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This novel is set in a world where there are no television talk shows, no
income taxes, no commuter trains, no air pollution, no nuclear crises or
campus riots or midi skirts. A world blissfully innocent of detergent commercials, thirty-cent subway fares, Spiro T. Agnew speeches, freezedried coffee, electric toothbrushes, pornographic movies from Denmark, draft dodgers, Women's Lib, and the Los Angeles Freeway. It is a world that never was but certainly should have been. A gorgeous, improbable, romantic world where all the men are handsome and heroic, all the girls impossibly beautiful and willing to dally back of the arena with a gladiator or two. A world made up of trackless jungles, mighty mountains, and shining seas, where cities blaze with barbaric splendor, glorious quests are possible, and adventure is a part of everyday life. It is crammed to the brim with weird monsters, sinister magicians, and grim-jawed warriors; a world where magic actually works and the gods exist in reality, not just in the imagination of their worshippers. This is the world of a popular new kind of fiction we call Sword and Sorcery. Welcome it! If you are one of those unfortunate few who have never before read a novel of Sword and Sorcery, you are in for a treat. A treat, that is, if you crave to escape for an hour or two from the above features of modern life into a gorgeous, impossible world. For Sword and Sorcery is sheer escapist reading, nothing more. It has no hidden meanings. It offers no handy, pre-packaged solution to any of the world's numerous ills. It has no ism or ology to sell, no message to put over. It is something remarkable and rare these days. It is - entertainment. These days, many people, including (alas!) many of my fellow science-fiction writers, seem to feel it is somehow vaguely immoral to read purely for pleasure. A story, say these wise men, should really come to grips with something crucial and important, like the oil slick on Laguna Beach, or the vanishing Yellowcrested Sandpiper. At very least, such persons advise, the hero should be a Negro striving to free his people, a homosexual gaily battling for social recognition, a concerned college youth protesting the iniquities of the Pentagon by blowing up his English Lit class, or an Amerindian getting back at the paleskins by seizing control of Alcatraz. Social problems abound in modem fiction almost as much as on the front pages of our daily newspapers. And a novelist, they argue, should get out of his ivory tower and onto the barricades. I disagree. The world has been full of troubles since man climbed down from the trees and started inventing civilization. Social evils have flourished since the last Ice Age, at least. It is unlikely that my generation, or the next one, will solve any of the several ills that plague the body politic. Which is not to say that we should ignore them and pretend they are not there: but that we should see them in the context of history and realize that they are part of the human condition. War, for example. There have always been wars, and few of them were fought for noble purposes. And crime. Crime in the streets is a large problem nowadays. But there has been crime in the streets going back to the day somebody invented streets. just as there has been corruption in public office ever since the invention of public office, if not indeed before. I see no reason why we should fill our every waking hour with brooding over the evils of the day. At least you will admit it is fun to lean back in a comfortable chair on a cold rainy evening, light a pipe, set a chill martini glass beside the ashtray, and escape into the pages of an extravagant romance, if only for an hour or two. The urge to do this goes back at least to the days when old blind Homer sang of gallant warriors and captive beauties and isles of strange enchantment amid the unknown sea. Technically speaking, we who practice the craft consider a tale to be Sword and Sorcery if it is a fast-moving and colorful adventure story laid in a preindustrial world where magic works and the gods are real - a tale which pits an heroic warrior in direct battle against the forces of supernatural evil. Obviously, this is story-telling of a sort at least as old as Homer. Certainly the warrior hero battling evil monsters is a plot device that can be dated back to the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf, where the Geatish prince fought the ogre Grendel, or to the Germanic epic, the Niebelungenleid, in which Siegfried slew the dragon Fafnir. This is quite true: the essential story elements that made up Sword and Sorcery are as old as literature itself. But nobody writes much in the way of book-length epic poems these days. Hence it was only recently that these scattered and diverse story elements were reconstituted into what we call Sword and Sorcery. The man who did this was a fiction writer for the adventure pulp magazines of the 1930s named Robert E. (for Ervin) Howard. Howard was born in 1906 in the town of Peaster, Texas, and spent most of his unhappily