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Robert E. Howard (1906-36) was bom and lived most of his life in Cross Plains,
Texas. In his short lifetime he turned out a large volume of general
pulp-magazine fiction: sport, detective, western, and Oriental adventure
stories, besides his many tales of fantasy. Of Howard's several series of
heroic fantasies, the most popular have been the Conan stories. These are
laid in Howard's imaginary Hyborian Age, between the sinking of Atlantis and
the beginnings of recorded history. Howard was a natural story-teller, whose
tales are unsurpassed for vivid, colorful, headlong, gripping action. The
Conan stories are the ultimate in tales of swashbuckling adventure with a
strong and sinister flavor of the supernatural. Howard wrote over two dozen Conan stories, ranging in length from 3,000 to 66,000 words. Of these, eighteen were published during his lifetime. Several others, from mere outlines to completed manuscripts, have turned up in Howard's scattered papers during the last twenty years. It has been my good fortune to edit these for publication, to complete those that were only partly written, and to rewrite'several other unpublished Howard stories to fit them into the Conan saga. One of the stories in this volume, Drums of Tombatku, was recently discovered by Glenn Lord, the literary agent for the Howard estate, in the form of an outline and a rough draft of the first half. I have finished the story in accordance with the outline. The other three stories, except for a few very small editorial changes, are, in the form in which they appeared in Weird Tales in the early 1930's. As nearly as such things can be calculated, Conan flourished about twelve thousand years ago. In this time (according to Howard) the Western parts of the main continent were occupied by the Hyborian kingdoms. These comprised a galaxy of states set up by northern invaders, the Hyborians, three thousand years before on the ruins of the evil empire of Acheron. South of the Hyborian kingdoms lay the quarreling city-states of Shem. Beyond Shem slumbered the ancient, sinister kingdom of Stygia. Farther south yet, beyond deserts and veldts, were barbarous black kingdoms. North of the Hyborians lay the barbarian lands of Cimmeria, Hyperborea, Vanaheim, and Asgard. West along the ocean were the fierce Picts. To the east glittered the Hykanian kingdoms, of which the mightiest was Turan. Conan, a gigantic adventurer from backward Cimmeria, arrived as a youth in the kingdom of Zamora, between the Hyborian lands and Turan. For two or three years he made his living as a thief in Zamora, Corinthia, and Nemedia. Growing tired of this starveling existence, he enlisted as a mercenary in the armies of Turan. For the next two years he traveled widely and refined his knowledge of archery and horsemanship. As a result of a quarrel with a superior officer, Conan left Turan. After an unsuccessful try at treasure-hunting in Zamora and a brief visit to his Cimmerian homeland, he embarked on the career of a mercenary soldier in the Hyborian kingdoms. Circumstances-violent as usual-made him a pirate along the coasts of Kush, where the natives called him Amra, the Lion. When his partner, the Shemitish she-pirate IMlit, was slain, he became a chief of one of the black tribes. Then he served as a mercenary in Shem and among the most souttherly Hyborian kingdoms. Later still, Conan appeared as a leader of the kozaks, a horde of outlaws who roamed the steppes between the Hyborian lands and Turan. He was captain of a pirate craft on the great-inland Sea of Vilayet and a chief among the nomadic Zuagirs of the southeastern deserts. After a spell as a mercenary captain in the army of the king of Iranistan, he arrived in the foothills of the Himelian Mountains, a vast stretch of broken country separating Iranistan, Turan, and the tropical kingdom of Vendhya. At that point, the present volume begins. L. Sprague de Camp |