In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads about one of Conan the Barbarian’s literary offspring
When I was a teenager devouring every fantasy book I could find, one of my favourite writers was Robert E. Howard. His Conan Chronicles – reprinted by Gollancz in a glorious two-volume edition as part of their Fantasy Masterworks series – sound rather crude and even unpromising when you try to explain to people what happens in a Conan story.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a formative early work of fantasy fiction
In the early 1950s, shortly before J. R. R. Tolkien published his landmark novel The Lord of the Rings, the Danish-American author Poul Anderson wrote two short fantasy novels which would have less of an influence on the course of fantasy fiction, but which now read as considerably more ‘modern’, in many ways, than Tolkien’s three-books-in-one epic.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle enjoys the adventures of the Puritan swordsman, Solomon Kane
Some writers have just one great character in them. Conan Doyle created a range of memorable characters, from Professor Challenger to Sir Nigel Loring of the Hundred Years’ War, but his name is now linked to one of his creations above all others. Mary Shelley wrote the first post-apocalyptic novel among other works of fiction, but her name now means ‘Frankenstein’. And for many, the name Robert E. Howard, if it conjures a fictional character at all, summons ‘Conan the Barbarian’ or ‘Conan of Cimmeria’.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads an enjoyable and high-octane fantasy from one of the genre’s most original voices
Here’s a question for you. Have you heard of the poet William Ashbless? He has his own Wikipedia page. Yet he doesn’t exist. He never has. Ashbless was the creation of two writers, Tim Powers and James Blaylock, in the 1970s when they were college students. Unimpressed by the terrible poetry being published in their school magazine, Blaylock and Powers decided to invent their own poet and submit ‘his’ work to the magazine as a joke. It was enthusiastically accepted.
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews the pioneering fantasy novel by Poul Anderson
In 1954, a bold and exciting new work of fantasy fiction was published, influenced by Norse myth and describing a heroic quest, containing elves, giants, magic swords, enchantment, an epic battle, and plenty of singing. The novel was called The Broken Sword by the Scandinavian-American author Poul Anderson: a book which has been eclipsed by the more famous novel which appeared that year, The Lord of the Rings (or at least began to appear that year: The Fellowship of the Ring was published in 1954).