brief life in Cross Plains, which is deep in the heart of Texas between Brownwood and Abilene. He died there in 1936 when I was a little boy. I never knew him at all. Howard was an adventure-story writer of the old school, nourished on the glorious tradition of Talbot Mundy, Harold Lamb, Edgar Rice Burroughs, and other pulpsters of the day. He really wanted to write Pirate stories on the Spanish Main, or jungle yarns laid in darkest Africa, or tales of magic and mystery in unknown Tibet. But since he was attempting to break into the pages of Farnsworth Wright's Weird Tales, as his friends H. P. Lovecraft and Clark Ashton Smith were doing, he had to modify his natural bent toward fast-action yarns to include the elements of magic and supernatural horror. His colleague and correspondent, Clark Ashton Smith, was then making it big in Weird Tales with cycles of cycles of stories laid against the exotic backgrounds of such lost civilizations of remotest antiquity as Hyperborea and Atlantis. These romantic and fabulous realms teemed with fantastic beasts of legend, with marvels and magicians and enigmatic gods and demons. Around much the same period his friend Lovecraft was selling stories of supernatural horror in which men of today faced and fought cosmic evil from beyond the stars. Good, entertaining stories, all of 'em, packed with thrills and shudders ... What Howard seems to have done is to incorporatell of these ideas into his own brand of rip-roaring adventure fiction. The result was a spectacularly success series of superb stories about Conan the Cimmerian, a mighty warrior of barbarian lineage who went brawling and battling his way across the prehistoric world of legend, rising from such lowly professions as thief, bandit, pirate, and mercenary warrior, to a king's general and, eventually, to a throne of his own. In pulling together the various elements of supernatural horror, ancient magic, and legendary prehistoric civilization, within the context of a fast-paced pulp adventure yarn, Howard contributed a new genre to the field of literature. We call it Sword and Sorcery. Howard founded his private literary domain in 1932. In December of that year, Weird Tales published a story called The Phoenix on the Sword under his byline. That was the first of all the Conan stories and it was an immediate sensation. The readers loved it and they clamored for more of the same. Howard happily settled down to creating his Hyborian Age world and chronicling the adventures of its most celebrated citizen. He did not know he had only four years left to live. In those four years he created a living, breathing legend. The readers ate up each Conan story as it appeared and clamored for more. Today, thirty-nine years later (circa 1971), they or their descendants are still clamoring for more; hence this novel by L. Sprague de Camp and myself. Very few writers have the luck to create legends. Conan Doyle worked the trick with Sherlock Holmes, and Edgar Rice Burroughs did it with Tarzan of the Apes, and Ian Fleming may have pulled off the same miracle with James Bond (it's too soon to tell, Bond-wise), but in only four years Robert Ervin Howard of Cross Plains, Texas, created, a living legend that was not only to outlive its creator but also the magazine in which it first appeared and the publishing house which preserved it in the dignity of hardcovers. As was the case with Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan and even that newcomer to the ranks of the pop immortals, Commander James Bond of Her Majesty's Secret Service, other writers have not been able to keep their hands off Conan. The first of the post-Howardians were content to merely imitate Howard's hero. Thus Henry Kuttner with his Elak of Atlantis yarns, and Kuttner's wife, C. L. Moore, with her Jirel of Joiry tales, and Norvell W. Page with his two short novels of Wan Tengri. Then other writers were inspired to work their own peculiar magic within much the same sort of world as that of Howard's Hyborian Age, but with more original characters - as Fritz Leiber with his magnificent saga of Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser, Michael Moorcock and his stories of Elric of Melnibone, the sinister, doomed albino princeling, or my collaborator, L. Sprague de Camp, with his deft, dry, witty tales of the Pusadian Age immediately following the collapse of Atlantis. Sprague was a late convert to the Conan stories, while I had been reading them ever since my teens. The difference in our ages is considerable - he is my elder by twenty-three years - so it is somewhat surprising that I had read and loved Howard's stuff whole decades before he read a word of it. But, although a life-long devotee of fantastic fiction, Sprague got the impression from glimpses of the covers on the newsstand that Weird Tales consisted of ghost stories, a genre towards which he has always been able to restrain his enthusiasm. It was a reviewer's copy of the hard-cover edition of Conan the Conqueror, impulsively thrust upon him by his colleague Fletcher-Pratt, that introduced Sprague to Sword and Sorcery. Once