality of the viewpoint character is to clue readers in that Amra is really Conan. And since it had been established by the time “Gods of the North” AKA “The Frost King’s Daughter” was published in The Fantasy Fan that Amra was one of the names Conan was known by, it’s not out of the realm of possibility that this was Howard’s motivation. But why would he do this? The only explanation I can come up with was that because Conan was a Weird Tales character, either Howard had an agreement with Farnsworth Wright not to try to sell a Conan story to another market (I’m unaware of any such agreement) or he felt that do sell a Conan story to another market would, in a sense, be dishonorable. It was standard practice in the pulp days for an author’s character(s) to only appear in one magazine.Howard may have been abiding by that practice.

On the other hand, it could be that “Frost-Giant” is the rewrite. The passage quoted above, the one with the place names, tends to disrupt the flow of the story. Certainly, its prose is more purple than the same passage without the travelogue. It could very well be, since as far as I know the exact composition date of either version of the story is unknown, that Howard was already working out the geography of the Hyborian kingdoms and simply hadn’t settled on a final name and nationality of his principle character. I will be the first to admit that the evidence isn’t conclusive either way, but this is the interpretation I favor. I’m sure if there’s information I’ve overlooked, Howard fandom will let me know about it. Quickly.

There’s one other thing I want to address. Wagner says Wright rejected “Frost-Giant” because it was too racy. Considering the sexual imagery in some of C. L. Moore’s Northwest Smith stories (another topic for another day), not to mention the sex implicit in some of the other Conan tales, I’m not sure I buy this line. If Wright was that uptight, why did he publish some of those Margaret Brundage covers? (I know, I know, racy covers on pulps had nothing to do with the contents.) Wagner says Wright’s view of Conan was of “a noble barbarian out to perform deeds of chivalrous heroism.” Again, Wagner doesn’t provide details to back this position up. In fact, Wright’s rejection of the story, which Wagner quotes, simply says Wright didn’t care for the story and gives no reasons as to why he didn’t care for it. The general consensus I’ve heard for years on this point was that Wright didn’t like the hero attempting to commit rape.

But is this what Conan/Amra really does? In the interest of stirring up trouble taking a deeper interpretation of the story, let’s look closely at what happens, shall we? Atali taunts Conan. “Spreading her arms wide, she swayed before him, her golden head lolling sensuously, her scintillant eyes half shadowed beneath their long silken lashes. ‘Am I not beautiful, oh man?’ ” Sounds to me she’s trying to entice him to pursue her. This is born out at the end of the story, when the old man Gorm tells Conan Atali lures men to their deaths. Gorm also describes her as beautiful and naked. Atali continues to taunt Conan, essentially daring him to follow her. Conan’s reaction is described as a madness that sweeps away his pain and fatigue. Howard makes the pursuit sound as though Conan were possessed.

Rather than trying to commit rape, I read the story as Conan being put under a spell of desire by Atali. Only Conan is stronger than she bargains for. When he kills her brothers, she realizes she can’t control him nor reverse the spell. Otherwise, why would she have to call on Ymir for help? Am I saying Atali was asking for it? You bet. Even a casual reading of the story would tend to show that was the case. What I’m NOT saying is that every (or even any) attempted rape victim was asking for it, so please don’t read that into my remarks. I don’t consider what Conan/Amra does here to be attempted rape because I don’t interpret his actions as being of his own free will. This is a fictional story, a fantasy, in which an evil woman’s spell goes wrong and she can’t control the desires she has deliberately cultivated in a man, with the outcome being other than what she intended. I don’t for a minute think that’s how the real world works, and in spite of some of Howard’s detractors, I don’t think Bob meant that here either. I think he was telling an entertaining story in the best way he could with a character whose personality he was still developing and exploring. And in that, he succeeded.

So, to sum up. I think “Frost-Giant” is probably a rewrite of “Frost King”, and furthermore Conan has gotten a bad rap these many years, accused by some critics of attempting a crime of his own free will when in truth he had no choice about. Those are my thoughts on this cold winter night.

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