off, there was no stopping him - he became an avid enthusiast and, when he discovered that unpublished and, in some cases, unfinished Conan stories existed in manuscript caches scattered around the country, he began tracking them down, completing and revising them, and getting them into print, with the assistance of Howard's Glenn Lord. In the meanwhile I had grown up out of my teens, spent a tour of duty with the infantry in Korea, and moved to New York to take some writing workshop courses at Columbia University. In 1965 1 began selling novels to the paperbacks, beginning with a book called The Wizard of Lemuria, which has been described, rather charitably, as the result of a head-on collision between Howard and Burrough. My first Lemurian novel became the start of a series of six, and besides these tales of Thongor the Mighty, barbarian warrior-king of Lost Lemuria, I have written six or seven other novels of Sword and Sorcery. Our mutual enthusiasm for fantasy in general and heroic fantasy in particular brought Sprague and me together at many science-fiction conventions and through the medium of a casual correspondence. Then in 1967 I edited and completed a book of Howard's stories called King Kull, which consisted of an abortive pre-Conan series of Sword and Sorcery narratives about an Atlantean savage named Kull. The volume was published by Lancer Books and is, I believe, still in print. Lancer, at Sprague's urging, had begun issuing its history-making series of Conan books, as edited, arranged, and completed by L. Sprague de Camp. That same year Sprague invited me to collaborate with him on some new Conan stories to help fill up the larger gaps between the extant tales. We have been doing so ever since. Collaboration with L. Sprague de Camp has been and continues to be a fascinating experience and a vast pleasure (I was reading L. Sprague de Camp back in my teens, too). It is very interesting to learn at first hand how his mind works and how he thinks out a story. I like to think I have learned something about my craft from observing him at work, for he is one of the greatest living masters of that craft, and the education I have received during this collaboration has been unique. This novel of buccaneers and black magicians is, according to the internal sequence of the saga, the sixth volume in order of our outline of Conan's life and career. The story serves to cover an otherwise inadequately chronicled period of Conan's biography, those two years in which he was a buccaneer of Zingara. We have used this book to strengthen the internal connections of the saga, too: herein first appears that same bluff, hearty Vanr, Sigurd, who reapears in the twelfth and last book, Conan of the Isles, here, too, reanpears one of Conan's old comrades, that stalwart black warrior, Juma of Kush, who first appeared on stage in the story The City of Skulls, in the first book of the saga, called Conan. We have further tightened the internal logic of the saga as a whole by presenting here the character of Zarono for his first appearance in the series (he makes a comeback in the story The Treasure of Tranicos in the eighth volume, Conan the Usurper), and by using for our chief villain the magnificent Prince of Magicians, Thoth-Amon of Stygia, who frequently makes an aparance throughout the saga as a whole. Conan, incidentally, is about thirty-seven or thirty-eight at this point in the saga. As my collaborator and I see this novel, Conan the Buccaneer, through press, it is not without a certain nostalgia. We have only one more Conan book to write and the series will be at last finished. The saga of the mighty Cimmerian, whose first appearance in print was =forty years ago, will come io a close with Conan of Aquilonia. Howard lived to see eighteen of his, Conan stories printed. Eight others, ranging all the way from completed manuscripts to mere fragments or outlines, have since been discovered among his papers. The team of de Camp and Carter have added eight more stories to that total, two of them book-length novels, not including a couple of oddities such as The Hand of Nergal (by Howard and Carter) and The Snout in the Dark (by Howard, de Camp, and Carter). All things considered, Sprague (variously working in collaboration with Howard, myself, and Bjorn Nyberg) has probably added more wordage to the Conan saga than Howard wrote originally. But the end, as I say, is at last in sight. Not the end of Conan himself, of course. He will go on for many years to come. These books will no doubt continue in print for years ... perhaps longer than seems likely right now. Besides mere books, Conan has now become a comicbook hero with a magazine all of his own (see your newsstand for Marvel's Conan the Barbarian). And, from time to time, it looks as if Hollywood might discover the doughty and durable Cimmerian. We were in negotiation with one producer for a solid year there. for a time. Other nibbles have come from the movie folk. More doubtless lurk in the unseen corridors of the future. And the readers are still clamoring for more. LIN CARTER Hollis, Long Island, New York (1971) |